Only Yesterday

As America heads into recession and battles terrorism, the events of the last decade are coming in for a good deal of blame. The case against the 1990s runs something like this: Like its self-indulgent boomer president, the country did everything to gross excess. The stock market soared. The Internet zipped ahead, and pampered geeks in their 20s became millionaires. Cable television battened on one celebrity scandal after another. The final blow to years of national solipsism came with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But how persuasive is this indictment?

Haynes Johnson’s “The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years” offers a fine opportunity to revisit an era that seems destined to be defined as much by what followed it as by what took place at the time. Johnson, a regular on “The Newshour With Jim Lehrer,” has conducted numerous interviews with everyone from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to the Clintons. He deftly covers a wide swath of material in clear and accessible prose.

Consistent with his cautiously liberal sensibilities, Johnson never comes down too hard on one side or the other in assessing the Clinton era. But he does believe that it was, above all, an age of missed opportunities--that the United States, having reached the zenith of its economic and military might, abandoned its mandate to exercise leadership, at home and abroad, in favor of “self-destructive squabbles, growing inattention, petty political assaults, and the diversions of the electronic entertainment and scandal culture.”

Likening the last decade to the 1920s, Johnson seeks to provide a social history of the Clinton era. He divides his book into several parts. First, Johnson closely examines the technological revolution and those who deserve credit for it. Next he argues that celebrity scandals paved the way for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Though much of it is familiar territory, his discussion of the conservative conspiracy to drive Clinton out of office still makes for chilling reading. Finally, and in his weakest section, Johnson speculates about where America is headed.

“The Best of Times” is itself a kind of document of an era that disappeared more quickly than anyone anticipated. Some of Johnson’s most illuminating passages arrive early. He quite rightly emphasizes that the technological boom of the 1990s cannot be ascribed--as the apostles of the free market would have it--to the heroic efforts of bespectacled nerds and visionary entrepreneurs. Quite the contrary. It was largely the product of investment from previous decades. Big government, in fact, set the stage. Johnson praises Vannevar Bush, science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for creating a national industrial policy.

With the end of the Cold War, however, the GOP sought to slash government support. Despite the belief in a “peace dividend,” it was the Cold War that had prompted investment on the domestic front as means of building up the nation. In the 1990s, though, federal support for research and development shrank by 2.6% per year. Corporations, too, neglected research. Short-term profits were their goal so as to impress Wall Street analysts. Indeed, the rewards for business leaders were startling.

According to Johnson, in 1980 heads of American corporations were earning 40 times more than their employees; “by the early nineties, just as the boom was getting under way, they were earning more than ninety times more than their workers.” By the end of the decade, they were earning 419 times more, prompting The Economist magazine to call it the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth in history.

If Johnson is critical of the hype surrounding the so-called New Economy, he is scathing when discussing the role of the media. He sees the trial of O.J. Simpson as a warmup for the impeachment of the president. The culprit is a press corps hunting for the next scandal. According to Johnson, “in both print and electronic journalism, the same trends could be seen--a blurring of the line between news and entertainment, a greater focus on scandal and celebrity, a ‘gotcha’ philosophy of investigative reporting run amok” and so forth.

Perhaps it is inherent in the territory that Johnson sought to survey, but he does end up scanting Clinton’s achievements. Together with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton presided over the longest economic boom in American history. Clinton, in contrast to Ronald Reagan, created a virtuous circle of low inflation and low interest rates, resulting in budget surpluses. Under Clinton, the number of poor Americans fell by 8.1 million, the largest drop since the 1960s.

Johnson may have mistaken the ephemera of the 1990s for its substance. It’s not hard to see how he could have made this error. Hatred of Clinton permeated left and right, leading to strange alliances among columnists such as Christopher Hitchens and right-wing pundits. Both sides saw Clinton as a betrayer, a sinister figure out to subvert American freedoms. But this was nonsense. If anything, Clinton comes across in life as a hapless figure, the victim of his own vices. He was, moreover, the best thing that happened to the right: Clinton created a cottage industry for his critics who were left scrambling for face time after he left office. The 1990s have gotten a bum rap. Now that America is at war and civil liberties are being curbed, the Clinton era won’t be condemned but viewed with nostalgia.