Actually, the honorable thing for Clinton would have been to resign. I argued for that in a Time magazine article as soon as he revealed that he had lied to the nation.[12] I knew, of course, that he wouldn’t. He had thrown himself off the highest cliff ever, and he had to prove he could catch a last-minute branch and pull himself, improbably, back up. And damned if he didn’t. He ended his time as president with high poll numbers and some new accomplishments, the greatest of the Kid’s comebacks�so great that I have been asked if I still feel he should have resigned. Well, I do. Why? Partly because what Ross Perot said in 1996 was partly true�that Clinton would be “totally occupied for the next two years in staying out of jail.” That meant he would probably go on lying. He tried for as long as possible to “mislead” the nation on Gennifer Flowers. He still claims that Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey made false charges. Perhaps they did, but he became unbelievable about personal behavior after lying about Flowers and Lewinsky. I at first disbelieved the story Paula Jones told because it seemed too bizarre; but the cigar-dildo described by Monica Lewinsky considerably extended the vistas of the bizarre.
Though Clinton accomplished things in his second term, he did so in a constant struggle to survive. Unlike the current president, his administration found in Sudan the presence of a weapon of mass destruction (the nerve gas precursor Empta) and bombed the place where it had existed�but many, including Senator Arlen Specter and the journalist Seymour Hersh, said that Clinton was just bombing another country to distract people from his scandal.[13] “That reaction,” according to Richard Clarke, “made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Quaeda.”[14] Even when Clinton was doing things, the appearance of his vulnerability made people doubt it. It was said in the Pentagon that he was afraid to seize terrorists because of his troubles; but Clarke rebuts those claims�he says that every proposal to seize a terrorist leader, whether it came from the CIA or the Pentagon, was approved by Clinton “during my tenure as CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] chairman, from 1992 to 2001.”
We shall never know what was not done, or not successfully done, because of Clinton’s being politically crippled. He has been criticized for his insufficient response to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Michael Walzer said of the bombing raids Clinton finally authorized that “our faith in airpower is…a kind of idolatry.”[15] But Clinton was limited in what he could do by the fact that the House of Representatives passed a resolution exactly the opposite of the war authorization that would be given George W. Bush�it voted to deny the President the power to commit troops. Walzer says that Clinton should have prodded the UN to take action; but a Republican Congress was not going to follow a man it distrusted when he called on an institution it distrusted.
At the very end of Clinton’s regime, did Arafat feel he was not strong enough in his own country to pressure him into the reasonable agreement Clinton had worked out and Ehud Barak had accepted? Clinton suggests as much when he says that Arafat called him a great man, and he had to reply: “I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.”
Clinton had a wise foreign policy. But in an Oval Office interview, shortly before he admitte lying to the nation, he admitted that he had not been able to make it clear to the American people His vision had so little hold upon the public that Bush was able to discard it instantly when he cam in. Clinton summed up the difference between his and Bush’s approach for Charlie Rose by sayin that the latter thinks we should “do what we want whenever we can, and then we cooperate whe we have to,” whereas his policy was that “we were cooperating whenever we could and we acte alone only when we had to.” The Bush people are learning the difference between the two policies a their pre-emptive unilateralism fails
Clinton claims that he was not hampered in his political activity by scandals. He even said, to Charlie Rose, that “I probably was more attentive to my work for several months just because I didn’t want to tend to anything else.” That is improbable a priori and it conflicts with what he told Dan Rather about the atmosphere caused by the scandal: “The moment was so crazy. It was a zoo. It was an unr�it was �it was like living in a madhouse.” Even if he were not distracted, the press and the nation were. His staff was demoralized. The Democrats on the Hill were defensive, doubtful, absorbed in either defending Clinton or deflecting criticism from themselves. His freedom to make policy was hobbled.
Clinton likes to talk now of his “legacy.” That legacy should include partial responsibility for the disabling of the Democratic Party. There were things to be said against the Democratic Leadership Council (Mario Cuomo said them well) and the “triangulation” scheme of Dick Morris, by which Clinton would take positions to the right of most congressional Democrats and to the left of the Republican Party. But Clinton, as a Southerner, knew that the party had to expand its base back into sources of support eroded by the New Right. This was a defensible (in fact a shrewd) strategy as Clinton originally shaped it. He could have made it a tactical adjunct to important strategic goals. But after the scandals, all his maneuvering looked desperate�a swerving away from blows, a flurried scrambling to find solid footing. His very success made Democrats think their only path to success was to concede, cajole, and pander. Al Gore began his 2000 campaign unhappy about his association with Clinton but trying to outpander him when he opposed the return of the Cuban boy Eli�n Gonzalez to his father. There is a kind of rude justice to the fact that the election was stolen from Gore in the state where he truckled to the Cubans.
Clinton bequeathed to his party not a clear call to high goals but an omnidirectional proneness to pusillanimity and collapse. This was signaled at the very outset of the new presidency. The Democrats, still in control of the Senate, facing a president not even strong enough to win the popular vote, a man brought into office by linked chicaneries and chance (Kathleen Harris, Ralph Nader, Antonin Scalia), nonetheless helped to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general. The senators knew Ashcroft well; they were surely not impressed by his acumen or wisdom.
A whole series of capitulations followed. While still holding a majority in the Senate, the Democrats did not use subpoenas and investigative powers to challenge Dick Cheney’s secret drafting of energy policy with Enron and other companies. A portion of the Democrats would support the welfare-to-billionaires tax cut. They fairly stampeded to support the Patriot Act and the presidential war authorization �with John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton at the front of the pack. The party had become so neutered that Al From and others from the Democratic Leadership Council called Howard Dean an extremist for daring to say what everyone is now saying about the war with Iraq�that it was precipitate, overhyped, and underprepared, more likely to separate us from the friends needed to fight terrorists than to end terrorism.
What would have happened had Clinton resigned? Gore would have been given “honeymoon” in which he could have played with a stronger hand all the initiatives Clinton ha begun, unashamed of them and able to bring them fresh energy. That is what happened whe Lyndon Johnson succeeded John Kennedy. Clinton himself may have reaped a redeemin admiration for what he had sacrificed to recover his honor. Before him would have lain all th opportunities he has now, and more. Hillary Clinton’s support of him in this act of real contritio would have looked nobler. Clinton’s followers were claiming that it was all and only about sex Clinton could have said, “Since that is what it is about, I’ll step aside so more important things ca be addressed.” All the other phony issues Starr had raised would have fallen of their ow insubstantiality
Of course, this is just one of many what-ifs about the Clinton presidency. By chance I saw a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s musical Wonderful Town, just before getting my copy of the Clinton book. All through the 957 pages of it, a song from the show kept running through my head: “What a waste! What a waste!”
