Boy Clinton
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Boy Clinton" The Book on Bill Boy Clinton: A Political Biography R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Regnery /356...
...Tyrrell singles out the Washington Post's David Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his campaign coverage of Clinton, castigating him for unethical behavior for failing to file a story corroborating Brock's account when he already had confirmation from Betsey Wright that it was true...
...American press by reporting that Donald P. Gregg, at the time Vice President Bush's national security adviser, was co-ordinating the secret operation to resupply the Nicaraguan contras in the 198o's...
...She would work for organizations like the Children's Defense Fund that engage in "masked politics...
...Hillary Rodham never went quite that far...
...In my journalistic life I have not had to deal with many desperate men," he writes...
...It was from these forebears that Bill Clinton acquired one of his greatest skills, his ability to lie...
...In a breathtaking prologue Tyrrell scoops the entire 4 For Beltway conserva tives Mena is a taboo subject...
...This skill was used heavily to ward off the Troopergate scandal, a pivotal moment in the history of the Clinton presidency...
...Those murmuring disapproval should ask themselves how long a free republic can survive once it starts employing death squads to eliminate political opponents...
...Most of the time this was disguised...
...But when the Clintons did, finally, deign to show up, they were accompanied by two uninvited guests: Harry Thomason (now a frequenter of grand juries) and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, two Arkansas friends who had made good in Hollywood...
...The media giants nibbled at the edges, compelled to address the subject by the sheer force of the allegations...
...This was to be expected from the generational culture that celebrated The Strawberry Statement, a revolutionary manifesto of a i9-year-old student named James Simon Kunen who reached stardom by invading the offices of Columbia University's president and urinating in his wastepaper basket-circa 1968...
...Hillary Clinton is a good liar too, but she is handicapped by her Midwestern Methodist roots...
...They fought the Vietnam War, the imperial presidency, racism...
...The mythology about the boy from Hope, the rise from poverty, was all eyewash...
...The harsh truth is that Ms...
...Besides, the Mena affair all leads back to Bill Clinton...
...And they might ask themselves whether it is fitting for journalists to turn a blind eye...
...Both Clintons have the instincts of a student politician, writes Tyrrell, living in a fantasy world of puffery and attitudinizing...
...Arkansas played its part too, of course...
...Clinton not 72 September 19 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...Bob Tyrrell's book--a "book-book" in publishing jargon, meaning a work of literary craftsmanship-has some astonishing revelations about Bill Clinton that should help shake the Beltway out of its complacency...
...The striking achievement of the 196o's protesters, he writes, "is that after tearing down ceremonies, conventions, standards, and traditions, they established almost nothing in their place...
...The collapse of Communism had shown that "the doves, in the great debate of the last 4o years, were right all along...
...That was bad enough...
...Working under the false name of Dan Magruder, and posing as a CIA official, he met surreptitiously in Dallas with Arkansas State Trooper L.D...
...Brown to discuss the operation...
...Tyrrell tried to respect their concerns, but the abuses were too serious to ignore...
...health-care industry...
...Nobody can accuse Tyrrell of ideological prejudice against the CIA...
...Reed himself has written about his misadventures in an underground classic called Compromised...
...Trooper Brown has extensive documentation to show that the governor of Arkansas was involved in recruiting him into the CIA's Mena operation (all duly logged among the 4o-page appendix at the back of the book...
...In one of the exquisite vignettes that color this fast-moving story, Tyrrell narrates how the Clintons trivialized convention in their first, symbolic act in the White House...
...The $ioo,ooo cattle miracle came along in 1978 when she was still calling herself Hillary Rodham and dressing like a Yankee feminist...
...Yet there is a serious policy issue involved when government intelligence services link up with unsavory types and lose control of their operation...
...Rodham and Boy Clinton are emblematic of their generation, or at least that part of it that supposed itself ordained by history to disturb the peace, discard custom, and refashion the world...
...Bill Clinton lies like a man detached from conscience," notes Tyrrell, "or perhaps born without one...
...Just how deep 70 September 1996 • The American Spectator he drank is still something of a mystery...
...Some conservative journalists have criticized Tyrrell for probing the Mena story...
...Speaking personally, as a foreign reporter, I should note it was David Brock's story that changed my whole view of the First Couple...
...Empathy doesn't do us anything," she said, tearing up her prepared speech (or so she pretended) in response to some mild words on empathy by the sweet-tempered Senator Edward Brooke...
...Bush was left in wonderment and the White House staff beset with foreboding at this early spectacle of impudence," writes Tyrrell...
...Barry Seal was assassinated in February 1986, ostensibly by Colombian hitmen...
...Regnery /356 pages /$24.95 REVIEWED BY Ambrose Evans-Pritchard...
...It was an outpouring of gibberish by a bossy student politician who had been marinated in the anger and rage of college radicalism...
...They did good...
...The patrician Mr...
...He was a friend of the late Bill Casey, Reagan's director of central intelligence, and as readers of The American Spectator know full well, he has been a tireless defender of Republican foreign policy...
...His uncle, Raymond Clinton, was a major force in Hot Springs, with powerful connections in Little Rock...
...Brown flew to Puerto Vallarta on June 18, 1986, under a false name on the orders of his handler, Felix Rodriguez, who happened to be an associate of both Donald Gregg and George Bush...
...Magaziner went on to head the aborted Rodham-Clinton plan to nationalize the U.S...
...These were the sort of people who made up the cabal, the FOBs who were suddenly handed the levers of power in 1993...
...No significant policy shifts are recorded...
...One of his new friends was Ira Magaziner, fresh from his single-handed crusade to destroy the curriculum of Brown University-turning the place into a "paradise for airheads and idlers," in the words of the Economist...
...Their prodigious catalogue of honors and elective offices reveals almost none of the accomplishments resulting from the power adroitly wielded...
...But it would be a mistake to imagine that they have a serious left-wing agenda, or indeed an agenda of any kind...
...At their next to best they are gamblers, traffickers in illicit goods, thieves, brawlers, and ex-convicts," writes Tyrrell...
...In a beautifully written passage he relives Clinton's week-long stay with the Kopolds, a family of reformist Czech Communists in Prague...
...They could do no wrong," writes Tyrrell...
...A thirty-year career in the service of American conservatism has been leading up to this thundering indictment of them, the "Coat and Tie Radicals" of the 196o's...
...And Bill Clinton was involved...
...But it is not just Clinton and the Washington press corps that comes off badly in this book...
...Ever the striver, ever the apple-polisher, Clinton adapted to it...
...It was there that Clinton, and the tiny band of Rhodes scholars who were to be his life-long co-conspirators, "became confirmed collectivists...
...The involvement of Donald Gregg is not itself so shocking...
...Tyrrell touches on allegations that Clinton's trip to Moscow in the winter of 19697o could have been funded by the KGB, or alternatively by the CIA, but he does not dwell on them...
...With a Iittle adjustment here and there, this could be the description of the Kelleys, the Cassidys, the Clintons, and, not to he forgotten, William Jefferson Blythe, the serial seducer and bigamist who was supposedly the natural father 71 TheAmerican Spectator . September r996 of the forty-second president...
...For other Beltway conservatives Mena is a taboo subject, a Cold War skeleton that is better left unrattled...
...But in the summer of 1971 she dropped the mask altogether, going to San Francisco to work for the Communist lawyer Robert Treuhaft, the husband of ultra-chic Marxist Jessica Mitford...
...The term "conspiracy theory" has been bandied around liberally, though not by those who interviewed participants and who have made a serious attempt to study the documentary evidence...
...And needless to say, it was also incredibly rude...
...But Brown backed out at the last moment...
...As for the pundits, they were nothing short of irrational...
...Another "Rhodie" was Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state and the architect of Clinton's policy of appeasing Russia at all costs...
...As he would so often, Clinton had rendered the first moment of his presidency unsatisfactory, mediocre, and disconcertingly shabby...
...In reality, explains'I yrrell, Clinton spent most of his childhood in "cosmopolitan Hot Springs, and in some comfort with new Buicks on the drive, and a country club at which to golf...
...But Tyrrell is not willing to let them off so lightly...
...They said that the troopers' stories were "unbelievable" while at the same time remarking that the American people already knew about this side of Clinton and elected him president anyway...
...Many conservatives were happy to see the Reagan administration circumvent the Boland Amendment after Congress cut off aid to the contras in 1984...
...Its dons and left-wing students were fixated on the sordid past of Western civilization and the colossal future awaiting mankind if only the dons and their students were put in charge...
...Yet he did not back away from the truth when his research into Clinton took him, unexpectedly, into Republican terrain...
...Hillary Clinton was already accepting bribes before she had had time to adapt to the culture of graft in Little Rock...
...Nothing could be the same again after that astonishing portrait of life inside the Governor's Mansion...
...This dabbling in the counterculture, at an impressionable age, has left the Clintons with an incurable nostalgia for the nostrums of the 196o's...
...No president-elect had ever arrived that late to take coffee with the outgoing president on Inaugural Day, a ceremony that has come to symbolize the irenic exchange of power that takes place in this great democracy between two leaders who usually hold each other in utter contempt," he writes...
...It is a well-targeted cluster bomb on the whole train of narcissists and moralizing poseurs who have, in his words, "done so much to erase the moral order of our civilization...
...BOOKS I N R E V I E W The Book on Bill...
...We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode [sic] of living...
...But for sheer effrontery, her valedictory address at Wellesley in 1969 came a close second...
...The scandals of the Clinton presidency are indigenous to the state, even if the White I louse reaction to them is marked by the supreme moral arrogance of the Coat and Tie set...
...To get a sense of precisely how stringent Rodham's politics had become by this time, it might be helpful to note that Treuhaft joined the Communist party after the Hitler-Stalin pact," writes Tyrrell...
...Tyrrell contends that Hillary became a hard-core leftist at Yale Law School, going beyond normal Coat and Tie protest into the realm of neo-Marxism...
...But they glossed over charges themselves, some of which were criminal, and never really explained to the American public what it was that the Clintons had actually done...
...The Kopolds were utopian dreamers of great charm, Tyrrell discovered when he visited them twenty-three years later, but they were still passionate Communists, and it says something about the young Bill Clinton that his network of acquaintances behind the Iron Curtain should include lifelong party members...
...I t is a tour de force...
...He and his wife were Stalinists...
...One of Talbott's contributions to modem thought was his Time magazine article noting that the Cold War had been unnecessary...
...The story that Tyrrell has since uncovered is deeply disturbing...
...He deserves great credit for his intellectual honesty, not to mention his courage and his first-rate performance as an investigative journalist...
...Even the most doctrinaire sort of 196o's radicals gave Stalinists a wide berth...
...They almost always settle for the semblance of power...
...Good people are too exalted to be bothering themselves with banking statutes, and venality laws, and sexual harassment codes...
...Little legislation has been passed...
...The Snopeses at their best are salesmen and hustlers...
...They kept President George Bush and Mrs...
...In the late 196o's the university "was a hive buzzing with moral superiority," writes Tyrrell...
...I use the word `visibility' advisedly...
...But in a broader sense the key to Bill Clinton's rise to power can be found in the unusual chemistry of Arkansas gangster ism mixed with r96o's Ivy League radicalism...
...The next few days revealed as much about the American press as it did about the Clintons...
...Democrats fall back on the defense of "Arkansas mores" when it is pointed out that these wonderful moral crusaders have somehow ended tip with the most corrupt presidency in the history of the republic...
...Good people do not have to play by the rules, which are created by capitalists and are bogus anyway...
...Bill Clinton had his own romance with the left, of course, at Oxford...
...They were holy people...
...Shortly afterwards, Trooper Brown was instructed to go to Mexico in June 1986 to assassinate a man called Terry Reed, a contract employee of the CIA who had worked on a different part of the Mena operation...
...And it was at Oxford that Boy Clinton threw himself into the revels of the antiAmerican counter-culture...
...This was the Snopes clan, writes Tyrrell, evoking William Faulkner's tale of a seedy, coarse, amoral, and rootless family of the South who worked and cheated their way to prominence and tolerable prosperity...
...Now Tyrrell has revealed that the article might never have appeared if The American Spectator had blinked in its war of nerves with lawyers and Arkansas state troopers with an eye for cashing in...
...But Boy Clinton is more than biography...
...Documents revealing drug-dealing, gun-running, intelligence-gathering cloak-and-dagger operations, and ultimately murder do not make amusing reading...
...What is interesting is that the flights to Central America were leaving from the Mena airport in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas, subcontracted to a legendary drug smuggler called Barry Seal...
...So the unbelievable was irrelevant because everyone already knew it was true," notes Tyrrell, mordantly...
...AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD is the Wash ington correspondent o f the London Sunday Telegraph...
...From the first hurrah of their public lives (beginning in high school for both) Clinton and Rodham have been energetic and steadfast in their quest of political visibility...
...For him Clinton was simply a sentimental leftist, walking the walk of those around him...
...Apparently she helped them defend the Black Panthers...
...Tyrrell himself has tried to respect their concerns, but the abuses were too serious to ignore...
...He later told Tyrrell that there seemed to be a plan to kill "anybody that apparently had anything to do with what happened at Mena...
...But it did come out, just in time for Christmas of 1993...
...Barbara Bush waiting for thirty minutes before appearing for the traditional pre-inaugural coffee...
...He had been led to believe his target would be a drug-running pilot from his earlier flights-and on seeing Reed realized this was not the man...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
