Bill Clinton has worked his way out of many sticky political situations and featured is run-down of incidents which he was faced with and how his coded speech helped him wrangle his way free. His style of speaking and usage of carefully-chosen words are analyzed. Included are the president's `I didn't inhale' answer to the marijuana question on his campaign trail to the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky.
Monicagate is vintage Clinton-only this time he got caught.
Mr. Cannon, a longtime White House reporter, writes for National Journal.
In 1990, when Bill Clinton was planning his run for president, a Democratic media consultant named Raymond D. Strother asked him how he was planning to handle the question of youthful marijuana use. "I'm thinking of saying I never violated the drug laws of my country," Clinton replied. Strother, seeing through the ruse immediately, gently informed the one-time Rhodes scholar that such an answer wasn't likely to fool the national press. By 1992, of course, Clinton had settled on his "I didn't inhale" line.
Was this a lie? Had he really not inhaled marijuana smoke? No one knows for sure, though several people who were at Oxford with Clinton told presidential biographer David Maraniss that they believed him-thought it was possible that the young Clinton really hadn't known how to smoke. The larger point, however, is that Bill Clinton believed while in college, believed while in Arkansas, and believes today that the truth is something that he can finesse.
Of all the behavior exhibited by the president during the past year, as he micro-managed a little sex scandal into his own impeachment, the decision his critics find most inexplicable is his absolute refusal to concede that he lied. This from a man who arrived in Washington with the sobriquet "Slick Willie," who admitted "inappropriate" sex acts in the Oval Office, who confessed adultery and acknowledged turning the country topsy-turvy through his own lack of discipline. But what he has stubbornly refused to do-despite assurances from some Republicans that he could make it all go away-is admit that he twice took an oath to tell the truth during court proceedings and failed to do so.
On its face, this refusal seems not only self-destructive, but strange. Clinton has been a known dissembler for two decades, and certainly the American public has no illusions about him. In the same polls that show Clinton with Eisenhower-level approval ratings, only 8 percent give him high marks for truth-telling. What's more, the facts that Clinton has grudgingly conceded-quite apart from the DNA evidence on that infamous dress-make it plain that Clinton told falsehoods to Paula Jones's lawyers, to a federal grand jury, to Jim Lehrer and other journalists, and to various U.S. senators. He lied to his cabinet, to his vice president, to his aides, and to his friends (including the much-maligned Harry Thomason). The only person he appears to have confided the truth to, concerning Monica Lewinsky, is Dick Morris.
It was hardly any shock to House members that Clinton's veracity was shaky-not after slippery negotiations in which the president would say one thing to one group and something entirely different to another. This applies not just to Republicans but to the self-same Democrats who railed against Clinton's conduct on the House floor, then trucked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in a show of support for the second president in history to be impeached. Now, as the Senate grapples with a constitutional mess, one question that presents itself is, Was this wreckage avoidable, given Clinton's nature? Another is, Whose fault is it, anyway?
Some like to cast the president's ambitious wife as a primary culprit. They see Hillary Rodham Clinton as the "enabler" who ill served the country by standing by her man, not out of love or loyalty, but out of her own desire to wield power. This explanation strikes at least one professional Clinton-watcher (me) as too pat, and probably unfair. Those who know the First Lady well insist that, whatever her ambitions, she loves the big lug a great deal. Like many other wives, she believed her husband's denials when others did not. Moreover, Clinton's presidency is not threatened by extramarital activity, but by perjury, which Hillary Clinton has no authority to pardon. So the First Lady should not bear the blame. If we are to point to enablers, or co-conspirators, we might as well name the Arkansas political establishment, Clinton's ineffective presidential opponents, the Democratic party, and the media, all of whom let Clinton shade the truth for years without an adequate accounting.
Today, the entire political culture-including the president-is paying the price. Clinton realizes his denials and assurances aren't worth much anymore, no matter how thinly sourced the allegation leveled against him: whether it's that he fathered an out-of-wedlock child in Arkansas or that he bombed Iraq in an attempt to forestall or thwart impeachment. When questioned by reporters on the lingering "Wag the Dog" doubts about his airstrikes, Clinton didn't rely on his own word or that of his secretary of state-both of them were compromised by flat denials in the Lewinsky affair. Instead, the president fell back on the assurances made by his defense secretary, a Republican, and by a general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Despite these credibility problems, Clinton surely doesn't think of himself as a liar. His fury, when he is accused of lying, is too spontaneous to be faked, and the effort he puts into giving convoluted, nearly technically perfect answers is the trait of a clever lawyer, not a man who takes secret pleasure in devilish fibs. In his January 17 deposition, for example, this man renowned for his memory of people and places answered "I don't remember" 71 times, "I don't know" 62 times, and "I don't believe so" or "I don't think so," etc., another 134 times.
Yet it is also undeniable that Clinton has a long record of exaggeration and prevarication. Presidents are like other politicians, only more so, and they lie for all kinds of reasons: during the heat of a political campaign, because it's expedient; when it's the only way to get Congress to do what they want; when they fear the consequences of admitting they did something wrong (like Richard Nixon, when he insisted that Watergate was a figment of the Washington Post's imagination). They lie most famously for national-security reasons, as Ike did during the U-2 affair. They also lie for the most human of reasons: when they want audiences to like them. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a master of such fibs. Ronald Reagan was another, as when he drew material from the movies, which could be creative-or unnerving.
Bill Clinton tells every kind of lie. He freely invents his own history, as the nation learned in 1992 when he provided ever-shifting accounts of his draft record and employed various half-truths about his relationship with Gennifer Flowers. He also made promises during the campaign that he hadn't the slightest intention of keeping, such as the middle-class tax cut before the Florida primary as a wedge against Paul Tsongas. Shortly after his election, Clinton made public assertions about the budget that he knew to be false, often prefacing them with, "It's time to tell the truth." When he blasted Republicans for not offering specific budget cuts, John Kasich, then the ranking GOP member on the House Budget Committee, whipped out a copy of a personal letter from Clinton thanking him for identifying $430 billion worth of such cuts. In time, Clinton would vow that American troops would be in Bosnia for only a year-even though the military brass was telling him that this was unrealistic. And he would, of course, insist, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
The most common of Clinton's falsehoods is the self-serving historical claim: He knows more about agriculture than anyone who ever occupied the White House (including, presumably, Washington, Jefferson, and Carter); no one has championed the First Amendment the way he has; no one has created more jobs or eliminated more government waste. Etc. In real life, a person who talked this way would be considered a braggart and a bore. But Clinton's outsized sense of entitlement comes through the loudest when his fabrications are at the expense of others. This trait is often attributed to Clinton's rebellious and spoiled generation, but with him it goes deeper. The notion that he is special-and thus can do no wrong-was nurtured in his family and, indeed, through his entire state. In that respect, he seems less like his baby-boomer peers than the pampered professional athletes of the 1990s, whose talent prompts society to overlook not only boorish but criminal behavior.
Ray Strother has another theory, and it's not a cheery one, because it suggests that Clinton may be the first in a long line. Strother suspects that the most important thing to know about Clinton is not that he is the first post-WWII-generation president but that he is the first focus-group president-the first to make it all the way to the Oval Office on the building blocks of polls, not his own achievements or beliefs.
Bill Clinton takes polls to decide where his family will vacation, what surname his wife will use, whether he will end the federal welfare entitlement, and how to phrase his apologies. Is it any wonder that truth sometimes gets lost in the shuffle? During the 1996 campaign, Clinton's advisers turned up evidence that voters didn't know about Bob Dole's war record-and, when they discovered it, were inclined to admire it. Clinton's response? To instruct every warm-up speaker in every little town he campaigned in to emphasize Clinton's "courage" in taking such safe (and poll-tested) stances as his opposition to the tobacco companies and to the National Rifle Association. Where's the outrage? the challenger would ask, as Clinton got away with this and so much more. But Dole never inspired that outrage.
Similarly, in 1992, George Bush had a chance to knock Clinton out, in the third presidential debate. Helen Thomas of UPI asked Clinton, "If you had it to do over again, would you put on the nation's uniform?" Responded Clinton, "If I had it to do over again, I might answer the questions a little better. You know, I've been in public life a long time, and no one had ever questioned my role."
Now, this was a real whopper, but what would have happened if Bush had turned to Clinton and said something like the following? "Governor, even though I left college voluntarily during World War II to enlist in the Navy, I haven't made an issue of your avoidance of military service in Vietnam. But now, sir, you've gone too far. You've been asked about the lies you've told relating to your draft record-and you've lied again, right up here on this stage. This has been an issue in Arkansas for years. Way back in 1978, an opponent of yours held a press conference to denounce you as a draft dodger. I'm not saying that the commander-in-chief has to be a veteran. But he's got to be someone whom the men and women in uniform know will tell the truth, especially about military service."
Bush said nothing, however, and Clinton won the election handily.
But in 1998, when Clinton should have been enjoying the victory-lap years of his two-term presidency, something did happen. The irritant that was the Paula Jones litigation took a nightmarish twist for him, putting him on a collision course with Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr, and a gentle pit bull named Henry Hyde. It is tempting to see Biblical retribution in all this, or at least the elements (particularly hubris) of a Greek tragedy. Remember this: Paula Jones wanted $25,000 and a private apology in lieu of filing her suit. She later backed out of a settlement agreement when Clinton, his lawyers, and his aides gave her the high hat. In the end, Clinton's luck ran out.
"There is something inevitable about it," says veteran Arkansas newspaperman Paul Greenberg, the man who coined the "Slick Willie" moniker some 18 years ago while writing about Clinton. "But he didn't see it. His whole career had taught him that he could get away with this stuff-in fact, that this was the secret to his success. But he left all these loose ends around, loose ends of truth, like rollerskates in the living room. And one of them was going to trip him."