The Truth About Bill's Lies

...But each time, combined with attacks on his opponents, the strategy worked...

...The next day, the president himself addressed the issue...

...the president hesitated before answering: Well, first of all, I didn't know about it...

...Clinton had maintained for years that he had never tried to avoid service in Vietnam...

...Starr, the prosecutor, is prohibited from making his evidence public, at least at this time...

...Clinton defenders do not need to lay a foundation to accuse Starr of a partisan vendetta...

...The candidate's answer: "I was just lucky, I guess...

...Then Clinton advised Flowers on what to do if approached by the press...

...At the time, some in the press questioned the wisdom of the idea, but the seeds Carville planted back then are bearing fruit today...

...I've never broken any state laws," he answered...

...Everyone involved in the story is now dead," he told reporters...

...At several critical moments during his campaigns and his presidency—certainly during the first days of the Monica Lewinsky affair—the president has been caught flat-footed, offering explanations that even his friends found impossible to believe...

...You have a right to ask them...

...Take the case of Webster Hubbell...

...The socalled audit was done after the decision to fire the travel office staffers...

...Perhaps Bill Clinton does, too...

...But Clinton made a more grievous error the next day during a photo-op with PLO leader Yasir Arafat...

...Did she visit him alone in the White House...

...THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH The say-nothing strategy appeared to be a big winner...

...But of course, all he had said in the past was that Nichols' stories were trash...

...Is Starr's image that bad...

...Lastly, they just liked Clinton—a fact illustrated later when a Roper poll of 139 Washington journalists found that 89 percent voted for him...

...In the days that followed, the White House story fell apart...

...First, presidential spokesman McCurry said Clinton was "outraged" by the story (another response strikingly similar to the president's reaction to Troopergate...

...So simply saying that Clinton is a good liar does not adequately explain his success...

...his almost universally conceded looseness with the truth has not brought him down...

...The press complained to me repeatedly about being gouged by the White House travel office," he said...

...It was an answer that satisfied no one...

...And when I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two...

...The story, which raised serious questions about Clinton's judgment, character, and abuse of power, was based on the accounts of four Arkansas state troopers, all of whom were in a position to know about Clinton's behavior...

...Sometimes he lies well, sometimes he lies badly, but he always puts on an extraordinary show...

...Bush appeared to be making headway with his constant attacks on Clinton's character, telling voters they could not trust a candidate who didn't always tell the truth in response to allegations about his personal life...

...Now, of course, Clinton has reportedly admitted the affair during a deposition in the Paula Jones case—a final confirmation that he was lying all along...

...On the draft, the questions began long before the 1992 primaries...

...The president and first lady have used it to avoid answering questions about the mysterious appearance of Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House, about the search of Foster's office, and about the role of White House lawyers in the Whitewater cover-up...

...At the time, Clinton's words outraged Republicans, who pointed to the Democrat's record of dissembling on questions like the draft, marijuana, and Gennifer Flowers...

...GENNIFER, POT, AND VIETNAM Start with the first campaign...

...In another excerpt, Clinton talked about the impact the Flowers affair might have on his standing in the Democratic race...

...WHITEWATER TO THE RESCUE As the White House struggled to deal with the Troopergate revelations, it faced another devastating blow: a Washington Times story detailing how administration officials removed Whitewater documents from the office of deputy counsel Vincent Foster after his suicide...

...We are cooperating fully with the special counsel, which is what all of you asked me to do...

...I'd like for you to have more rather than less, sooner rather than later...

...That is literally all I know about it...

...There simply is no secrecy requirement...

...Rather, he said, he and his friends were motivated by simple compassion...

...I'll have to refer to them for any other questions...

...And the audit—which wasn't really an audit—was done after the decision to fire the staffers...

...Neither the president nor anyone in the White House is constrained from making public any information relating to the Starr investigation...

...In fact, the president has made obscuring the truth just one part of an elaborate damage-control strategy that he has relied on nearly every time he faced accusations of wrongdoing...

...When a reporter asked, "Given that there have been public suggestions this money was offered to encourage [Hubbell's] silence before the Whitewater investigator, have you taken any steps to ensure yourself that this is not the case...

...All three statements could not be true...

...The public seemed to accept his explanation, even in September, when reporters discovered that Clinton's late uncle had lobbied members of the local draft board in an effort to keep Bill out of the military...

...The first major crisis was the uproar over the firing of the White House Travel Office staff...

...Analysts attributed Clinton's success to a variety of factors: the booming economy, doubts about Starr, and public indifference to what the president did in his "private" life...

...Although most observers believed that a truthful response—that he had occasionally smoked pot as a young man more than twenty years ago—would have caused little political damage, Clinton tried to avoid a straight answer...

...In the Gennifer Flowers case, Clinton tried to deny accusations of adultery while not actually making a simple declaration that he had never had an affair with the former lounge singer...

...Press reports had begun to zero in on the Arkansas governor's shrinking lead over George Bush in the polls...

...But he carefully avoided a specific denial of the facts of the case...

...Along with Clinton and several Kentucky politicians, the crowd got a good show from country music star Tom T. Hall and a local group called Nervous Melvin and the Mistakes...

...It was October 28,1992, little more than a week before the presidential election...

...And several reporters felt The American Spectator • March 1998 lingering guilt about their treatment of Gary Hart's womanizing in the 1988 presidential race...

...The campaign acknowledged that he recalled getting the notice, but said it hadbeen delayed in the mail and he had missed his induction date...

...He reneged on the promise, skipping ROTC in favor of a return to Oxford and later enrollment in Yale Law School...

...Finally, a radio reporter asked, "So none of this ever happened...

...Likewise, many of them had smoked marijuana and were equally disinclined to push that issue...

...Unlike George Bush, however, Bill Clinton has prospered and won re-election...

...We are working very hard to comply, get all the requests for information up here...

...Another element is the fabulously successful discredit-the-accuser maneuver...

...Several quickie polls showed Clinton's approval rating soaring, even as some Americans had doubts about his truthfulness...

...On the draft, some Baby Boomer reporters had avoided military service themselves and were not anxious to cast the first stone...

...On May 19,1993, the day the story broke, Clinton was asked what he knew about it: All I know about it is that I was told that the people who were in charge of administering in the White House found serious problems there and thought there was no alternative...

...But the third element of the Clinton defense comes not from the White House but from Republicans...

...Less then two months later, in February 1992, reporters discovered that in 1969 Clinton, then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, had gotten out of the draft by promising to join an ROTC program at the University of Arkansas...

...In all three cases, emerging facts forced Clinton to—as they say in Congress revise and extend his remarks...

...No one had any idea...what the nature of the allegations were against Mr...

...Instead, Clinton's operatives launched an intensive effort to discredit the tapes...

...Did he give her gifts...

...most of them were shouting and cheering and waving Clinton-Gore signs...

...By the summer of 1992, the danger had diminished enough for Clinton to lighten up...

...Reno stonewalled until January 12, when Clinton, buckling under the political pressure, directed her to appoint a counsel...

...In 1842, the legendary showman P.T...

...Clinton, who had never before mentioned the notice, insisted that he had "never intentionally misled anybody about this...

...The mermaid, created by joining the body of a fish to the head of a monkey, was plainly a fraud, but Barnum promoted it as the "most stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection...

...Then they said the tapes were selectively edited...

...The firings, they said, were unavoidable after an audit found evidence of financial wrongdoing...

...I just have nothing else to say...

...Finally, in an interview with the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, he declared that "the relationship was not sexual," but only after avoiding so many questions that much of the press corps thought he was lying...

...He was also just lucky, because each issue seemed to put the mainstream press in a quandary...

...By then, Clinton had little reaction...

...Since he's single," Clinton said of Kerrey, "nobody cares who he's screwing...

...The combination of lying, discrediting his accusers, and the investigative blackout adds up to an impressive scandal-management strategy—one that Clinton's advisers clearly believe will help him survive the Lewinsky storm...

...On March 16,1994 Clinton attended a news conference with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin...

...There's nothing they can do...

...But if everybody is on the record denying it, no problem...

...Instead, Americans heard from Mrs...

...As it had throughout the campaign, Clinton's rapid response team countered every accusation...

...Each time, he managed to talk his way out of disaster by offering misleading accounts of events—only to be forced to change his story when subsequent revelations showed him to be lying...

...Asked about Flowers, Clinton said, "Watch '6o Minutes' I've said all I'm going to say and I'm not going to say any more...

...The allegations on abuse of the state or the federal positions I have—they're just not true...

...Clinton spokesmen initially said the staffers had been fired as a result of an evaluation that was part of Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government project...

...Just a day later, with word emerging that the whole affair was part of a scheme between the first lady and presidential friend Harry Thomason to steer business to Clinton cronies, the president tried another tack...

...He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election...

...When the Star tabloid published a story about Larry Nichols, the former Arkansas state employee who was peddling a list of alleged Clinton ex-lovers that included Flowers' name, Clinton called the story "bogus" and "trash...

...In December 1991, as his presidential campaign prepared for the primary season, he repeated his story in an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors...

...Shortly after the "Troopergate" piece appeared, the Los Angeles Times published its own version of the story, adding even more details...

...At a news conference on January 28, 1997, Clinton for some reason chose to forego his usual claim that he could not discuss 30 March 1998 • The American Spectator It turned out that the reinventing government explanation was false...

...He just knew the formula worked...

...The groping, stumbling response and the "it's not so" conclusion echoed Clinton's explanation of Troopergate...

...And it soon became apparent that the investigation had given him a new reason to remain silent: the presence of an independent counsel meant that Clinton could answer questions that he felt might be politically advantageous to him, and refuse to answer others, citing the confidentiality of the Whitewater investigation...

...Still, Clinton's speech gave a few listeners the impression that something was wrong...

...Later in the day, Clinton stuck to the "improper" defense in previously scheduled interviews with PBS and National Public Radio...

...Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine," he told the crowd...

...And I didn't personally know anything about it till I read about it in the press....And I am just telling you it's not so...

...during an appearance on MTV, he was asked, "If you had it to do over again, would you inhale...

...that work was done many months ago...

...In other words...why the pleasure in experiencing deception after knowledge of it had been gained...

...Regaining his composure, Clinton said, "We have not done anything wrong...

...I wonder if I'm just going to be blown out of the water with this," he said...

...Americans simply can't stop watching him spin his tales...

...To the best of my recollection, I didn't know anything about his having that job until I read about it in the press....It's just not—we—we did not know anything about it...

...But they were still curious...

...I don't see how they can [garbled] so far if they don't, if they don't have pictures...

...Then, in April, several papers reported that Clinton had actually received a draft induction notice in 1969...

...There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to him," Clinton said...

...T. Barnum, biographer Neil Harris writes that Barnum based much of his career on his realization that people can take pleasure in being deceived, that they often find it quite entertaining: Why did Americans enjoy watching shows and visiting exhibits that they suspected might be contrived, why did they flock to witness impostures that they knew about...

...The "didn't inhale" remark certainly attracted its share of ridicule, but it was an unprovable assertion that allowed Clinton to get past the pot issue...

...By the end of January, White House aides were so pleased with the attack on Starr that they began saying openly that Clinton might never answer questions about Lewinsky...

...If they ever hit you with it," he said, "just say no and go on...

...On December 21, Hillary Rodham Clinton called the troopers' account "outrageous, terrible stories...

...The president denied the assistance was hush money...

...MONICA When the Lewinsky case broke on January 21, Clinton displayed all the candor-avoidance habits he had developed over the years...

...I kept hearing it everywhere...

...Before the campaign even began, Clinton told Arkansas reporters that the marijuana question was "none of your business...

...THE FIRST YEAR Clinton's victory had the practical effect of laying to rest the three biggest character issues from the campaign...

...It'll get us through this...

...After again denying the allegations, he seemed to endorse the investigation: Now there are a lot of other questions that are, I think, very legitimate...

...I've told you all I know about it," he said...

...Clinton faced three issues that could have sunk him in 1992: his affair with Gennifer Flowers, his use of marijuana, and his avoidance of the Vietnam draft...

...that's really what I've, what I've talked about with our people...

...And I can tell you categorically that that did not happen...

...Clinton told ABC, "because they have to abide by the rules that they The American Spectator • March r998 operate under when they have these investigations...

...The White House immediately set to portray the reports as "tabloid trash"—while not specifically denying their contents...

...But there have been some notable stumbles...

...Had Clinton ever broken any state laws, they wanted to know, or perhaps any international laws...

...It seemed that Clinton had been caught red-handed...

...a matter under investigation...

...The story revived questions about Whitewater, which had flared briefly during the campaign but never threatened Clinton's candidacy...

...Sure, if I could," Clinton responded...

...Clinton's an unusually good liar," Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey told Esquire magazine in January 1996...

...You won't hear any more from my husband," Mrs...

...A few hours earlier, in Texas, Clinton had put his criticism of the Republican president even more bluntly...

...First they said the transcripts were published in a supermarket tabloid, which alone should make them suspect...

...Reno resisted, even when, a few days later, Democrats Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bradley announced that they, too, favored an independent investigation...

...Only much later did we learn the extent of Mrs...

...BY 1 ill Clinton couldn't have asked for a friendlier crowd...

...McCurry added that Clinton "never had any improper relationship with this woman...

...Later Clinton, as he had done in the Flowers case, cited his earlier explanations as a reason to refuse further comment...

...In one excerpt, Clinton complained about the attention paid to his extramarital affairs compared to the relationships of Democratic opponent Bob Kerrey, a bachelor...

...But read today, in light of Clinton's performance during five scandal-filled years in the White House, the speech seems like an almost clairvoyant indictment of Clinton himself...

...Clinton used a similar strategy when faced with the question of whether he had ever used marijuana...

...Once the investigations were underway, the president was able to claim that, even though he would love to tell the public all the facts, he could not because the issue was under investigation...

...You and the American people have a right to get answers...

...All I knew was there was a plan to cut the size of the office, save tax dollars, save the press money...

...It'll get us through this...

...In Humbug: The Art ofP...

...Later, when the issue arose during the primary season, he said he had "never broken the laws of my country," an odd locution that caused reporters to ask ever-more-specific questions...

...His action seemed even more suspect when the press discovered a letter Clinton had written in late 1969 in which he said he used the ROTC ploy specifically to get out of the draft...

...Barnum never took the time to come up with a scholarly answer...

...It turned out the reinventing government explanation was false...

...But Flowers—and the Star—had tapes...

...The audience dissolved in laughter...

...Few observers brought up the fact that there is no legal reason for the silence...

...He employed phony experts to give lectures on its authenticity and other phony experts to denounce it as a fake, all in an elaborate—and successful—effort to stimulate ticket sales...

...Some news accounts called the recordings "alleged tapes," and other stories referred to Clinton's voice as "the male voice that Flowers says is Clinton's," or "the man," or "the voice...

...But no law prevents the president from revealing everything he knows, or from releasing to the public every document given to Starr in response to a subpoena...

...A reporter asked whether the president still stood by his campaign claim that he lost money in the Whitewater deal...

...28 March 1998 • The American Spectator "It got us through the snows of New Hampshire," adviser Paul Begala said at the end of January...

...And that's not a dodge...

...The very idea that the word 'trust' could ever come out of Bush's mouth after what he has done to this country and the way he has trampled the truth is a travesty for the American political system...

...I tried before...

...Barnum exhibited what he called the "Feejee Mermaid" at his American Museum in New York...

...He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election...

...But is the economy that good...

...just look at Clinton capo James Carville's decision to launch an organized attack on Whitewater 27 "There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to him," Clinton said...

...I wish you'd let them do their work...

...And then they said the tapes might be fakes...

...That explanation stood until reporters learned that some of the president's closest advisers, including confidant Bruce Lindsey, knew about Hubbell's problems at the time the president was claiming ignorance...

...It was a seeming miracle of damage control...

...Put all those factors together, and Clinton dodged not one, not two, but three bullets in the '92 campaign...

...when selling policies from welfare reform to affirmative action to reinventing government, Clinton can glide over the truth so smoothly that even critics miss the deception...

...Sometimes that's true...

...No doubt many, if not most, of Barnum's customers knew the whole thing was preposterous...

...Just days after Clinton's statement, the first lady went on national television to assure the public that nothing of the sort would happen...

...Blaming the furor on the president's right-wing enemies, she said, "I find it not an accident that every time he is on the verge of fulfilling his commitment to the American people and they respond...out comes yet a new round of these outrageous, terrible stories that people plant for political and financial reasons...

...BYRON YORK is an investigative writer with TAS...

...Clinton herself, who earlier on NBC had labelled Starr "a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband...

...Hubbell," Clinton told reporters...

...In 1994, Hubbell was in deep trouble, facing charges that he stole more than $400,000 from his —and the first lady's—former law firm...

...Clinton acknowledged "causing pain in my marriage," but when reporter Steve Kroft said, "I'm assuming from your answer that you're categorically denying that you ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers," Clinton responded, "I've said that before, and so has she...

...I have nothing else to say," he began...

...He might be right...

...The day after the "6o Minutes" broadcast, she held a press conference and played several minutes of audio tapes of phone conversations between her and Clinton...

...ROTC was the one way left in which I could possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance," Clinton wrote...

...It got us through the snows of New Hampshire," a confident Paul Begala told the New York Times at the end of January...

...As the questions threatened his political survival in the New Hampshire primary, Clinton and his wife made their dramatic Super Bowl Sunday appearance on "6o Minutes...

...But they enjoyed it anyway...

...Then Hubbell stopped cooperating...

...how, they wanted to know, had Clinton managed to escape Vietnam, despite being classified 1-A through much of 1968 and 1969...

...Had the president actually done what he said, he would no doubt have been subjected to a torrent of embarrassing questions...

...Later we learned his silence was perhaps related to the receipt of as much as $500,000, arranged by his friends in the White House...

...Unusually good...

...I want to do that...

...Facing the possibility of time in prison, Hubbell agreed to tell what he knew about Whitewater...

...We...we did, if, the, the, I, I, the stories are just as they have been said...

...In December 1993, Clinton faced the most serious challenge yet to his credibility when TAS published writer David Brock's long account of Clinton's womanizing while governor of Arkansas...

...The strategy worked...

...Everybody thought there was some sort of billing dispute with his law firm, and that's all anybody knew about it...

...On January 2, 1994, Republicans Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, then in the minority in Congress, called on Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor (at that time, the independent counsel law had lapsed and had not yet been reauthorized...

...I expected them to look into it and come interview you...

...While those factors most likely play a role in Clinton's survival, perhaps there is something else at work...

...And so was the draft issue...

...But each time, through a combination of facile storytelling and aggressive doubt creation, he got away with it...

...In their eagerness to investigate so many aspects of the Clinton presidency—Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Lippogate — they have established formal investigative machines that have given Clinton an excuse for refusing to present a detailed public defense...

...I knew nothing about it— no—none of us did—before it happened...

...But his first months in the White House brought new character issues...

...On May25, the president again faced reporters...

...Echoing the first lady's earlier statements, he called the charges "outrageous...

...And he reacted to them in the style that had proved so successful earlier...

...As doubtful as that seems to some, a look at the president's history shows that Begala just might be right...

...A full-scale independent counsel blackout descended over the matter...

...Through the years, the strategy has been a great success...

...And I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I didn't try it again...

...Look, I don't have anything else to say about that right now," Clinton responded...

...It was an artful non-denial denial, one he repeated when he returned to the campaign trail...

...Now Clinton himself took up the attack...

...04 31...

...And we will give you as many answers as we can, as soon as we can, at the appropriate time, consistent with our obligation to also cooperate with the investigations...

...independent counsel Kenneth Starr back in 1996...

...I have nothing to add to what I've said in the past...

...It took Clinton nearly ten seconds to get a word out...

...Traveling in Europe at the time, the president testily refused to answer reporters' questions about Whitewater...

...Clinton's involvement, of Thomason's maneuverings, of the president's own knowledge, and of the cover-up...

...I think we have cleared it up," he said...

...They're outrageous and they're not so...

...Flowers began to fade from the scene, even though Clinton eventually conceded that the voice on the tape was indeed his...

...More than 9,000 supporters had I come to see the Democratic candidate speak at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky...

...Did he call Lewinsky...

...It was, even in the view of White House partisans, a terrible performance...

...some pundits thought he should just 'fess up and move on...

...Later, when the Star published Flowers' tale of her affair with Clinton, he responded by saying, "The allegations in today's Star are not true...

...In later appearances, the president has been more careful to use the investigation excuse or rely on surrogates to make his statements on Whitewater...

...26 March 1998 • The American Spectator But at other times, especially when confronted with allegations of personal misconduct, Clinton has proved an absolutely terrible liar...

...29 In one excerpt, Clinton complained to Flowers about the attention paid to his extramarital affairs compared to the relationships of Bob Kerrey, a bachelor...