Lies Told Often Enough Are as Good as Truth

Not that it matters much anymore, the damage is done, but Hillary Clinton is right about that Talk magazine interview, and the media pack got it wrong. Their collective howls of derision were in no way justified by the article’s actual text.

But the media define the moment, and a flattering portrait of the first lady as she travels the world in Eleanor Roosevelt mode dealing with complex issues of peace and poverty gets twisted into yet another chapter in what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd arrogantly dismisses as a “warped marriage.”

“Fans and foes of Mrs. Clinton were left reeling by her contention,” Dowd wrote, “that the president’s chronic philandering was caused by ‘abuse’ he suffered as a little boy when his mother and grandmother battled over him.”

There was no such contention, as a reading of the Talk magazine story by Lucinda Franks makes obvious. Indeed, the president’s wife is forthright in condemning her husband’s behavior as a “sin of weakness” and acknowledging that he “lied” in covering it up.

Hillary Clinton did not bring up Bill Clinton’s relationship to his mother and grandmother, as the media accounts suggest; the interviewer did. As Franks wrote: “I tell Hillary I read his mother’s autobiography, in which she wrote about the atmosphere of alcohol, violence and chaos that forced her son to be the man of the house while he was still a child. Hillary leans over and says softly, ‘That’s only the half of it. He was so young, barely four, when he was [so] scarred by abuse he can’t even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother.’ ”

Indeed, the president suffered a severe ordeal in childhood, as even a cursory examination of biographical material makes clear; the word “abuse” does not seem wildly inappropriate. Yet, at no point did Hillary offer that as an excuse for her husband’s behavior.

What Hillary did say, and what seems to be at the base of her critics’ rage, is that, on balance, theirs has been a marriage worth preserving. Others may disagree, but to insist that a broken home is the proper model for dealing with such marital woes is to endorse a solution that is hardly consistent with the most frequently expressed values of the culture.

Since when is it a crime to tough it out to preserve the family, particularly when a child is involved? Or to view your mate’s “sins” as ones of “weakness” rather than “malice”? Doesn’t charity begin at home?

Certainly it has been, on balance, a useful marriage as far as the well-being of the country is concerned. Despite everything, this first family has presided over a period of impressive national renewal for which they can share credit. Not since the Roosevelts has a couple worked more in sync on the public’s business, and if this appears to some a marriage of convenience, as with the Roosevelts, a messy divorce hardly seems the desirable alternative.

However, the more important issue in the venomous treatment of Hillary concerns the place of truth in reporting. It’s difficult to imagine any fair person managing so thorough a distortion as was accorded this interview. This mangling of the truth ended up being reluctantly acknowledged in some morning-after accounts, most notably by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, but with absolutely no sense of shame on the part of Hillary’s detractors.

Take ABC’s Cokie Roberts, who’s presumably objectively reporting on the first family, yet who led the pack in smearing Hillary on this one. In a syndicated column coauthored with her husband, Steven Roberts, for the New York Daily News, they thundered against what they claimed was Hillary’s attempt to shift blame for Clinton’s behavior: “His mother? His grandmother? Two dead women who can’t defend themselves? Please.”

They also cited the anti-Clinton results of an ABC poll posing the question: “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that her husband’s infidelity was due to childhood abuse is: a lame excuse, or a legitimate explanation?” When confronted with the fact that Hillary never made such an assertion, Cokie Roberts told Kurtz of the Washington Post: “At this point, it doesn’t much matter whether [Hillary] said it or not, because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday, and this was all anyone was talking about.”

There you have it: The media blithely distort, the public believes the canard and it becomes the truth.