Scrapbook
Annals of Sid Sidney Blumenthal, the Erich von Stroheim of the Clinton administration, has published a memoir of his White House days—to generally poor reviews, most of them from newspapers and...
...Nevertheless, as a service to those of our readers who remain helplessly curious about Blumenthal's brand of political pathology, The Scrapbook offers the following, handy-dandy condensation of The Clinton Wars...
...At home, Sidney and the president continue their struggle against conservatism, a force whose "authentic” roots lie in “the Confederacy” and a commitment to “concentrated private power...
...First he persuades the president to use the magic words "One America" in his 1996 State of the Union address...
...Sidney agrees...
...Others are not...
...CHAPTER FIVE: "The facts would have upset the way they were telling the story, so there were no facts," but media attention to Whitewater persists, and soon Mrs...
...CHAPTER EIGHT: "Learning by observing others on the staff, I quickly saw that part of my function was that of a catalyst...
...Republicans are to blame...
...Powell dominated Clinton's foreign policy councils...
...The reception is "overwhelmingly positive...
...But meanwhile, back in the capital, media hostility, especially at the Washington Post, continues unabated...
...CHAPTER FOUR: Enter Dick Morris, an "opportunist," sure, but someone who "helped Clinton to be pragmatic for good ends," meaning a reelection victory in 1996...
...CHAPTER ONE: Sidney introduces his hero during a visit to FDR's boyhood home in March 1993...
...Most of her staff were against it,” but “I said it was a risk she should take...
...CHAPTERS TEN THROUGH TWELVE: Sidney already knows “about the rightwing conservative movement,” but to learn how that movement is fabricating a sex scandal against the president, he cultivates David Brock...
...CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Oddly undeterred by the intellectuals, House Republicans prepare to impeach the president...
...But justice triumphs in the end...
...Ominously, we hear of a man named Kenneth Starr, "the son of a Church of Christ minister, inculcated in biblical literalism and the sinfulness of drink, dancing, and fornicating...
...CHAPTER TWO: Given America's "peculiar vulnerability" to "moralistic absolutism, anti-intellectualism, [and] populist demagogy," many people fail to see Clinton as he is: "the poor boy who rises by dint of hard work, merit, superior intelligence, and character...
...Paula Jones files her lawsuit...
...Eight hundredplus pages of mercilessly patronizing, tutelary prose the likes of which most grownups won't have seen since those lives-of-the-great-inventors library books they made us read in elementary school...
...Of course, no such book should be assumed useless simply because its notices are stinko...
...But these enemies manage to derail Sidney's work at the New Yorker...
...His journalism arouses ire "from only one element: the neocon-servatives," whose politics have a "Stalinist" method...
...CHAPTERS SEVENTEEN & EIGHTEEN: A “concatenation of pseudoscandals” plagues the administration as its time winds down, but the president leaves office a giant (with Sid on his shoulder...
...One evening, without advance notice, Clinton conducted the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center...
...Clinton’s planned Senate campaign...
...prestige reached a zenith it had not enjoyed since perhaps the presidency of John F. Kennedy...
...The catalyst has many conversations with the president and first lady and writes them many memos, all quoted at interminable length...
...Having survived a "vicious" Republican election campaign the previous autumn, Clinton is now confronting a conservative reaction against the "protean nature" of his personality, symbolized by the president's "eclectic relationship with music," which "the traditionally minded warned was the devil's sign...
...Within the formal rankings of the White House, this is the highest level...
...a bias toward the Republican version was presented as objective...
...In the end, however, “Gore had won the votes of a majority of the American people...
...CHAPTERS FOURTEEN & FIFTEEN: “After the Kosovo war, other world leaders regarded Clinton with a deference that extended beyond his role as the chief of state of the number-one power...
...These phrases were not mere slogans...
...A member of the orchestra told me he was the only guest conductor they'd ever had who knew what he was doing...
...Sidney provides Hillary a respite from Washington by arranging for her to attend a Manhattan luncheon with friendly writers and deliver a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations...
...All quotations guaranteed accurate...
...With Brock’s help, Sidney discovers that Starr, in league with the media and “the knuckle-dragging crowd,” intends to use Lewinsky to destroy the Clinton administration and all its good deeds...
...Future chief executives “will stand in the shadow of Clinton...
...A “flagrantly political and authoritarian” decision by the Supreme Court halts that voting, effectively denying black Floridians “the full rights of citizenship...
...Serious journalists” are “shocked and dismayed...
...Therefore, the Clinton health care plan fails, and all looks grim until . . . the Oklahoma City bombing, "a turning point against the Republican right...
...Bush is “installed” in the White House...
...Minor academic scholars or conservative political figures” are pressed into service by the GOP and make “tendentious” Scrapbook arguments...
...CHAPTER SIX: Sidney recalls his childhood and education...
...CHAPTER SIXTEEN: “The negative Republican campaign against Al Gore, once begun, never ended...
...Sidney decides to sacrifice himself to preserve Clinton’s presidency, even in the face of anti-Semitic attacks from Vanity Fair: “Self-denial was the price of public service that had to be paid...
...Sidney is subpoenaed by the grand jury...
...Sidney helps too...
...And such large portions...
...Meanwhile, things go wrong overseas, too...
...In sum, we can't recommend the thing...
...CHAPTER NINE: Sidney introduces British prime minister Tony Blair to Clinton, and the two Americans help their Labour party friend restore England to greatness...
...George W. Bush, a man who has spent “much of ” his life on “drunken sprees,” now has a “messianic streak about his destiny gained from his born-again religious conversion”— and Bush is consequently a “ruthless” campaigner...
...Alas, however, even on these ironic terms, The Clinton Wars turns out to be an unusually nutritionless meal...
...Then "I hit upon a phrase: the indispensable nation," that revolutionized American foreign policy...
...Clinton is determined to persist...
...Clinton is "under siege...
...Republican attacks on Democratic fundraising improprieties sputter when "[a]ll the charges were revealed to be empty," and Clinton wins a second term...
...Blumenthal’s academic friends organize in the president’s defense, and the tide begins to turn: “Not since Vietnam had the intellectuals intervened in politics with such effect...
...Annals of Sid Sidney Blumenthal, the Erich von Stroheim of the Clinton administration, has published a memoir of his White House days—to generally poor reviews, most of them from newspapers and magazines ordinarily sympathetic to the author's politics...
...Because of their implicit trust in him, U.S...
...The Lewinsky investigation is “an Italianate conspiracy—an intricate, covert, amoral operation bent on power...
...CHAPTER SEVEN: "My title was Assistant to the President...
...President Clinton brought in with him a stream of cool, brisk air from outside...
...and his friendships with an immensely long list of famous people...
...But Florida, which once had “the largest Klan in the South,” hangs in the balance...
...At six feet, two inches, with a jutting jaw, gray-green eyes, a ruddy complexion, and loose long limbs, Clinton was the most physically imposing person in the room, as he almost always was...
...In brief, every one of the accusations against the Clintons was false...
...Very often, in fact, it's the "worst" first-person accounts of recent political history that provide the best sort of fun: unintentionally embarrassing anecdotes that the clueless writer imagines are worth boasting about...
...No, really...
...The siege is unfair...
...And ignorant suspicion of Clinton, always amplified by processing through "the right-wing gears," breeds a series of empty domestic scandals: "There was never anything to Whitewater," a fantasy concocted by men who "shared an antagonism toward blacks and toward Bill Clinton...
...Many of those arguments focus on Sidney himself, because he is “Eastern educated, a 1960s graduate, from the liberal media, Jewish, [and] intellectual...
...The Bush campaign encourages a riot to disrupt vote counting in Miami...
...his active participation in various Democratic political campaigns he was simultaneously writing about...
...his career in journalism...
...Clinton, frustrated but still eager to bring goodness to the world, asks Sidney to join his staff...
...Mike Kelly calls Blumenthal “Sid the Human Ferret,” though Kelly fails to cite “a single documented incident” to verify the contention...
...He is replaced by the late Michael Kelly, which makes Clinton's job offer all the more attractive...
...The Confederates fight back: The Monica Lewinsky story breaks in the press...
...And it is "a step on the road that led her eventually to decide to run for the Senate...
...During the Senate impeachment trial, Blumenthal is betrayed by his friend Christopher Hitchens, an “unkempt,” “bleary-eyed,” “unreliable,” and chronically “lubricated” person...
...Sidney is centrally involved in diplomacy with European political leaders, but he eventually shifts attention to Mrs...
...CHAPTER THREE: To conservatives, "[i]f government was the Behemoth from the Book of Revelation, Clinton must be Lucifer...
...The words mattered...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 37
