Dear Bill,
Can I call you Bill? I hope it's okay. You always had a populist aura that invited informality. I was actually at the Democratic convention where you were nominated in July, 1992. A political friend of mine worked on your campaign and she wangled me a press pass. I remember wandering the hallways of Madison Square Garden, overwhelmed by the vast machinery of it all. When I popped out in the nosebleed section designated for unimportant members of the media, it was just in time to see the inspirational film, "The Man From Hope" I think it was called, about your life. It struck me, I must confess, as hokey and a tad embarrassing, but the crowd seemed rapt, and I suppose there are worse ways to introduce yourself to the nation.
And we did need introduction, Bill. Many of us outside of Arkansas hadn't heard of you before the campaign. But I and others my age were intrigued: a Democrat of the generation just before ours, a Baby Boomer who spoke stirringly about the middle class, who seemed to bear the promise of reviving the Democratic party from the earnest embarrassments and foreign policy failures of the Carter administration. I was a child when Carter was in the White House and somehow your rise coincided with my desire to put away the powerlessness of childhood and get on with projects--universal health care, a progressive tax code, an end to bigotry--that had only been pipe dreams for my entire adult life.
Since high school I had lived under Republican presidents. First there was Reagan, whom we viewed (admittedly with elitist snark) as an affable idiot with a gift for babbling platitudes that placated the gullible. And then there was George H.W. Bush, a decent man, in retrospect, but cold, patrician, suspect for his connection with the CIA. If Reagan sometimes didn't seem to know what he was saying, Bush usually seemed to know things he wasn't telling.
And then you came, with a chance of winning. I remember sitting in a dive bar on the Upper West Side with my soon-to-be first husband watching the 1992 returns, drinking shots of Maker's Mark bourbon in your honor, barely believing the results as they rolled in. Why Maker's Mark? you might ask. Why indeed. There was something in this choice of booze to toast your success, Bill--we called it "Marky Mark," because Mark Wahlberg, then known by his rapper name, was in his briefs on bus shelters all over New York City. Somehow it seemed appropriate to us--bourbon, for your southern heritage, but also Marky Mark in those Calvin Klein underwear ads, because there was something about your image, even from the very beginning, that felt a little bit louche, a tad too free with the eyes, with the hands. There were rumors of course, and tales of your affair with a cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers had at one point threatened to sink your campaign, but you brazened it out by admitting your marriage wasn't perfect, and we all felt, well, isn't it better to know the faults of the man, the depths he has sunk to and returned? Marky Mark also had an unsavory past, but we Gen-Xers didn't believe in perfection anyway, that sappy fifties version of reality--Camelot and the like-- we all know now to be a sham.
So the big surprise out of the gate was how you just fumbled things: your promise to allow gay people to serve in the military walked back into "Don't ask, don't tell," your plans for a progressive stimulus package filibustered in Congress by deficit hawks. National health care, put in Hillary's hands, quickly became a bungled mess, though there was, at least, the budget bill of 1993 that raised taxes on the wealthy, lowered taxes on the poor and small businesses, and put the nation on track to reduce the deficit. From what I've read, you got a lot of what you wanted there, though not everything, and it was the Republicans who blinked. Later, after the budget led to the longest economic expansion in history, they would try to argue it was somehow Ronald Reagan's doing.
You tacked to the center. Liberals took issue with your statement that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare," (abortions decreased by 18% on your watch) and with the trade agreement NAFTA, negotiated by George Bush but taken up by you. In a big disappointment for liberals you signed the Defense of Marriage Act--later struck down by SCOTUS--that let states refuse to recognize gay marriages contracted in other states. You expanded the death penalty even as you passed an assault weapons ban. According to biographers, it frustrated even you sometimes--in one outburst you complained that "we're Eisenhower Republicans here!" But this was the era when Congressional figures like Newt Gingrich made headlines by shutting down the government, making obstructionism their go-to strategy. The more you staked out the center, the more they sidled to the right.
They did it because they hated you. And oh, Bill, how they hated you. Why did they hate you so much--and your wife even more? It's a question pondered by everyone who writes about your presidency. Hillary famously called it a "vast right-wing conspiracy" determined to bring you down, and indeed, when I go to the New York Public Library and browse the 970 section, it's all frustrated shouting from the spines: titles like The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Clinton Cash, Partners in Crime, Crisis of Character, The Death of American Virtue, Contempt, Circle of Death. Honestly, Circle of Death? The books focused on your wife are even more hysterical: Can She Be Stopped? Hell to Pay, Guilty as Sin, Queen of Chaos, Stealing America, Armageddon. How unlucky you were that your White House years coincided with the rise of the mediaverse that alchemized conservative rage into a movement, first radio shock jocks, and then, at the start of your second term, the dawn of Fox News. And that was before social media locked us all in our partisan echo chambers and threw away the keys.
So there was a constant drumbeat in the background during your administration: claims about secret real estate deals and illegal foreign campaign contributions and even murder--claims that laid the foundation for ludicrous conspiracy theories about Democrats and pizza parlors that circulate in the fetid backwaters of the web even today. I remember paying little attention to any of it at the time because it was clear that it came out of partisan resentment. And indeed, you were never charged with any crime. But still, it makes me question myself, Bill, because today I often wonder how the MAGA people can just ignore the steady stream of indictments and convictions and outright shameless behavior swirling around their man, but no doubt they attribute all of it to a vast left-wing conspiracy. I have to ask myself, was I as blinded by partisanship as MAGA folks are today? And did our extreme partisanship all start there, in your administration, with the frustration of the right and the willful shrug of the left? It's important to note that no one ever found actionable evidence of wrongdoing in the Whitewater investigation, even after you yourself appointed a special prosecutor, a move Antonin Scalia disapproved of, because of the possibility a special prosecution would turn into partisan harassment.
As I have questioned myself on this, Bill, I have read as much as possible in the time constraints of this project, and what the Whitewater scandal looks like from the vantage point of a couple of decades is shoddy, loose dealings that might pass muster in Arkansas but that were unfit for the national stage. Illegal foreign contributions, yes, but the DNC returned them; possible quid pro quo over real estate deals and definite cronyism on behalf of friends and patrons, but none of it rose to the level of an indictment.
And yet: the women. No one, not even your partisans, believed you were totally innocent there, Bill. But the economy was booming, you had won a second term, and the business of America, after all, is business. I think of a phenomenon of that period, where women had sexy dreams about you--I had one too, I'm ashamed to say--but I ask myself, what was beneath that, really? A recognition, perhaps, that you were, to put it discreetly, available? A subconscious response to a man on the make? I think of that MTV interview you did when a teenage girl asked you the question she said everyone wanted answered--boxers or briefs?--and you astonished your aides by answering. This was a big deal at the time. Coarser, crasser things have become the norm since then--case in point: candidate Trump assuring the public that he has a large penis--but back then, to bring up even whatever swaddled the presidential junk was shocking.
In the end, this was the downfall of the Whitewater investigation: it led to only one smoking gun, and that was Monica Lewinsky. I remember watching you deny on television having had sex with "that woman," and thinking oh yes you did because there was something devious in the very way you denied it. But that lie, which led to the investigation delving deeper and completely dominating the news cycle, that lie, as you later said, saved you. Because by the time the evidence was gathered and presented, the public was exhausted by it. The unseemly slavering over every lurid detail just seemed icky. Yes, you were sleazy for messing around with an intern, even a willing one, but the general feeling was TMI! I don't want to return to the bad old days where a "gentleman's agreement" kept the iniquities of important men out of the public eye, JFK-style, because that situation treats women as mere toys for the powerful. But the pornographic testimony, the DNA-testing of Monica's Gap dress, it all began to look, to use Donald Trump's phrase, like a witch hunt.
But if I'm being honest, Bill, I have to challenge myself here too. Post #METOO, all of this looks different. Yes, a Republican judge dismissed as unprovable the case of Paula Jones, who claimed that as governor, you invited her to your hotel room and suddenly dropped trou. But it does echo the confirmed behavior of #METOO malefactors like Harvey Weinstein. (Which frankly, Bill, boggles the mind if it's true. Harvey Weinstein was an ogre but you were a young attractive man, and surely could have used classier seduction tactics.) But regardless of what happened in that particular hotel, here's what I think is the real question everyone wants answered: why can't we just have a president whose junk stays in his pants and out of the headlines?
So yes, Bill, the lie saved you. It also got you impeached for perjury. You squeaked by with an acquittal in the Senate and finished your term, enraging conservatives even more. Then in a shoddy last-minute move, you pardoned some of your convicted cronies. Worse, you provided a roadmap for future abusers of the office. Donald Trump definitely learned from your mistake: pay them off early to make the story go away. Though that didn't work out either, and I must return to my earlier point: the office of president deserves better. We the people deserve better.
At some point in your second term, my political friend got me an invite to a meet-and-greet where you were the main attraction. We all milled around expectantly until you walked into the room. You were literally larger than life. You crackled with energy and the immense power of the office. I was so impressed by you, and so disappointed to have to qualify that awe with what I knew about your character. I wanted to respect you. I wanted to respect myself.
Bill, I earnestly hope that in the years since 2000, you have learned to live with your complicated legacy. I suspect that you tried to do that by subordinating your own ambition to your wife's. What a blow it must have been to see how much, in sabotaging your own chance at greatness, you blighted hers as well. Even more, I hope that you have mended what was broken in your soul. In the end, that's what we hope for everyone. That's what I hope for myself.
Yours sincerely,
Ginger Strand
42: Bill Clinton