One should not hold it against anyone, even a modern historian, that he was not fortunate enough to have an Oxford education. But one is entitled to complain, of such a luckless person, that he affects knowledge of the old place. President Clinton’s former college, University College, is not situated “on the Broadway”, chiefly because there is no such street. (There is a street named Broad Street, but that college is not situated on it.) Then again, since Clinton was in so many ways such a child of the Sixties, it would be helpful to feel confident that the historian knew his bearings in this over-studied decade. I was not a contemporary of Tariq Ali’s at Oxford, nor was Tariq a contemporary of Clinton’s, and nor did either or indeed any of us “wear dark glasses in which everything looked either black or white” — which is not, in any case, the effect that dark glasses produce.
No, I did not look only myself up in the index. I have covered Clinton all the way from Arkansas to Washington and back, and I did, in fact, know some of his male and female circle a quarter of a century before that; but long before I reached Nigel Hamilton’s chapter on Oxford, I had worn out a ballpoint or two by marking things that were vaguely or wildly “off”.
Unease begins in the section devoted to “Acknowledgments”. Here I learnt of a chance meeting between subject and author at a dinner in Little Rock in the summer of 2002: “At first, having heard my name, the President appeared, as we shook hands and posed for a photograph, not to make any connection between my name and my impending biography. Instead, taking the beautifully embossed menu card from my hand, he began to autograph it for me, in the manner of a star — which, indeed, he has remained, out of office, wherever he goes.”
Cambridge historians were less deferential in my young day. Be that as it may, having suddenly recognised the name of his Boswell-to-be, Clinton “pulled back at least a yard. He stared at me. His blue eyes narrowed. The blood drained from his face. He looked, at that moment, as if he might strike me.” But so entrancing was the subsequent monologue he delivered that Hamilton now thinks that Thomas Mann, “the great German ironist of the 20th century, would have been profoundly intrigued” by the encounter. Not just “intrigued”, you notice, but profoundly so.
Most of the men and women who have faced Clinton’s famous rages or hectic advances report that his face goes a deep red rather than a livid white. No matter. The glimpse of a highly overwrought and selfish individual would be worth having, if it were not that it has produced in Hamilton — as it has in countless journalistic toadies and Hollywood hangers-on — a lasting, abject sense of having been brushed by the presence of greatness. From then on, in the narrative, it’s “Bill” all the way.
Or “Billy”, actually, in the chapters that deal with the fabled Arkansas boyhood. Here is the story again, exactly and almost word for word as Clinton has wished to tell it himself. Quite often, his own reminiscences are taken as objective confirmation. We are invited to take at face value the mawkish tales of his piping-treble opposition to white Southern racism, and of his lone stand against his drunken, wife-beating stepfather. We can’t tell for sure if the story of his defending his mother is true: we do know for a fact that a short time after the alleged incident he went to the courthouse to ask to take the boozy brute’s surname as his own. We can tell for sure, because of the dates and incidents claimed, that several of Clinton’s boasts about resisting segregation are made up. And we do know that, by the end of his tenure as governor, which was many years later, Arkansas was the only state in the union not to have a civil rights statute. I don’t especially mind that Hamilton invariably gives Clinton the benefit of any doubt. I do mind that he often doesn’t even cite the evidence for the doubt, or rather doubts.
Thus, for example, he gives high marks to Roger Morris’s book, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, but doesn’t even canvass the allegations made therein. Of these allegations, I might cite the grave charge that Clinton forced himself violently on unwilling women, and the strong suggestion that he was an informer on anti-war students at Oxford. Neither would be exactly trivial, but neither is even considered in these pages. Hamilton does quote fairly well from Paul Greenberg, one of Arkansas’s finest journalists and an early warner of the titanic local ego that sought presidential therapy for itself, but the effect of this passage in Hamilton’s hands is to suggest that Clinton was too warm-hearted and impulsive for his own good and too eager to please people, and that the choice he faced was between losing as a man of principle and winning by compromise. Well, if you put it like that . . .
What if George Bush were to get up today and say that what we needed was “self control, not birth control”? He would be laughed off the stage. Or at least he would be jeered at by all those confident of their liberal certainties. Yet in “Hillary’s” mouth — yes, she gets first-name treatment, too — this same fatuous slogan is presented as a brave “New Democrat” stand. What if George Bush had executed a lobotomised black man on the eve of a hotly disputed primary? That is what Clinton did to Rickey Ray Rector during the tussle over Gennifer Flowers that had seen his polling numbers plummet in New Hampshire. Hamilton to the rescue again, with the “news” that Clinton was a long-standing fan of capital punishment and made no exception in this case! Well, I knew that. But even the guards and the chaplain, in a not-very-bleeding-heart state prison, were disgusted by the Rector business. And it is simply not true, as Hamilton sloppily says, that Rector was a “multiple murderer” who was “compos mentis” at the time of his arrest.
By this time we are in the home stretch of Hamilton’s first volume (which ends with Clinton’s first election victory), and the lenience continues to match the lacunae with almost too much ease. Flowers gets many more pages than the wretched Rector, while it is never conceded that, in point of fact, she was telling the truth and Clinton was lying. Clinton was later to admit this himself under oath in one of his otherwise perjured pre-impeachment hearings, but for Hamilton the only problem appears how to present the matter in “spin” terms. Why should a mere woman have been able to influence a presidential campaign? Would that not have been a concession to the “Puritans”? Well, not if Clinton had admitted the truth of it, it wouldn’t.
Like many of his star-struck cohort, Hamilton fails to see that Clinton slyly asked for the support of the permissive while openly soliciting the votes of the “judgmental”. He later clustered with Billy Graham to call Monica Lewinsky an untruthful slut, while suggesting on the side that he was a bit of a dog, just like good old JFK, really. But hypocrisy is the ally, and the tactic, of the moralists, not the sexual libertarians. And there is a difference between denying a relationship and slandering or defaming the woman with whom you had it. In other words, Clinton didn’t just “lie about sex”. He lied about the women. It’s not enough for Hamilton to miss this slight but essential distinction. He has to say this, about one devoted Clinton loyalist who had misgivings: “Poor Stephanopoulos, a Republican turned idealistic Democrat and barely thirty, seemed to be in the wrong camp, as an Orthodox priest’s boy: a warrior who in his heart of hearts would have been better suited to the right-wing Republican crusade in New Hampshire’s Republican primary, tub-thumping Judaeo-Christian values.”
This ill-carpentered sentence is a near-perfect smear, compounding quarter-truth and baseless innuendo while managing to suggest an absolutely marvellous man-of-the-worldliness about its own author. Yet this same smart sophisticate can’t manage to puzzle out the plain truth about Clinton’s marijuana-smoking lie in the same campaign cycle. Didn’t inhale? Maybe because of his allergies? Here I can be equally confident. Marijuana was consumed in cookies and brownies in mass quantities, to which the young Clinton was not allergic in the least. (I told you my Oxford years were not completely wasted.)
We now know that Clinton won the nomination fairly convincingly, but this retrospective awareness does not entitle a chronicler to write about it as if it were fore-ordained. For example, there was quite a tense moment in an early debate between the Democratic contestants, when Governor Jerry Brown opened the raw question of the Clinton couple’s revolving-door business deals in Arkansas. Again, the big fat face turned flush — not white this time — and in thick tones our “Bill” changed the toxic subject by accusing Brown of “jumping on my wife” (an amusing choice of terms). That memorable and prophetic episode goes unmentioned in this text, which at one point describes the Brown campaign as negligible, at another as worrying for Clinton, and ends by saying that Brown was prevented from speaking at the 1992 Democratic convention in New York City, which in point of fact he was not.
One can hardly be unaware of Clinton’s showbiz appeal — slightly different from being a “star”, I would suggest — and of the magnetism he continues to exert on the shallow and the meretricious. That a greedy, needy, Bible-toting crowd-pleaser should become a hero to so many self-proclaimed swingers is a minor irony. That a man who bullied and insulted so many women employees should become a feminist icon is yet another. That he claimed and disclaimed the moral grandeur of the anti-war movement, while blurring the distinction between a draft-dodger and a war-resister when it happened to suit him, is probably definitive. So there must come a point, even in a celebrity culture, when reputation is judged in the light of actions rather than the other way about. History can be written without irony, I suppose, and so can journalism. But neither can decently be written without objectivity, and this history doesn’t rise even to the journalistic level.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City
Reading around the Clintons
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Pocket Books, $20): Living History was, of course, not HRC’s first outing into print . . . 
