Looking at Clinton Years: The TV Histories Begin

After eight years, the retrospectives on the Clinton White House have begun. It’s unlikely that any of the current crop will provide more insider perspective than the five-part series “The Clinton Years,” which begins airing on ABC News’ “Nightline” tonight. In an unusual partnership designed to amortize the 40 hours of interviews, a two-hour version of the series, with a similar theme but told in different order, will air on PBS’ “Frontline” on Jan. 16.

The program, which is scheduled to continue on “Nightline” all week, barring major breaking news, benefits greatly from Washington’s revolving door between politics and journalism. George Stephanopoulos, an ABC News correspondent and former Clinton strategist, figures prominently, as do the recollections of David Gergen, a former Clinton advisor who appears frequently on “Nightline.” Although he wasn’t an official ABC News analyst at the time he was interviewed for the program, Gergen is currently in discussions about becoming one, according to an ABC executive.

Tom Bettag, executive producer of “Nightline,” says Stephanopoulos and Gergen were approached in the same manner that all Clinton insiders were. “Honestly, they didn’t make any difference,” he says, in getting others such as former spokesperson Dee Dee Myers, former advisor James Carville and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich to open up, as indeed they did. The candid observations range from Gergen talking about how First Lady Hillary Clinton took control of the failed early health care debate because the president was “in her doghouse” over charges involving his personal life, to a Carville and Stephanopoulos anecdote about laughing under the table when the president insists that Hillary Clinton’s hair is at fault when a focus group reacts negatively.

“We approached people saying, ‘We are going to do this oral history of the administration,’ and what drove it is that once a few people talked, others wanted to be in,” Bettag says, in an “ ‘I don’t want his to be the final version’ effect. It happened much more as such things always do journalistically.”

Unlike many retrospectives that are approaching the Clinton years through the lens of specific issues such as welfare and the environment, the ABC/PBS collaboration looks at how the internal politics and the politician’s decision-making style and even his marriage affected his campaign and two terms. Because insiders were forced to react to them, the broadcast ends up with a heavy emphasis on the constant personal attacks that plagued the Clinton White House.

After conducting the first few interviews, Bettag says the program made the “big bold decision to only do it with people who were in the White House,” from disgraced advisor Dick Morris to current Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala.

It was the “ambivalence” in their recollections that captured “Nightline’s” attention, Bettag says. “On the face of it, you’d think we’d get pandering and all these spin-meisters,” but instead, in addition to admiration for Clinton, “at the same time we got a sense of betrayal, the bittersweet tone of the insiders. I think that’s much more interesting than if we interviewed Newt Gingrich on what he thinks of Bill Clinton.”

As such, the show has a clear point of view. As correspondent Chris Bury sums up in the opening of the “Frontline” documentary, Clinton “never really did answer the question that has come to define his presidency: How could a modern American politician cheat death so often?”

‘All That Talent and All That Ability’

The broadcasts hammer home that theme again and again, as in, “It was a typical White House moment . . . bad news follows good,” and “By now, the Clinton team knew enough to savor such sweet moments when it could. In this White House, another round of incoming was practically guaranteed.” In case viewers still don’t get the point, both programs include variations of this quote from Reich: “On Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays I say, ‘Thank God Bill Clinton was there.’ And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, I say to myself, ‘What a waste.’ All that talent and all that ability, and he did not do what he intended to do and get accomplished. Maybe if he had been more disciplined both in terms of his agenda and also his personal life, more could have been done.’ And on Sundays, I don’t think about it at all.”

The Clintons don’t defend themselves. Bettag says the broadcast requested interviews but didn’t get them. Material that didn’t make the cut, such as a story about the choreography of a Middle East peace accord signing, is available through the show’s site on https://www.abcnews.com.

With such a tough broadcast, “Nightline’s” Ted Koppel, who anchors the ABC portion, won’t dissuade critics who question how ABC can allow him to continue to cover Clinton given the harsh observations the president comes in for in Koppel’s new book “Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public.” Recently, Koppel was taken to task in a Washington Post review by Ray Suarez, a correspondent for PBS’ “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” who complains Koppel has lost his objectivity with such writing as “Maybe I’m doing the president a great injustice, but I am hard-pressed to think of a single act of his, throughout what I guess will come to be known as the Lewinsky matter, in which he put the nation’s welfare ahead of his own.”

Bettag says Koppel has “20 years of demonstrating his ability to separate his personal opinion from his coverage. There are very few people who could get by with that. But if you have done what Ted has done every night for 20 years, he has earned the right to do that.”

* “The Clinton Years: A Nightline/Frontline Special Report” can be seen tonight through Friday on ABC’s “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. The “Frontline” documentary can be seen Jan. 16 at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV.