Bill Clinton, You Lying Horndog

Historians and scholars generally agree that of America’s 45 presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were the best. And the worst? The consensus seems to be, starting from the bottom, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Donald Trump, Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce.

Having recently read David Maraniss’ Pulitzer Prize–winning book, First in His Class, I would like to say a few words about its subject, William Jefferson Clinton. I will begin by noting that the experts tend to put him in the second quartile, above the median. Good but not great, in other words. Clinton sure did some things right. He oversaw the longest economic expansion in American history; unemployment was low during his eight years (1993–2000) in the White House; a bloody war in the Balkans was brought to an end; and technical assistance and funding to the former Soviet states helped safeguard Russia’s nuclear power plants and dismantle its nuclear weapons.

Despite being born into a moderately dysfunctional lower-middle class family in Arkansas, the nation’s second-poorest state, he excelled academically. Clinton won a scholarship to Georgetown University, graduating in 1968. He spent two years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (taking time out to join anti-Vietnam War protests and engage in a series of legally dubious moves to keep from being drafted) and returned to the States, earning a law degree at Yale. While in New Haven, Clinton met Hillary Rodham, a bright young woman from Chicago whom he would marry in 1975. (She went on to become secretary of state under Barack Obama and the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2016.)

Apart from shining in the classroom, Clinton had a garrulous personality—people liked him, adored him, were drawn to him like a magnet. Standing 6′ 3″, he could give an extemporaneous speech at the drop of a hat. Even as a teenager, admirers were saying he might be president one day. Clinton had been active in student politics at Hot Springs High School, Georgetown, Oxford and Yale. Working as a low-level clerk for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, he learned how things worked in Washington, D.C. He assiduously made contacts and used them when he ran for office.

That began in 1974 when, as a professor at the University of Arkansas’ law school, Clinton campaigned for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He lost, but rebounded two years later and by winning election as the state’s attorney general. Not for long, though, because he had higher aspirations. By 1979, he had moved into the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock and served five terms. During that time, his and Hillary’s personal and business affairs got tangled up in what became known as the Whitewater scandal. Two others were imprisoned, but the Clintons came out relatively unscathed. Critics say they were protected.

While Clinton toyed with the idea of running for president in 1988, he eventually decided against it. He is remembered in that year for giving a much-too-long nominating speech for Michael Dukakis at the Democratic convention in Atlanta. Nominated himself in 1992, he beat the incumbent, George H.W. Bush. A strong third-party candidate, H. Ross Perot, probably made the difference between the two frontrunners. At any rate, his ascension brought 12 years of Republican rule to an end.

And now to the main point of this article—Clinton’s sexual escapades and how they nearly wrecked his political career. In fact, they could well have prevented him from becoming POTUS in the first place, as the accusations started in Arkansas. I will pass lightly over Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, and will do the same for the allegations made by two Arkansas state troopers who contended in late 1993 that they had arranged numerous liaisons for Clinton during his long tenure as governor. It put him in Hillary’s doghouse and changed the dynamics of their marriage, which had long been characterized as more of a partnership than a marriage. Rest assured, Clinton denied it all. His pit-bull political adviser, James Carville, made the round of talk shows, using such lines as “If you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, no telling what you’re going to find.”

Much was made of the photo of an earnest Clinton shaking hands with John F. Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden in the summer of 1963. I am probably not the first to grasp that both gentlemen were unable or unwilling to restrain themselves in terms of sex. They were reckless and seemed to enjoy living dangerously. Clinton was fortunate not to be harmed any more than he was by the charges of Flowers, et al. (He did pay Jones $850,000, however, to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit.)

But when a cute-if-plump 21-year-old intern started working at the White House in July 1995, Clinton made his biggest mistake. Monica Lewinsky found ways to be in his vicinity often and gave him a series of not-so-subtle come-ons, most famously when she lifted her jacket, popped the strap of her silver thong against her hip, and flashed him a saucy look. They had 10 quick-and-dirty encounters in a hallway or bathroom adjacent to the Oval Office between November 1995 and March 1997. In three of those instances, he took a call from a member of Congress while she was on her knees giving him mouth-love.

The Bill/Monica thing was bad on several levels. He was married (she wasn’t); he was 28 years her senior; he had all the power in this “relationship”; and it degraded the office of the presidency. I am not sure whether JFK—shameless in treating female White House interns as sex objects—ever stooped so low. Nevertheless, the fact remains that both were consenting adults. I am a heterosexual male and who has had his own moments of weakness, so I am loath to judge.

Clinton erred, when the affair became public, by lying about it and urging Lewinsky to follow suit. For decades, he had been bluffing his way through similar situations. Of course, at the time (before Lewinsky’s “friend,” Linda Tripp, made surreptitious recordings and turned them over to the authorities), he had no idea it would grow to such proportions. Nor did he know that she had preserved a semen-stained blue dress that would prove very incriminating. This issue dominated the media almost until the day George W. Bush gave his inaugural speech in front of the U.S. Capitol. In private conversations, press conferences, TV sit-downs with Hillary poised stone-faced at his side and sometimes under oath, Clinton—a chameleon who was by turns kind and calculating, relaxed and ambitious, a mediator and a predator—obfuscated, fibbed, prevaricated, falsified and tiptoed around the truth. It was utterly unconvincing. He might as well have climbed to the top of the Washington Monument and screamed, “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” We knew he was lying, and he must have known that we knew.

If only he had fessed up at the start, it would have eventually blown over with minimal damage. But he would not or could not, and so a judge found him in contempt of court, and the House of Representatives impeached him for perjury and obstruction of justice. Only when the Senate acquitted him of those charges on February 12, 1999 was Clinton sure he could remain in office for the rest of his second term, albeit as the lamest of lame ducks.

This was a tragedy, certainly for Lewinsky, but for Clinton as well. Had he resolutely sent her out of the White House the first time she began flirting and restricted his sexual energies to his wife, he might now be in that first quartile—regarded as one of America’s truly great presidents.

Clinton and Lewinsky at the White House, February 1997…

Clinton wags his finger at the camera and declares, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”…

The Senate’s impeachment trial of Clinton…

On the cover of Time magazine…