Ken Starr: A True Child of the ‘60s

Long before sex scandal engulfed the White House, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were demonic figures to people who believe the nation has entered an era of political and cultural decay whose roots are to be found in the 1960s. The Clintons are, so the thinking goes, quintessential products of the decade dominated by liberalism, civil disobedience, disrespect for law, the decline of patriotism, recreational drug use, sexual promiscuity and rampant self-indulgence. Conservative opponents are fond of calling the president “a draft-dodging, pot-smoking womanizer,” thereby attempting to link him to anti-Vietnam War protests, illegal drug use and the sexual excesses associated with the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. His wife fares no better. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been criticized both for her aggressive professionalism and her rejection of the traditional, ornamental role of first lady in favor of active engagement in contentious policy issues. Judging from recent speeches by Sen. John D. Ashcroft (R-Mo.), religious conservative Gary L. Bauer and others, the current scandal has intensified Clinton’s identification with the ‘60s. To impeach and convict him, these critics say, will excise the cancer of that dreaded decade from the nation’s body politic.

But the conflation of Clinton’s present problems with the ‘60s distorts his relationship to those years and misconceives the true meaning and legacy of that decade, trivializing it at best, and attributing to it changes with roots far deeper in our post-World War II society. Denouncing Clinton as the sinister embodiment of ‘60s politics and culture may be good rightist propaganda, but it is bad historical and cultural analysis. In fact, a stronger case might be made for Clinton’s principal tormentor, Kenneth W. Starr, the former Barry Goldwater volunteer, whose self-righteousness and contempt for moral ambiguity resemble not so much the spirit of the late senator from Arizona as they do the paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover and radicals such as the Weathermen. Hoover was eager to crush his enemies by any means, including illegal electronic eavesdropping. Sixties radicals, equally certain of their own rectitude and monopoly on truth, blew up buildings and destroyed innocent lives to protest the Vietnam War.

As a consequence of that war, the civil-rights movement and the disruptions produced by a postindustrial economy, the ‘60s witnessed the collapse of a liberal political consensus that had dominated U.S. politics from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon. That consensus, while it endorsed an expansive role for the federal government in promoting economic growth and national security, also tolerated white supremacy, homophobia and the subordination of women. The consensus rested upon the conviction that America possessed both the economic resources and political will to contain leftist (and especially communist-dominated) revolutions wherever they arose in the world.

Black demands for equality, rising feminist aspirations, the gay awakening, the tenacity of Vietnamese communists and the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy presented U.S. liberalism with a series of challenges it could not master, except through half-measures such as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty or Nixon’s peace-with-honor policy for Vietnam. These palliatives only deepened social discord and gave new momentum to a conservative backlash that continues to poison American life. The true legacy of the ‘60s is not Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Diggers or the Yippies, but Young Americans for Freedom, the Christian Coalition, Operation Rescue and the Freemen of Idaho.

Based on his record as governor and president, Clinton bears about as much resemblance to the historic core values of liberalism as Newt Gingrich bears to the Republicanism of Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes or former Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. One of the proudest ‘60s achievements was a sustained and often successful attack on the death penalty as both arbitrary and racist. As governor, Clinton, an enthusiastic supporter of capital punishment, condoned the lethal injection of a man so mentally retarded that he believed he could finish his dessert after his date with the executioner. As president, he signed into law the broadest expansion of crimes punishable by death since the adoption of the first federal criminal statutes in 1789.

True ‘60s liberals such as Earl Warren, Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas treasured the Bill of Rights and expanded civil liberties. Clinton has contracted them. His craven “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with respect to homosexuals in the military has produced more, not less discrimination and harassment of gays and lesbians in the armed forces, thereby stalling the quest for toleration that began with the Stonewall demonstration of 1969. By all accounts, Clinton’s style of social protest in the ‘60s was characterized by civility and caution, with one eye always fixed on how his behavior might affect his future opportunities. He sat at no lunch counters, rode no freedom buses, blocked no troop trains, burned no draft card and never occupied a dean’s office. He never even inhaled, either pot or the spirit of confrontation and refusal that energized the radical politics of the era.

Thus, to equate Clinton with the political and cultural insurgency of the ‘60s does an injustice to that decade’s true heroes--Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Cesar Chavez, David Dellinger, Casey Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg and the Berrigan brothers. In more ways than one, Clinton resembles the cool, cerebral detachment of his idol, John F. Kennedy, whose liberalism failed to comprehend both the passion of the civil-rights workers in the South and the resolve of Vietcong guerrillas.

It would be a supreme irony if the evolving sexual attitudes of most Americans, attitudes mistakenly attributed to the counterculture of the ‘60s, spare Clinton the ultimate punishment of impeachment. As early as 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey and his associates began to document a profound revolution in the sexual behavior and values of American men and women, changes that flowed from the economic incentives pushing women into the paid-labor market, scientific advances in contraception and the exploitation of sexuality by the captains of consumer consciousness on Madison Avenue. Americans were having more sex, inside and outside marriage, and they had begun to decouple sex from procreation for the first time in their cultural history. Sex for pleasure, and sex as a form of self-expression and self-fulfillment, trumped sex as reproduction. This trend was accelerated in 1955, two years after Hugh Hefner launched Playboy magazine, when Gregory Pincus discovered the progesterone-type oral contraceptive and, seven years after that, when Jack Kippes produced an inert plastic contraceptive, the IUD.

With or without the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision decriminalizing the sale of contraceptives to unmarried adults, Americans reconceptualized their sexuality long before the San Francisco hippies urged them to “make love, not war.” By divorcing sex from reproduction, the contraceptive revolution gave sanction to every possible form of intimate gratification among consenting adults, including homosexuality. From the marketing of automobiles to the selling of toothpaste, the revolution received a giant boost from those bastions of conservatism, American capitalists, who told consumers that their products would add to the purchaser’s sexual prowess or allure. This is why public-opinion polls suggest that most Americans, while troubled by the president’s obvious prevarications about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky, consider the context of his lies and have an even harsher opinion of the tactics employed by Starr to open Clinton’s sexual closet to public view. Most Americans do not wish to return to the dark ages of our sexual culture.

In a successful attempt to combat the most lamentable forms of patriarchy and sexual exploitation, many ‘60s radicals, male and female, argued that “the personal was political.” The idea suggested that even the most intimate forms of human behavior were subject to public scrutiny and reprimand. It is now Starr and his right-wing acolytes in the House of Representatives who appear to have adopted this perspective by seeking to impeach and convict the president, not for official misconduct that subverts the state, but for private behavior that offends their moral sensibilities.*