The present is the theater of history, but history’s significance matures only through hindsight. Even then, history first speaks as a wailing child and does not become articulate until significant time passes. Former President Bill Clinton’s autobiography "My Life" is his bid to impact how the history of his presidency will be written. Interestingly, changes in America since 2001 have created an unexpected distance between the world today and the Clinton years encountered in this book.

The first half of "My Life" is colorful and nuanced yarn about Arkansas life and navigating rural politics; while only the second half tackles the presidency. Clinton does not supply much more behind-the-scenes information than a newspaper, and yet it does remind one how vociferous domestic politics were in the 1990s, and therefore how much has changed. The 1993 balanced budget battle, for instance, or Clinton’s fight to put 100,000 police officers on the street as part of that 1994 Crime Bill, seem quaint compared to the overt life-and-death issues of 2003 and 2004: torture, preemptive war, Florida electoral fraud, Wall Street corruption, invasion, and terrorism. The Clinton-era budget debates that raged for eight years and which Ross Perot’s Reform Party candidacy helped spur now seem like historical squabbles glimmering on a picturesque sunset horizon.

Most media outlets have noted, repeatedly, how the world has changed since that fateful day, a day that does not even need to be dated to appear like a fiery nimbus around this paragraph; yet I find it surprising to agree. For to agree is to echo what has become a commercialized and trivialized experience, a soap opera broadcast on television with a flag in the background rolling in the breeze; yet, things have changed since Sept. 11, 2001. Four years ago, who knew the U.S. would have a Department of Homeland Security, an astounding development not just on the level of institutions, but also on the level of language. Four years ago who could have imagined that after 8-plus years of daily political battles to balance the federal budget, the budget would soar from a projected surplus to the largest annual federal deficits in U.S. history.

Clinton uses "My Life" to present himself as a person and later president from a modest background who had worked on behalf of the country as a whole, an heir to the legacy of Harry Truman. In addition, Clinton re-presents an argument for his Third Way mainstream political philosophy, which he claims to have begun charting all the way back in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention. The mayhem at the 1968 convention, Clinton argues, allowed Richard Nixon to associate Democrats and leftists with lawbreakers and Nixon’s own party with common-sense, law-and-order, and middle class values. Thereafter, Richard Nixon began the right’s vilification of “liberals” as out of touch. In Nixon’s wake, Reagan and both Bush presidents have used this demonizing strategy effectively, effectively taking up where McCarthyism left off: narrowing the spectrum of debate from between capitalism and socialism during the first half of the twentieth century, to Republicanism and liberalism, to right-wing Republicanism versus moderate Republicans today.


The narrative of the so-called “scandals” during Clinton presidency almost becomes the focus of Clinton’s presidential tale, as Clinton juxtaposes what he sees as baseless, media-driven scandals (until Monica Lewinski in 1998) to his actual actions, accomplishments, and substantive legislative battles. Hindsight aids this argument. For Clinton’s legislative battles and accomplishments remain facts to be considered by any historian, while the so-called Clinton-era scandals that were a brouhaha media-circus seem so much white noise now. The multi-million investigations of Travelgate—when the Clinton administration fired twelve career employees at the White House travel office; or Filegate—when some low level White House staffers obtained FBI files on Republican opposition figures; or Troopergate—in which Clinton as Arkansas governor supposedly used state troopers to rendezvous for trysts (a story reported by David Brock in The American Spectator, but since retracted by Brock in his book Blinded by the Right); or Whitewater—which was investigated for years both by a Senate Committee and then by Independent Counsel Ken Starr—now all seem like a waste of printed words. Yet, these scandals were more highly investigated then many substantial issues today. As a result these scandals do become a point of interest for historians, an out-of-focus phenomena to be explained.

In "My Life," the scandals become one of Clinton’s main themes, not in terms of their substance, but precisely in terms of their vociferous vacuity. Clinton hypothesizes that a media circus overwhelmed and tainted his presidency; notes how the media portrayed him as a member of the elite jet-set rather than coming from his more Trumanesque roots; and argues that this media circus was fueled and funded by a core of tainted reporters and Republican activists famously referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “vast rightwing conspiracy.” The fact that Clinton now embraces his wife’s view, in contrast to the silence with which he greeted his wife’s words at the time, is possibly the sole surprise of his autobiography. The rightwing activists that hounded the first Democratic President since Carter only stopped when a president more to their liking assumed the helm in 2000, and their work was abetted by a media landscape that blew up sensational stories of scandal, but would underreport the more boring, bureaucratic news of exoneration. For instance, Clinton asserts that a U.S. federal agency investigated the accounting and tax-reporting issues that was at the crux of the still-obscure Whitewater scandal and issued two separate investigative governmental reports—one before and one after his 1992 presidential victory—that exonerated Clinton of wrongdoing. Yet Ken Starr continued to investigate Whitewater year after year, and the media continued to cover Whitewater as an ongoing, inconclusive scandal for almost a decade.

Exonerating reports never deterred Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Amazingly, Starr’s office of independent counsel was still winding down after President Clinton was out of office, and after the very law that legalized its role and framework was allowed to lapse in order to prevent another independent counsel like Starr from being appointed in the future. Clinton also claims he never met Paula Jones (who in her sexual harrassment lawsuit was represented by lawyers from The Rutherford Institute) but whatever the truth of the Jones case is, Clinton's words cannot settle. In the end, the scandal-machine that Clinton calls “Whitewater World” never stopped, and to many observers the problems that Clinton outlines about the Fourth Estate have yet to be corrected. In fact, in 2004 The New York Times apologized for its uncritical coverage of the build-up to the second Iraq war. Like the Travelgate exoneration, The New York Times’ one-day apology appeared in a single story, a flea compared to the elephant of misleading pre-war coverage that bannered months of news.

The organization and success of the neo-conservative right—beginning with the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 according to investigative reporter Lewis Lapham; or with Nixon’s campaign strategy and victory in 1968, according to Bill Clinton—may become an emerging story for historians writing the latter half of political America in the 20th Century. For this story has yet to be told at length and in its proper scope. The emergence of the Christian Coalition as both an independent political force and self-contained network of communication; the emergence of Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio offering their own brand of views and news; the mushrooming of prestigious, conservative think-tanks; the recent rise of Fox News under Rupert Murdock and Reagan communications-veteran Roger Ailes; all point to a new American political matrix that in 2000 won control of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

The post-Goldwater founding of think tanks to provide right-wing expert opinion in so-called neutral media and academic venues has made an enormous impact. This began in the 1970s: the Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, and in the mid-1970s the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) revived with significant new funds, notes Lapham (“Tentacles of Rage,” Harper’s, Sept. 2004). Tycoon Joseph Coors provided a $250,000 initial gift to The Heritage Foundation, and Pittsburg industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife later pitched in $900,000. The Howard Pew Freedom trust donated $6 million in the mid-70s to the American Enterprise Institute, and the Koch family founded the Cato Institute with a $500,000 gift. Today, these three foundations have annual budgets of $33 million, $17 million, and $25 million, respectively. As historians have remarked that The Heritage Foundation provided Ronald Reagan with a blueprint for his domestic agenda in 1980, historians in the future may note that a think tank within the American Enterprise Institute—The Project for the American Century founded in 1997—may have provided the incubated groundwork for George W. Bush’s preemptive foreign policy. This think tank’s 1997 neo-conservative founders include Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

When Clinton came into office, he interrupted a 12-year-reign of a Republican, conservative establishment, and as a result faced the full fury of media, think-tank, fundamentalist Christian, wealthy-funders, and other groups that had toiled for years to maintain arch-conservatives in power. During this interregnum, some like industrialist-heir Richard Scaife went into overdrive. From roughly 1995-1998, foundations backed by Scaife gave $3.5 million to The Heritage Foundation, $1.22 million to the American Enterprise Institute, $1.40 million to Stanford’s Hoover Institute, and $325, 000 to the Cato Institute. Meanwhile, Scaife had been continuously funding the American Spectator magazine and its “Arkansas Project” created to investigate and publish dirt on President Clinton. Scaife even had ties to independent counsel Ken Starr. In 1997, when Starr considered abandoning his independent counsel role to become dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, Starr in the end declined, for news reports uncovered that the Pepperdine position may have been steered to him by the Republican partisan Scaife. Scaife donated $13 million over a period of 30 years to Pepperdine, according to CNN Online research. Incidentally, in April 2004—long after Starr left the limelight—Pepperdine named Ken Starr its Law School dean.

Current U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson is a good figure to trace the link between the conservatives of the past and their return to power today. Olson was an assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan from 1981-1984, and after leaving for private practice, Olson later represented and defended President Reagan as Reagan’s attorney during the Iran-Contra scandal. During Clinton’s presidency, Olson provided legal advice to the American Spectator magazine, free legal advice to convicted felon and Whitewater ‘witness’ David Hale, and also legal advice to Paula Jones, the woman who sued President Clinton for sexual harassment. In 2000, during George W. Bush’s candidacy for president, Olson on behalf of the Bush campaign argued before the Supreme Court that votes should not be recounted in Florida in Bush vs. Gore. Olson and Bush won that case, halting the Florida recount, and taking the presidency. Upon Bush’s election, Olson became U.S. Solicitor-General. On Sept. 11, 2001, Olson’s wife died on one of the planes hijacked for terrorist attacks.

Clinton cites a conversation he once had with Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson in 1994 about Whitewater. According to Clinton, Simpson said:

“This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you didn’t. You know before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted to you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important. Democrats like you and [then-Wyoming governor Mike] Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.”


Sources:
Clinton, Bill. My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Jackson, Brooks. CNN Online. 27 April 1998.
www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/04/27/scaife.profile/

Lapham, Lewis. “Tentacles of Rage." Harper’s. September 2004.

Noah, Timothy. “Ted Olson Vs. Partisanship.” Slate.com. 16 April 2004. slate.msn.com/id/2099086/

“Transcript.” Washington Week, PBS Online. 22 Feb. 1997. www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/transcripts/transcript970221.html

“Pepperdine Appoints Kenneth W. Starr as Dean of Its School of Law.” PR NEWSWIRE. 6 April 2004. www.lawschool.com/deanstarr.htm.

“Theodore B. Olson.” U.S Dept. of Justice, Online. www.usdoj.gov/osg/aboutosg/t_olson_bio.htm

“Ronald Reagan Remembered. Larry King Live--Transcript, CNN Online. 7 June 2004. www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0406/07/lkl.00.html