A Clinton Warrior Relishes the Fight

The 23 grand jurors who heard independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s case against President Clinton had a lot to say about the key witnesses. They were skeptical but respectful of the president, threw their arms around Monica S. Lewinsky, empathized with Betty Currie, were cool toward Linda Tripp.

And they found Sidney Blumenthal irritating.

The forewoman told Blumenthal before he left Grand Jury Room 3 that the jurors did not appreciate “the inaccurate representation” given on the courthouse steps after his last appearance. “We would hope,” she said, “that you will understand the seriousness of our work and not in any way use it for any purpose other than the purpose that is intended.”

Actually, it was Blumenthal’s lawyer who had complained on the courthouse steps, criticizing Starr’s prosecutors for grilling Blumenthal about White House attitudes toward the Starr staff.

An Aide Finds Himself in Demand

The grand jury episode, based on documents released by the House, illustrates why Republican House managers are eager to question him today. They want not just Blumenthal’s testimony that Clinton told him Lewinsky was “a stalker” but Blumenthal himself--a man who can be such an ideologue that his testimony could leave a bad taste.

“The Republicans can’t want Sid for the so-called evidence he’ll offer so they might be hoping he puts on some display of arrogance or lashes out in some way,” said his good friend, Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker.

Republicans believe that Blumenthal’s characterization of Lewinsky to others as “a stalker” was in fact orchestrated by the president as part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Blumenthal’s defense--and the essence of his testimony on at least three previous occasions--has been that the president told all this to him so he would parrot it back to the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

For 30 years, Blumenthal was a Washington journalist who showcased his liberal views in the New Republic and the New Yorker. When the Clintons came to the White House, he wrote fawningly about them. His intellectual compatibility with Mrs. Clinton helped him land a job at the executive mansion two summers ago. Now, 50, an author of five books and a playwright, Blumenthal has developed a widespread reputation for arrogance.

Even his friends--who think he will be fine with the facts at today’s interrogation--are worried that cockiness might get the best of him.

“Sidney has got to be really careful not to be himself,” said one Washington journalist who is an admirer. “Sid’s amusing, funny, well-read, articulate and very, very smart. But I weigh anything he tells me because I know how partisan he is.”

A Man Who Shines in Spotlight

Blumenthal friends said that he will enjoy being at center stage today, portraying himself as a conduit between the unfaithful king and his betrayed lady.

“If there’s a battle he likes to be on the front lines,” Hertzberg said. “And he does regard this as all-out war.”

At his birthday party last fall, this story was told: When Blumenthal was 5 years old, police arrived at his kitchen door asking for someone named Sidney Blumenthal who was suspected of spray-painting cars on his Chicago block. From behind his mother emerged young Sidney, barking at the Chicago cop:

“I’m Sidney Blumenthal, you schmo. Why do you want to know?”

After high school, Blumenthal left Chicago for Brandeis University near Boston, where he joined the radical leftist group, Students for a Democratic Society. After college, he wrote for alternative papers around Boston and worked on his first book, “The Permanent Campaign,” about the need for candidates to market themselves even after they had won.

An Absolutist Approach to Politics

By the mid-1980s Blumenthal was at the New Republic, leading campaign coverage of Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart and his yuppie supporters.

But Blumenthal differentiated himself from most partisan journalists with his almost absolutist approach to politics. In Blumenthal’s writings, Democrats stood for goodness and progress, Republicans for darkness and defeat.

But it was not enough to write about history. He wanted to take part in it. So he wrote memos for candidate Hart, according to a source. And later he wrote glowingly of candidate Clinton and slammed his opponents. He once wrote a piece questioning President Bush’s war record.

“Sidney is capable of writing a piece that is 100% true and 100% dishonest,” said New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, a former friend. “Everything he wrote about Ross Perot was true, but the piece was not really motivated by a desire to tell the truth about Perot. It was motivated by a desire to help Clinton.”

Blumenthal’s closeness to candidates never troubled Hertzberg, his editor both at the New Republic and the New Yorker, even if it made him suspect in the eyes of journalists struggling with objectivity.

“Sidney thinks other journalists are like theater critics who won’t say whether they like the play,” Hertzberg said. “Other journalists think he’s like a theater critic who’s one of the backers.”

In 1987, Blumenthal, then at the Washington Post, met the Clintons. “Sid appreciated the Clintons’ political skills and they read his books,” said Derek Shearer, a Los Angeles academic who served as Clinton’s ambassador to Finland.

Later, Blumenthal’s slavish praise of Clinton’s presidency caused problems when he took over the “Letter from Washington” column at the New Yorker. He was known to give the first lady advice regularly and he refused to write about Whitewater.

“He took a column that had a well-deserved reputation and turned it into a vehicle for the Clintons and for denouncing their enemies,” said Michael Kelly, a tough-minded Clinton critic who succeeded Blumenthal after he was forced to give up the column.

Blumenthal is among the last Clintonites still standing with them, and he appears to be the perfect surrogate for the first lady, whose vision of the conservative movement Blumenthal chronicled as a journalist and in a well-received book, “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power.” (At the White House, Blumenthal’s cultivation of conspiracy theories about the right-wing has earned him the nickname “Grassy Knoll.”)

A Warrior Who Revels the Political Battlefield

In addition to working on Mrs. Clinton’s millennium project and international strategy, Blumenthal’s stint at the White House has involved some ugly episodes as a passionate Clinton warrior. He sued Internet columnist Matt Drudge for defaming him. He has been at the heart of White House claims about dark right-wing forces behind Starr’s pursuit of the president, according to insiders. And he persists in seeing himself as not just any White House aide but more akin to political philosophers such as Irving Kristol or Isaiah Berlin.

The Saturday before last month’s State of the Union speech, two dozen Clinton advisors were assembled in the White House theater for a dress rehearsal. A loosely enforced rule allowed interruptions only by the few aides most conversant with policy. Blumenthal was not one of them.

And, of course, the first person to interrupt was the one-time 5-year-old from Chicago.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.