Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [281]
Hillary Rodham Clinton was standing by her husband, alleging that a broad, black-hearted conspiracy of political enemies was seeking to do him in. The national television audience—or at least a portion of it—loved it.
That same night, President Bill Clinton gave a masterful State of the Union address. He made no mention of adultery or Monica Lewinsky or the scandal that was threatening to wreck his presidency. Instead, the embattled chief executive spoke of the importance of safeguarding budget surpluses, and of the dangers posed by Iraq, where a military strike by American forces might be necessary if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein continued to defy United Nations weapons inspectors. It was a virtuoso performance, one of the most dazzling of his career, bumping Clinton’s finicky poll numbers upward.
Yet there were ominous signs that not everyone was buying the president’s slick salesmanship, even among his most loyal supporters. Justice David Newbern, longtime “Friend of Bill,” or FOB, watched the finger-wagging speech from his living room in Little Rock and reached an unpleasant conclusion: “I thought it was probably not the truth,” he would recall. As someone who had known Bill Clinton for years, Newbern detected something in his face and mannerisms that disturbed him. “It seemed to me that there was something wrong there, that we were headed for a downhill slide.”
Betsey Wright felt almost sickened by all the signs. “I know his body language too well,” she said as if in a trance. “I knew he wasn’t telling the truth.” She still felt a large measure of responsibility for allowing Bill Clinton to rise to this position of power, knowing the dirty secrets of select “sexual escapades” in the past. “God, was I angry with him,” she said, recalling this low point in her own life. “Because he knew that he was under a microscope. I guess I have felt for some time that the dalliances that Bill Clinton had, had nothing to do with sex. They had to do with some kind of inferiority complex that he inexplicably had. And that it was a sickness that he as president of the United States wasn’t free to go get help on it. I didn’t want him to run for president. And I remember telling him that I didn’t think he could control [his desire for women]. And that he would end up nationally embarrassing and humiliating Hillary and Chelsea. And he told me that he had it all under control now.”
John Brummett, a Little Rock journalist who had worked the state capital beat for the Arkansas Gazette and had followed Bill Clinton since he ran for attorney general, was attending a party with a group of Arkansas friends at the conclusion of this incredible week and reached a three-part conclusion: “One, he did it. Two, he lied under oath about it. Three, he’s gotta go.” Brummett now predicted that Clinton would resign: “Only because he would have to.”
Even among folks from home, Brummett detected, an irreparable split was developing. “By that point, I don’t think Arkansas had any view of Clinton that was discernibly different from the rest of the country,” he explained, “except we’d had ours longer.… I mean, all the things the nation was going through, we’d been going through that before. We’d just been doing it longer.”
As one journalist acquaintance of Brummett’s who was an avowed FOB put it, “You know Bill just kind of eats you up. You give and give and give to him. And then, when you’re done giving to him, he moves on to somebody else who’s got some more to give. I think that’s kind of the nature of this all-consuming politician that he is.”
When Clinton was first elected president, many Arkansans had believed that capturing this high office would bring a treasure trove of glorious prizes to Arkansas. Instead, many were muttering that they were getting “nothing except a bad name” out of this deal. The rest of the country was making jokes as if Arkansas was a haven for hillbillies who intermarried and cheated on each other for amusement. Now, critics were snickering louder than ever: “This is