From Whitewater to Troopergate, here’s everything you don’t remember about the Clintons.
Politico 1/1/2015
By BEN SCHRECKINGER
Hey! Remember the ’90s? If you’re like me (a millennial), you were probably too hopped up on Capri Sun and Go-Gurt to retain more than bits and pieces. Well, Important Things were happening. And judging by how much ink was spilled (this was when the news still came printed on dead trees), most of those Important Things were scandals involving Bill and Hillary Clinton. But because you can’t get a semen-stained dress past Nickelodeon’s standards department, even millennials who had their wits about them back then know only the basic outlines of these national traumas.
This is important because—as you may know if you’ve followed coverage of those midterm elections that so few of us voted in—millennial voters are totally in play: Likely voters under 30 are split nearly 50-50 between preferring a Republican- or a Democratic-led Congress, with a slight advantage toward the GOP. That makes us a challenge for Hillary—but also an opportunity, since most of us can’t tell our Paula Joneses from our Star Joneses from our Ken Starrs. In a survey Slate conducted this past spring, only 46 percent of people under 30 and 28 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds remembered the Monica Lewinsky scandal “very” or “fairly” well, compared 76 percent of older Americans. And consider this: The very youngest voters at the polls in 2016 will have been born after the Lewinsky scandal broke; as far as they know, the most controversial thing the fairer Clinton’s ever done is wear sunglasses on a plane while texting.
But the political consultants who are planning to rake in tens of millions of dollars pretending they know how to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 smell an opportunity, too: Part of their strategy for sinking the HRC juggernaut (assuming she does, indeed, run) is to reintroduce young voters to the Clinton administration scandals of the ’90s that we might have missed. Now, a whole new generation of Americans will get to feel that special mix of disgust and apathy that only comes from reading for the first time a detailed description of the president’s penis from a woman who is not the president’s wife. As the old political saw goes: You can either beat a dead horse or you can cut it into a two-minute web video and hope it goes viral (and people who spend time around dead horses know viral).
To save the consultants the trouble, and to help enlighten my fellow twenty-somethings, Politico Magazine herewith presents a tweetable, shareable millennial’s guide to the Clinton scandals of the ’90s.
Gennifer Flowers
Imagine, if you can, the year 1991. It was a happier time. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen, Saturday Night Live was still funny and newspapers were raking in money hand-over-fist. We’re talking pre-Myspace era. Pre-Friendster even, if you believe a time that old exists.
Most Americans were satisfied with their president, George H.W. Bush, even though they thought he was kind of a dweeb. (At that point in his life, he didn’t even wear crazy socks.) His reelection in 1992 was considered a safe bet until a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton entered the scene. You mean that skinny, white-haired grandpa who seemed so angry at Barack Obama a while back? Yep, same guy. Except back then, he was scarfing down Big Macs and wailing on the sax with Arsenio Hall (the Jimmy Fallon of the 1990s), and he was about to become the first black president. The Democrat had energy, he had charisma, he even had an upbeat song by Fleetwood Mac (still together at the time, despite the cheating and the cocaine).
The other thing Clinton had was a libido, an open secret among the press corps and political insiders. “Everyone knew he had this baggage,” says Jill Lawrence, who covered Clinton and his administration for the Associated Press and then USA Today. “I’m not saying we expected Gennifer Flowers to have a press conference and produce recordings.”
But that’s exactly what Flowers, a D-list actress-cum-D-cup nude model, did. Well, first, she came out ahead of the 1992 New Hampshire primary and told the Star (a supermarket tabloid sort of like a less shameless Gawker of the pre-snark era) that she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton. Then, Bill went on 60 Minutes to deny the affair but acknowledge “causing pain in my marriage.” And that’s how the nation also met Hillary Clinton, who told correspondent Steve Kroft, “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” It was a seminal moment in the history of cheating politicians and their spouses, as the soon-to-be First Lady of the United States pitted herself against First Lady of Country, years before the “Stand by Your Man” moments of Huma Abedin, Gloria Cain and Silda Spitzer.
That’s when Flowers held the press conference and played ambiguous tapes of phone calls with Clinton that she claimed validated her story. But because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet, and Clinton had managed to avoid mass-faxing pictures of his manhood to the public (note to Anthony Weiner: stick to fax), how could Americans be sure what was true? The tapes left enough wiggle room for Slick Willie to slide through the scandal unscathed (though years later, he would admit to having a sexual encounter with Flowers, but claimed it only happened once, in 1977).
The Arkansas governor came in second in the New Hampshire primary and dubbed himself the “comeback kid” (a phrase that, when I googled it, led to a 1980 made-for-TV movie about minor league baseball featuring Patrick Swayze. Ask your parents?). From there, Clinton won the nomination and rode high into the general election. Voters might have been pretty sure he was a serial philanderer, but they were also beginning to suspect that his opponent, Bush père, hadn’t actually meant them to “read his lips” and the prospect of four more years of boring scandals like that proved nearly unbearable. Clinton won the presidency, and a smug nation was confident it would never again elect a Bush to high office.
Travelgate
After Bill’s inauguration, the scandals came early and often. The first of these was Travelgate, a warm-up act for bigger blow-ups to come. In May 1993, Clinton aides fired the staff of the White House travel office, which—get this—was officially called the White House Travel and Telegraph Office. Instead of just replacing the office with a part-time intern and a Kayak.com account, the White House installed an Arkansas travel company with several ties to the First Family. Critics accused the administration of cronyism, and the administration accused the old travel office staff of improper recordkeeping.
This was the first scandal in which Hillary really took the lead. It appears she was the driving force behind the administration’s efforts to oust the travel staff, which included prodding the FBI to investigate the office (maybe to find out whether they were still using telegraphs?), and covering up those efforts. The late William Safire, a conservative political columnist who had nonetheless endorsed Bill Clinton for president (and also a stodgy language columnist who turns in his grave every time one of us uses emojis or shouts “YOLO”), called Hillary a “congenital liar,” and the White House press secretary announced the president wanted to punch Safire in the face. (It’s worth keeping this episode in mind every time someone over 40 tells you that civility in Washington has reached a new low.)
In the aftermath, an independent counsel would find that Hillary made “factually false” statements to investigators but that there wasn’t enough evidence to indict her. The most important thing about Travelgate, though, was that it helped to pave the way for Whitewater, the thinking man’s Clinton scandal.
Whitewater
You could be forgiven, fellow millennials, for not knowing much about Whitewater—because much of the Washington press corps never quite wrapped their heads around it either. “I could never remember what it was supposed to be about,” says Todd Purdum, a Politico senior writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor who was then with the New York Times Washington bureau. “It was so byzantine.”
Let’s go back to the beginning. Whitewater was the name of a tract of land on the White River in Arkansas that the Clintons invested in with fellow Arkansas couple Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The plan was to wait for the land to appreciate, build vacation homes on it and sell it, but the plan didn’t work and the Clintons lost money. Then, in the mid-1980s, Jim McDougal embarked on another real estate scheme, Castle Grande. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer for the development plan, which collapsed amid federal regulators’ accusations of financial fraud.
It’s likely that no one would have ever heard of Whitewater, or Monica Lewinsky for that matter, if Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, an old Arkansas friend of the Clintons, hadn’t been found dead in July 1993 in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park with a gun in his hand and a bullet wound in his head; a distraught letter about Washington witch-hunts was also found in his briefcase. Foster had been battling depression at the same time he got wrapped up in Travelgate (as an intermediary between Hillary and the staffer who did the firing). Many on the right rejected the logical conclusion that the political climate in Washington had become toxic enough to drive a person to kill himself, and they instead clung to the theory that the Clintons had offed Foster or pressured him to commit suicide.
In the aftermath of Foster’s death, White House staff removed documents related to Whitewater from his office at Hillary’s behest, then, in the face of questioning about it, changed their story more times than Diddy’s changed his name. In 1994, the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate the Clintons’ role in Whitewater and related dealings in Arkansas, including the allegation that, as governor, Bill had improperly pressured a businessman to give Susan McDougal a loan.
While the investigation was ongoing, Hillary got the chance to shine again. Seeking to tamp down Whitewater and a controversy over her miraculous run earning a 10,000 percent return in 10 months in the late 1970s trading cattle futures with no prior experience, she held the fact-filled Pink Press Conference to defend herself, so named for the color of her sweater. She used the occasion to turn a salacious scandal into a mind-numbing logic puzzle with statements like, “I gathered all my documents together to give to my accountant. I had a year-end statement from Stephens, which did not report anything about commodities. I had a year-end statement from the Peavey Brokerage Company, which … reported a loss, and I had no year-end statement from either Clayton or the company called ACLI.”
“It was impermeable,” Purdum recalls. “But it was also an entirely accurate press conference about Whitewater.” Mostly, people were impressed with her “relaxed” body language, and in a way it was telling: The Clintons escaped unscathed, while both MacDougals and 13 other people, including a former Bill Clinton aide and his successor in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, were convicted of Whitewater-related crimes.
Troopergate and Paula Jones
Nostalgic for a good old-fashioned sex scandal, a confused public now turned its attention from Whitewater to Troopergate, a story that then-conservative journalist David Brock first reported for the American Spectator in 1993. (Yes, this was when David Brock was a conservative muckracker. More on that in a minute.) Two Arkansas state troopers claimed that they had arranged sexual liaisons with women, including one named Paula, for Bill Clinton when he was governor.
In May 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against the president for sexual harassment that allegedly took place in 1991. This was all happening at the same time that Rwanda’s ethnic majority Hutus were committing a genocide that killed between 500,000 and a million of their countrymen. Guess which story got more coverage in the American media.
To bolster her claim that Clinton had exposed himself to her in a hotel room, Jones gave a graphic description of his penis. Her lawyers also dug up a raft of other government employees who they said had been the object of Clinton’s sexual advances. Working without the aid of Tinder, Clinton had somehow still managed to make a pass at half the women who had come within a five-mile radius of him, and when you’re the governor or president, a lot of those women work for you. It was in response to questions from Jones’s lawyers that Clinton would deny, under oath, having “sexual relations” with a certain White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Clinton ended up paying Jones $850,000 in a settlement. But you could say it was really a wash for Bill and Hill: Brock, the guy who broke the story, repented of the right and now runs a group of left-wing nonprofits that are working overtime to protect the couple’s reputation in the 2016 race.
Monica
None of these scandals prevented Bill Clinton from cruising to an easy reelection in 1996. So, finally, the Republican Party decided to give up on the sideshows and focus on the real scandal going down in the Clinton administration: a massive deregulation of the financial services sector, backed by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, that would lead, a decade later, to a global economic meltdown, force all of us to move back in with our parents, and destroy our parents’ retirement funds. Just joking. The Republicans were pretty much fine with all of that, as long as no one was getting blown.
Instead, the world exploded when a Department of Defense bureaucrat named Linda Tripp produced evidence that Clinton had lied under oath about Lewinsky when Paula Jones’ lawyer asked him if he’d had sexual relations with the intern. While Tripp’s motivations for nearly bringing the republic to its knees remain shrouded in mystery, she was probably interested in a book deal (#ThisTown). She had befriended Lewinsky when both were working at the Pentagon and, on the advice of a literary agent, recorded phone conversations with Lewinsky about the affair. When Tripp found out that Clinton had denied having sexual relations with Lewsinky, she offered her tapes to Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who had taken over the Whitewater investigation.
On January 17, 1998, a reclusive blogger named Matt Drudge broke the news that Newsweek—this was before the storied news brand merged with the Daily Beast, then died, then was revived to promptly accuse an elderly Japanese-American man in California of inventing Bitcoin—had killed a story by Michael Isikoff about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky. (In homage to the Internet’s first giant scoop, Drudge has refused to update the design of his website to this day.)
This is when things really got crazy. On January 26, Bill went on national television to say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The next day, Hillary went on the Today Show and told Matt Lauer (then still with hair) that the steady succession of scandals had been drummed up by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Lewinsky turned over a semen-stained blue dress that provided DNA proof of the affair, Starr pursued the perjury allegation and the fate of the government rested on whether oral sex, which Clinton eventually admitted to receiving from Lewinsky, fell under the definition of “sexual relations.” When, in August 1998, Clinton ordered airstrikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan (involving a group called Al Qaeda and a guy named Osama bin Laden), people who had just seen the movie Wag the Dog speculated the strikes were cooked up as a distraction from Lewinsky.
For Purdum, the most surreal moment came in August 1998, when federal prosecutors asked Clinton about the neckwear he had sported during a Rose Garden appearance on the day that Lewinsky appeared before a grand jury. Lewinsky claimed to have given him a tie. Was this the one—a message from the president for her to remain loyal? “They were thinking Clinton may have been trying to send a signal by tie,” Purdum recalls. (Hey, maybe it was more efficient than the White House telegraphs?)
The saga dragged on for months and even started taking a toll on American families. “I would get calls from my mother,” says Lawrence, who covered the seamy details day in and day out. “‘Did you have to use that phrase?’” A version of the story even seeped into millennials’ impressionable young minds. “People who had small children had to explain to them, in many cases prematurely, what a lot of phrases they heard on the radio meant,” recounts Purdum. Lawrence recalls her 9-year-old son drawing a picture, titled “Lewinsky/Clinton,” of the president staring morosely out a window with the caption, “I used to like her.” Some of you may remember this as the confusing period of adolescence when your parents let you start watching MTV as long as you promised not to turn on C-SPAN.
In December 1998, the Republican-held House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The following February, the Senate voted to acquit. It would turn out that many of Clinton’s most zealous persecutors in the Republican Party were adulterers themselves. Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House during the impeachment vote, had run off on his first wife while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. Bob Livingston, who had been elected to succeed Gingrich as speaker, resigned the post when Hustler revealed he had had an extramarital affair of his own.
And that was the end of the Lewinsky saga… or was it? Last April, Stephen Colbert got Bill Clinton to join Twitter. As of October, @MonicaLewinsky is there too. Could the stars be aligning for a 21st-century Anthony Weiner-style Lewinsky scandal encore? Hillary’s enemies can hope against hope, but as millennials learned from the bitter disappointment of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit Obama’s reelection campaign, the sequel’s never as good as the original anyways.
Pardongate
With the end of the ’90s came the end of the golden age of superficial Clinton scandals. On his last day in office, Clinton rode off into the sunset with a substantive scandal, issuing several questionable presidential pardons on January 20, 2001. Most notably, he pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive from justice who was wanted on tax evasion charges and hounded by allegations of what George Bluth might call “light treason.” But Rich could be forgiven, apparently because his ex-wife had given generously to the Clinton Library and to Hillary’s fledgling Senate campaign. And this might explain why Wall Street titans are so eager to put a Clinton back in the Oval Office.
Legacy
Just as historians have come to view the World Wars as a single, massive conflict, in hindsight Travelgate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky begin to look just as inseparable. Their legacy might be just as consequential as well: Disturbed by the power of lone women to sway the course of our democracy by recording phone calls, the good folks at the NSA resolved to just do that all themselves. Realizing that it would be better if future generations of leaders preempted scandal by incriminating themselves with semi-public photos of their escapades from the get-go, Al Gore invented the Internet and gave Mark Zuckerberg the idea for Facebook. Determined to spare the country another eight years of asinine scandal-mongering, Hillary Clinton politely ceded the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama, and Washington swore off stupid distractions once and for all.
OK, that’s not how it happened. In fact, the scandals never did much lasting damage to Bill or Hillary. Bill’s approval rating shot up to 73 percent at the exact time the House was voting to impeach him (which is about 30 points higher than Barack Obama’s “strong” rating now). Hillary’s favorability rating hit an all-time high in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, and during her recent tenure as secretary of state, more than 60 percent of Americans held favorable views of her.
“It was a secret weapon that [Bill Clinton] had,” says Joe Klein of Time magazine, who anonymously authored Primary Colors, a thinly veiled roman à clef about Clinton’s 1992 campaign that turned into a movie starring John Travolta. “Blue-collar white guys saw him messing around with lounge singers, eating at McDonalds … they just admired him. He was living large.” In other words, dredging up old scandals might not claw many millennials away from the Clintons. “I think it’s an awfully stale beer,” Purdum says.
In fact, some argue that the most lasting legacy of the scandals might be the trivialization of American media, which started long before Upworthy and BuzzFeed began clogging our Facebook news feeds. “The real scandal was the press scandal,” Klein says. “The amount of time and space we spent on things that were non-important or nonexistent.”
So, now that you know, feel free to forget quickly and clear up that mental hard drive space for more important things, like T-Swift lyrics. I’ll leave you with Klein’s compressed summary of the whole thing for the tl;dr crowd: “There was a shady real estate deal, that was just a stupid real estate deal. And then there was a blowjob, and that’s it.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/clinton-scandals-the-nineties-113905.html