A look through the keyhole

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, Bill Clinton was the invisible man. Gore seemed so spooked by Clinton’s scandals that he ran away from his successes. But Clinton’s name is springing more easily from the lips of the Democrats seeking his old job in 2004. Most of the leading Democratic presidential candidates are portraying their plans for the economy as a return to Clinton’s agenda; even Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who led an unsuccessful revolt from the left against the 1997 balanced budget Clinton negotiated with congressional Republicans, is touting his work for the initial economic plan Clinton squeezed through Congress in 1993.

This Clinton revival may partly reflect the fact that the Democratic candidates are now focused on appealing to Democratic primary voters, most of whom still regard Clinton as a hero. But surely another factor is the contrast between Clinton’s economic record and the performance of the two presidents named Bush who bookend him. In Clinton’s eight years, the economy created nearly 23 million jobs and the number of people in poverty fell by 7.7 million, the largest reduction since the boom years of the 1960s. Through the four years of the first President Bush and the two-plus years of his son the economy gained fewer than 240,000 new jobs (or just 1% as many as under Clinton), and the number of Americans in poverty increased by 7.8 million. Under Clinton, the government’s fiscal position improved every year and by 2000 Washington had achieved its largest budget surplus ever; this year, George W. Bush will almost certainly break the record for the largest deficit ever, a dubious mark now held by his father. Many factors beyond the three presidents’ policy choices may explain the disparity. But it’s a good bet that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will try to frame the 2004 presidential election as a choice between a Clinton strategy linked to prosperity and a Bush record of tougher times.

Yet it’s also clear that many Americans associate Clinton far less with such economic successes -- or other policy achievements such as the reform of welfare and the movement toward peace in Northern Ireland -- than with moral failures, particularly the affair with former intern Monica S. Lewinsky that led to his impeachment by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives (and Al Gore’s coolness in 2000). The effort to balance those competing ledgers has dominated the steady flow of memoirs and studies already appearing on Clinton’s presidency -- from insider tales by George Stephanopoulos and Dick Morris to journalistic assessment by Haynes Johnson, David Halberstam and Joe Klein. The Clintons’ own efforts to shape their place in history are approaching, with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoirs due out next month and Clinton’s effort expected next year, just in time for the presidential election. Amid that flood of words from Chappaqua, the likely prominence of the comparisons between Clinton and Bush in the 2004 race and the already escalating buzz about a possible Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign, it’s guaranteed that the struggle to define Bill Clinton’s legacy will continue for years -- with the results affecting not only the verdict of posterity but more immediate judgments by the electorate as well.

Onto that treacherous field steps Sidney Blumenthal, a former journalist who joined the White House staff in Clinton’s second term, with “The Clinton Wars,” an epic-length brief for the defense. Blumenthal has grand ambitions: He has crammed between these covers a journalistic account of Clinton’s first term, an insider’s report on his second, and an historian’s effort to fit all of these events into the longer sweep of American politics. It’s difficult to imagine that either Clinton will defend the president’s record more enthusiastically or unwaveringly than Blumenthal.

In many ways Blumenthal’s portrayal is a useful corrective to the tendency among conservatives and even many mainstream reporters to present the Clinton years as only a succession of scandals while slighting his policy achievements and success at dragging to the center a Democratic Party that had lost five of the six presidential elections before his victory. It’s easy to forget how far the Democrats had fallen before Clinton showed them a path back to the Oval Office with his New Democrat agenda: In the three elections immediately before he broke through in 1992, the Democrats had won a smaller share of the available electoral votes than in any three-election sequence since the formation of the modern party system with Andrew Jackson in 1828.

As a journalist Blumenthal had a good sense for the big picture, and he puts that on display here. He places Clinton in both historical and contemporary perspective. He makes a strong case that Clinton should be seen as part of a legacy that stretches from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson through Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson: a tradition of “progressive presidents” who challenged “existing political and social arrangements” and forged new mechanisms for the federal government to pursue the enduring national goal of expanding opportunity. And he shows how the changes Clinton imposed on the Democratic Party in the United States helped inspire British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other “third way” leaders across Europe to modernize their own center-left parties around ideas such as fiscal discipline and linking opportunity to responsibility (through policies like welfare reform).

Blumenthal also -- correctly, I think -- sees the battle over Lewinsky and impeachment as part of the culture wars that have raged between left and right since the 1960s. Clinton polarized the country so sharply, even while pursuing mostly centrist policies, largely because he symbolized the personal strengths (creativity, intelligence) and weaknesses (self-absorption, a lack of discipline) of the baby boom. Many impeachment supporters were genuinely outraged by Clinton’s behavior and the lies he told to hide it. But to some on the right, discrediting Clinton through impeachment seemed to become a way of demonstrating that the 1960s had been misguided all along. In that sense, Blumenthal persuasively argues, for conservatives, impeachment “was the show trial of their culture war.”

Yet even with such valuable (if not always unique) insights, the book mostly falls flat. Blumenthal mostly avoids the memoirist’s temptation to inflate his own importance. But anyone expecting that Blumenthal’s unusually close relationship with Clinton and his wife would produce eye-opening revelations about either of them or Lewinsky, or even White House life during the crucible of Clinton’s impeachment, will be disappointed. Intermittent glimpses behind the White House curtain are overwhelmed by literally hundreds of pages in which Blumenthal marches through the public record of the Lewinsky scandal, impeachment and the 2000 election campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. This opus weighs too much and reveals too little.

Overstuffed with so many familiar stories, the book checks in at an elephantine 832 pages. In his classic memoir, “Present at the Creation,” Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman’s secretary of State, needed fewer pages to tell the story of the Marshall Plan, NATO, the division of Europe, the Korean War and the building of the post-World War II international order. In “The Education of Henry Adams,” the great 19th century historian elegantly condensed decades of political intrigue at the apex of Washington life into fewer than half as many pages.

All of this poundage squeezes much of the life from what could -- and should -- have been a more compelling personal and political story. Blumenthal is breezy and engaging describing his childhood in Chicago, where he was raised in a colorful, middle-class family (his father had double-dated with Jack Ruby), and like so many older baby boomers, acquired the political bug in the 1960 presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Already drawn to history and biography, Blumenthal was captivated when a neighbor took him to a Kennedy rally just before election day.

From Chicago, Blumenthal went to Brandeis University just as the anti-Vietnam War movement was accelerating in the late 1960s, and he plunged in. After college, Blumenthal fell into the thriving alternative-press scene in Boston, and he’s especially evocative in describing the sense of opportunity as the baby boomers flexed their post-’60s muscle in culture, politics and the media: “It was a given that journalism was committed and crusading -- and that David Bowie’s latest album was an important statement.”

After Boston came a prescient book on political consultants and, in 1984, fresh, energetic coverage of the presidential campaign for the New Republic. Later came more books, a tumultuous turn as a reporter at the Washington Post, a return to the New Republic for the 1992 campaign and then an ascent to one of the peaks of American journalism: the Washington correspondent position for the New Yorker, where his closeness to Clinton was one of the principal calling cards for new editor Tina Brown. Blumenthal’s star at the New Yorker quickly dimmed along with Clinton’s: When Clinton’s first term fell into chaos amid policy reversals and the initial volleys in the scandal wars, Brown replaced Blumenthal with Michael Kelly, another talented writer who was in the process of transforming himself from an essentially nonpartisan journalist into a conservative polemicist with a special loathing for Clinton -- and apparently for Blumenthal as well, based on the stories Blumenthal tells in the book. (Kelly died earlier this year while covering the war in Iraq.) Blumenthal hung on at the New Yorker for a while but didn’t seem to hesitate when Clinton offered him a position as a White House communications and political advisor after the 1996 election.

As he ascended through all of these positions, Blumenthal was an intensely polarizing figure in the journalistic world and not just because of the usual professional jealousy in the hothouse national press corps. His admirers, and even many of his critics, acknowledged his skills as a writer and his appreciation for political history. But he constantly faced the charge of being too much of a partisan, and rumors persisted that he privately advised some of the politicians he favored -- first Gary Hart in the 1980s and then Clinton. In this book, Blumenthal provides plenty of ammunition for those critics. Though he glides swiftly over his relationship with Hart, Blumenthal flatly acknowledges that he offered ideas to Clinton, his political Svengali Dick Morris and other administration figures while still covering them for the New Yorker. When Hillary Clinton is feeling besieged by scandal in 1994, Blumenthal writes, he “suggested to [her] that she escape the stifling atmosphere of Washington by going” to Chicago and New York City; then he helped arrange a lunch for her with the New York literati. Later Clinton offers him the White House job only after Blumenthal, still at that moment a reporter, offers Clinton counsel on the 1997 State of the Union.

What all those encounters (and several more Blumenthal describes) suggest is that Blumenthal stopped thinking of himself as a journalist long before he formally crossed over to become a political aide. The overall tone of “The Clinton Wars” confirms that Blumenthal views himself more as a political activist than a reporter or a historian, and the book seems designed more to defend than to explain Clinton.

For that reason, Blumenthal the journalist is undermined by Blumenthal the activist: Ultimately he is too much the believer to be believed. Even with his historical insights, he is so steadfast in rejecting criticism from any direction that he loses credibility as a reliable evaluator of Clinton’s successes and failures. Whether on Clinton’s response to terrorism, the legislative gridlock of his final two years, the role of the Lewinsky scandal in Gore’s defeat, or the chaotic and controversial pardons of Clinton’s final hours, Blumenthal never gives an inch; it’s as if he’s still preparing talking points for the White House press office.

In his treatment of the Lewinsky scandal, Blumenthal is no more critical of Clinton, though a bit more interesting in revealing the mind-set of the president’s aides at the time. Unlike others in the White House, he expresses nothing approaching anger at the president. Yet he helps explain how even those more disappointed in Clinton managed to fight so fiercely for his survival during impeachment.

Like many Clinton supporters, Blumenthal saw the president’s relationship with Lewinsky primarily as a personal matter between Clinton and his wife: “I felt it should be between the two of them,” he writes. The one note of disappointment he sounds reprises a common complaint among Clinton backers at the time: “[H]e had acted recklessly, and in doing so he had given ammunition to his enemies.”

On the other hand, Blumenthal makes clear he saw the drive by Kenneth W. Starr and congressional Republicans over the scandal as a virtual coup to overturn the 1996 election. To Blumenthal, Clinton’s opponents were manipulating a private failing to achieve the political goal of destroying his presidency. “An illicit sexual relationship and the illicit subversion of democracy were hardly morally equivalent in my mind,” he writes in one of the book’s most biting sentences. In other words, Blumenthal (and presumably those around him) kept themselves going on the belief that impeachment was a much greater threat to the “rule of law” the Republicans touted than anything Clinton had done.

I say presumably because Blumenthal, while boldly asserting that argument, offers little sense of how it affected the White House’s day-to-day conduct through the struggle. That failure crystallizes a central flaw in the book.

Blumenthal too often fails in the cardinal responsibility of any memoirist: to spill the beans. Not in the sense of airing dirty linen but in providing readers with a clearer understanding of how decisions were made and personalities interacted. Blumenthal offers only a few tantalizing views through the keyhole. He evokes Clinton’s profound affection for the slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a single moving detail: the fact that Clinton kept in his White House living quarters a handful of dirt from Rabin’s grave. There’s a great aside in which Clinton, like an athlete measuring a rival, tells Blumenthal in August 2000 that he wishes he could have run himself against Bush and company because “I’d run their ass down.” And Blumenthal captures Clinton’s omnivorous personality with a concise description of wandering into his hotel room at an international economic summit and finding the president “playing cards by himself, watching the news on television, reading memos, and talking to Hillary on the telephone all at the same time.”

But such moments are far too rare in the book. Either from a deficiency of access or an excess of discretion, Blumenthal says remarkably little about what happened behind the scenes at the White House during the struggle with Starr or impeachment or the 2000 presidential campaign. He drowns the reader in extended excerpts from the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings while offering only a bland single paragraph on what he was doing at the time; the reader has to trudge through 50 pages of familiar stories on the legal and political maneuvers in the escalating confrontation before reaching a single angry Clinton monologue on the day of impeachment itself.

The mystifying imbalance in the storytelling is crystallized in Blumenthal’s treatment of Clinton’s role in the legal struggle between Al Gore and George W. Bush after the 2000 election. More than 750 pages into the narrative, Blumenthal whets the reader’s appetite one last time, disclosing that Clinton (not surprisingly) was “galvanized” by the standoff. “Behind the scenes,” Blumenthal writes, “[Clinton] dispensed strategic and tactical advice to the Gore effort in Florida through his aides, including me.” But Blumenthal doesn’t say what any of that advice was. Instead he devotes the next 19 pages to summarizing the postelection legal battles already chewed over in half a dozen other books.

By that point, all but the most ardent Clintonites may feel like Dr. Zhivago, trudging through the snow for a purpose long forgotten. Blumenthal is right that the debate over Clinton’s legacy will continue for years as both political parties try to define his memory for their own purposes. But reading about the Clinton Wars shouldn’t feel this much like fighting them.