The Reckless and the Stupid
The character of a President eventually determines his
destiny
By Lance Morrow
(TIME, February 2) -- Americans trying to get their bearings thought of Richard Nixon
and traced his descent from the charge of obstructing justice to
the threat of impeachment, and then to the morning of his
maudlin-defiant resignation. Or, imagining a precedent for the
origins of the current mess, they went back to Bill Clinton's
Rose Garden hero of long ago, John Kennedy, the martyred
Ur-boomer who may have been Clinton's role model in obdurately
reckless sex.
But maybe the third protagonist of the '60s should be conjured
up. Until the middle of last week, I had been working on the
conceit that Bill Clinton is Lyndon Johnson Without Tears -- both
Clinton and Johnson being big-hearted, triple-slick Southern
boys, and mama's boys, with a genius for politics, and a bardic
gift for storytelling, and huge egos and insecurities
interbraided, and minds aggressively intelligent, instinctive,
fiercely absorptive, and with a love of people, and a general
incapacity to tell the truth. Or anyway (let's be nice) a way of
thinking of the truth as only one of life's creative
possibilities.
Lyndon Without Tears. Up to the great train wreck, Clinton's
presidential career had been astonishingly lucky and
frictionless. Now, presumably, there are tears enough, and much
gnashing of teeth up in the family quarters. Americans try to
imagine what Hillary Clinton is saying to her husband; some
envision the air full of flying lamps. Or maybe she comforts him?
After Lyndon Johnson's death in 1973, a biographer hesitantly
asked Lady Bird Johnson how she reacted to Lyndon's many
extramarital love affairs. With that heroically relentless smile
of hers, Lady Bird replied that Lyndon loved people and half the
people on earth are women, so it seemed natural that he would
love them!
Should we explain Bill Clinton that way? Bill Clinton and Lyndon
Johnson were different in this: L.B.J. was unmistakably, with
all his faults, a grownup man; his downfall -- brought on when his
Great Society got lost in the war he would not or could not
escape -- had a tragic size and weight. Clinton remains a very
bright End of History boy-man. There is something trivial and
unnecessary in his travails, and even if they lead to his
downfall, they will seem sordidly silly.
Is character destiny? The President's character, at least in
this compartment of his life, seems a hybrid of the Arkansas
horndog and the Runaway Bunny. The horndog part is self-
explanatory. The Runaway Bunny, you will remember, tests the
limits of his independence by toddling off, as two-year-olds
will; his mommy always comes after him and scoops him up in her
snuggles. He is testing her. Who is the mommy being tested in
this latest envelope-pushing behavior by Virginia Kelley's Boys
Nation golden boy? Poor Hillary Clinton? The United States of
America? Will America forgive Billy Blythe again and embrace him
with those big 60% hugs of approval? The psychiatrist in us
suspects that the President of the United States may have a
little trouble being a grownup. W.H. Auden wrote: "In front
maturity as he ascended/ Retired like a horizon from the child."
Of course, some thought that the affair with the intern might be
a setup or hallucination. Those who credited the story separated
into two camps: 1) those who don't think it matters much (a
man's sex life is his business; a President's conduct of the
office is the only legitimate concern, and anyway, maybe it is
good macho sociobiology for a leader to chase girls); and 2)
those enraged by the irresponsibility and arrogance implicit in
such behavior--if it happened.
What astonishes Americans and drives them into Camp Two is the
thought that after the electorate made a kind of deal with
Clinton in 1992 (we'll let the Gennifer Flowers thing slide,
that was Arkansas, and you're a big boy now: just don't do it
again), he may have so unrepentantly and blithely and
cynically -- and maybe pathologically -- persisted. Some Clinton
haters indulged in mere prurient dudgeon. But plenty of parents
were incensed in a nonpartisan way by the thought that the young
woman might have been thus debauched in the house of Jefferson,
Lincoln and Roosevelt. Could the President truly have divided
his time between worrying about his place in history and
corrupting an intern? Now he may have a convergence, with the
second activity defining the first.
Those of us in a third camp were appalled not so much by the
immorality as by the recklessness and stupidity of it all. Even
if the charges are true, Clinton may of course survive. (I
thought that by now O.J. Simpson would be doing life without
parole.) We live in an age when almost nothing is too squalid to
be transcended. What Clinton needs now is a producer like the
one played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Wag the Dog, a man
who, when confronted with a hideously impossible public
relations problem like the one facing Clinton, announces
bouncily, "This is NOTHING!"
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