DICK MORRIS: ALIVE AND WELL IN THE SOLIPSISM ZONE
BROOKS, DAVID
DICK MORRIS: ALIVE AND WELL IN THE SOLIPSISM ZONE By David Brooks Bill Clinton was talking about his place in history with Dick Morris a few weeks ago in the Oval Office. They went over each of...
...Morris has called Clinton “the essence of my career...
...Time said Morris had been “casting a mighty and mysterious spell on the presidency...
...Panetta, Rubin, and Christopher would frown at such self-aggrandizement...
...Who was Carter’s...
...These Morris-like figures transcend mere adviser status...
...Since the story came out about Morris’s dalliance with a hooker who listened in on his phone calls with Clinton, the commentariat has been puzzling over the strange relationship between the president and the slimeball...
...Morris did...
...But he could tuck in right below, around Teddy Roosevelt, and you can imagine Morris as they went down the roster: “Garfield...
...They have dozens or hundreds or even thousands of aides preening their queen-bee selves...
...Creeps don’t make a politician’s skin crawl because their creepiness just doesn’t penetrate his zone of solipsism...
...It takes an extraordinary aide to tend to the bubble of solipsism...
...He looked at his life and saw what he needed, and I became that...
...How could a person in the center of this hive of furious attention not develop into a solipsistic entity...
...This is what happens to friendship when it happens between two men whose lives are suffused by politics...
...But with the vulgar Dick Morris, a president could really open up, cast decorum aside, and let the self-absorption flow...
...Who was Reagan’s close friend...
...It’s not a bit surprising that Morris couldn’t even have a relationship with a prostitute without making Bill Clinton a major part of it...
...What’s striking about this bizarre chain of events—from the call girl eavesdropping on the president, to the wife imagebuffing the adulterer, to the president and first lady making condolence calls to the disgraced spinner who betrayed them—is that we now have a politicomedia aristocracy every bit as removed from natural human traits as Versailles-bound aristocrats were in 18th-century France...
...He’s the one who placed all those confiding middle-of-the-night phone calls to Gennifer Flowers...
...Shakespeare emphasized the friendlessness of the king, and friendlessness is a common trait among many recent presidents, good and bad...
...His wife’s statement—“I’m concerned with helping Dick get through this...
...Here’s a man whose relationship to the president transcended the normal White House structure and transcended normal professionalism, to the dismay of the White House chief of staff...
...Toast...
...Does anyone doubt that he will be back, after a decent interval, at his Sun King’s side...
...Instead, they feed their own self-importance by sharing in the solipsism of their boss...
...And how could a totally politicized consultant in this atmosphere not devolve into an unnatural creature, beyond shame and plausibility...
...In the Isaacson interview, Morris said of Gore’s convention-speech story about his sister: “In that four minutes he probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives...
...But major politicians dominate every room they enter and move as if their every gesture is being monitored by crowds...
...Even if this episode destroys me, I will have done one great thing in my life, which is to help this man get the chance to lead this country for another four years,” Morris told Time’s Walter Isaacson after the scandal broke...
...Morris was willing to have 80 percent of the White House staff hate him so long as he could have this bond with the president...
...Every compromise is grandly dressed up as a “Hegelian synthesis...
...But if you were president, wouldn’t you occasionally like to hear someone tell you that you were...
...Andrew Jackson...
...Massachusetts governor William Weld, a former Morris client, gave Time a beautiful description of how Morris makes his politicians feel: “He sings to me...
...He finds boogie men and sets them up and knocks them down...
...Morris is no Falstaff, but the common thread is that political leaders subordinate things like friendship and normal human relationships to raison d’?tat...
...Commit adultery, betray your president, get on the cover of Time in consecutive weeks, sign a book deal, negotiate to become an analyst for TV networks . . . Does anyone doubt that Dick Morris will go on and on...
...Everything is coming at them, every flattery and every question and every attack, and it produces a kind of nearsightedness: Nothing really exists until it comes inside the zone of solipsism that surrounds them like a plasma bubble...
...Morris says he wrote Clinton’s convention speech while the president was distracted on the train trip that preceded the convention: “I would give the speech as it came to my mind, and people would pounce on it and edit it as we went along...
...The zone of solipsism prevents such natural relations...
...He becomes their meaning, and politicians enjoy these alter egos because finally someone is as obsessed with the “Me” as they...
...For the central message that such aides communicate to their bosses is that they, the patrons, are cosmically important—a focal point of history, worth the sacrifice of lesser mortals...
...is like a focus-group-tested paean to adulterers...
...An intimate of 20 years immolates himself, and Clinton reacts as coolly as if somebody told him rain was coming...
...I’m just like him...
...You smoke him, Mr...
...Without Morris, Clinton probably wouldn’t have agreed to a balanced budget, wouldn’t have signed the welfare-reform bill, and the political landscape would have looked very different...
...They went over each of the presidents one by one, the Washington Post told us, to see where Clinton ranked...
...When Clinton discovered that Morris was going to be portrayed as his “brain,” he reportedly hit the roof and demanded Morris call Isaacson and get himself off the cover...
...In the world of Morris enthusiasms, every Clinton election is a historic election...
...He has turned his own marriage into a grotesquerie in order to save his political skin, posing for a “homey” dinner table picture in Time with his wife Eileen McGann, a photo in which they look like a couple of wax figures contemplating suicide...
...We think it strange that French aristocrats would avidly seek the honor of being present for the Sun King’s defecation, but isn’t it equally odd that we have these teams of guru spinners and image crafters all tending to the media emanations of one man...
...Maybe more so...
...No normal adviser would write exclusive briefing books for the president in which he criticized the other advisers...
...He has great survival instincts ever since being born prematurely at 2 1/2 lbs...
...Hayes...
...Clinton acknowledged with becoming modesty that he couldn’t be in the top tier— Lincoln, Wilson, FDR—without a major war...
...He describes the Clinton campaign as a joint Morris/Clinton exercise: “We decided, on my urging, that we would lead into the convention with a lot of bill signings . . .” Any normal aide would say “The president decided . . .” Morris says it was his idea to make the first night of the Democratic convention in Chicago non-political, with Christopher Reeve and Sarah Brady: “The president himself was quizzical, but I called him every morning on his vacation, and he said that if I thought it would work, we should do it...
...Speeches are not just words...
...Clinton supposedly knew Morris had no character, but what that meant wasn’t real to him until Morris upstaged him on the cover of Time four days before the world found out that the Star had photographs and tapes of Morris and his hooker at the Jefferson Hotel...
...Bill Clinton has that vulgar side...
...Most major politicians—of either party—are not normal human beings...
...A president wouldn’t feel comfortable swirling this topic around in his mouth with his classy advisers...
...Morris is a man obsessed with Clinton’s public face, and foolishly careless when it came to his own...
...His entire conversation consisted of stories and observations about Sharon, so that after a while, if you yourself were not Sharon-obsessed, your eyes teared up out of boredom...
...Maybe he was right...
...That’s why he’s an attention-craving politician and not a law professor somewhere...
...Clinton is not just a politician, he is “the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans this century...
...President...
...We normal people wend our way through the world aware we are one of millions...
...Look at how Morris describes the way he was subsumed in the identity of Bill Clinton: “He shaped me into his tool,” Morris said to Eric Pooley of Time...
...In his letter of resignation, Morris used the word “I” 13 times and took credit for preventing a landslide Clinton defeat...
...Strings go p-ling in my thoracic cavity...
...And judging by the interviews he’s given, even Morris’s devotion to Clinton can’t really be called friendship or sympathy, since he admires his own role in forming Clinton more than he admires Clinton as a person...
...But maybe it’s not so mysterious...
...And then later, “I don’t believe there is a single issue where Bill Clinton and I disagree...
...Who is Dole’s...
...they are epoch-making...
...And it’s not surprising that Morris would harbor grandiose notions of sacrificing himself for his boss...
...This suggests that Clinton immediately insulated himself from Morris, who had become a problem and no longer an asset...
...The manner in which Clinton appears to have cut Morris off is reminiscent of the way Henry V cut off Falstaff at the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II (“I know thee not, old man,” Falstaff ’s former buddy Prince Hal tells him upon assuming the crown...
...Gloria Borger likened Morris to Clinton’s bad habit, “as if he had begun smoking again...
...In Israel, I used to dine with an aide who plays a Dick Morris-like role to Ariel Sharon...
...When Clinton was told about the Star expos?, he supposedly looked up for a second and then continued working on his convention speech...
...Morris, of course, is himself thoroughly politicized...
...Couldn’t triangulate his way out of a paper bag...
...I think he will...
...Vice presidents and even presidents aren’t actually that powerful...
...The speech we gave was almost word for word the one we drafted for him...
...The most amazing characteristic in Morris’s post-disgrace interviews in Time and the New York Times is his pride of ownership in this political entity called Bill Clinton...
...Finally, Morris’s weaknesses penetrated Clinton’s zone of solipsism...
...Politicians are often surrounded by such lowlife hangers-on and amoralists...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 1
