No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton By Christopher Hitchens Verso 122pp, £12 in UK
Warning the world about the perils of Bill Clinton at this moment in history must be, by any measure, a wearying - if not hopeless - crusade. Surely one cannot fathom that any being on the planet is currently standing resolute in the contention that the American president is an archetype of character and courage, of integrity and vision, of goodness and candour? There may be, however, somewhere, a soul who suspects that Bill Clinton is human, has accomplished a few good things during his two-term Presidency, and perhaps even feels a modicum of affection for his dog Buddy.
Christopher Hitchens will have none of it. The complexities of the man are invisible to Hitchens; instead, Clinton is a monster, pure and simple, a man without conscience. Hitchens's kindest interpretation of Clinton would be to diagnose him as a sociopath, an interpretation that is kind because it supposes that a pathology of that magnitude is at least not voluntary, while the alternative - an evil man choosing to commit evil acts - is.
"Clintonism poisons everything it touches," seethes Hitchens in one of his more economic declarations. More typically, he writes: "His prolixity remains stubborn and incurable, yet it remains a fact that in all his decades of logorrhoea Clinton has failed to make a single remark that could possibly adhere to the cortex of a thinking human being."
It is those kinds of pronouncements - ("adhere to the cortex . . .? " exclaimed a friend who read the book. "Yuck.") that make this book little more than a slim, infrequently entertaining read. Hitchens's rage and anger and bitterness make his braying both unpleasant to endure and uninformative to anyone searching for a forthright analysis of the Clinton era. Anyone who has anything nice to say about Clinton is simply dismissed by Hitchens. To wit, a partial list;
Former Clinton adviser Dick Morris is a "pimp".
Historian Arthur Schlesinger jnr is a "polka-dotted popinjay".
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is a "loophole artist for rich thugs".
Playwright Arthur Miller is "the stupid one".
Poet Maya Angelou's work is "doggerel".
US Attorney General Janet Reno is "a biddable mediocrity".
Born in 1949 in England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford in 1970. A long-time contributor to The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines, he has used his perch as an over-educated British outsider to rail against the inequities of America ever since. He is nothing if not prolific. He has written at least five books and two collections of essays. Nary a month can pass without reading Hitchens in the New York Review of Books, Salon's Internet magazine, or in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or New York Observer op-ed pages.
A frequent presence on television, he has captured an American readership as well as viewership with his sharp wit, bad-boy persona, and rumpled demeanour. The portrait of him on The Christopher Hitchens Website is an Annie Leibovitz classic of a besweatered Hitchens holding a cigarette before a collection of empty pint glasses. During interviews, he makes sure to drink alcohol in copious quantities, even if it is early in the morning, thus enshrining a certain image.
It is really all rather entertaining then, the Hitchens industry. Few would begrudge a talented and clever writer, especially one so merrily enthralled with his own verbiage. But what makes Hitchens's newest work so unfortunate is not his meanness or the sloppiness of his reportage. The sadness is that much of what Hitchens contends about Clinton may be true. Another author will have to tell us. It is the absence of scholarship and seriousness about a matter as dangerous as the cynical antics of an irresponsible American president that is disheartening.
Hitchens accuses Clinton of disingenuousness on every imaginable topic, from race relations to militarism to welfare reform. He accuses him of populist manipulation and a destruction of democracy by an over-reliance on polling. This latter piece of business is hardly news and hardly exclusive to, or invented by, Clinton. (Governance by the overnight poll has been a feature of American politics since the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and the elevation to guru-status of his pollster Patrick Caddell.)
But in his frenzy to prove Clinton is a really bad man who lies all the time, Hitchens falters. He triumphantly cites, for example, a 1997 speech by Clinton commemorating the triumph over racial segregation in sport of an African-American baseball player named Jackie Robinson. In his speech, Clinton remembers his boyhood arguments in the Deep South over segregation, and he cites Robinson as a victorious element of those arguments over boys espousing bigotry.
Robinson "retired from the game in 1956, when Clinton was nine. The Supreme Court had decided in favour of school integration a year before that," Hitchens writes in support of his thesis that Clinton was lying in his recounting of his boyhood attack on segregation.
Clinton probably was embellishing a yarn. But the fact is that spirited schoolyard arguments about black folks and about Jackie Robinson were alive in America well past the 1950s. They were certainly topics when race riots consumed Newark, New Jersey, Detroit and Harlem in 1967. They were alive when Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white man in 1968.
Nothing that has happened in the last decade in America is not Clinton's responsibility, in Hitchens's world-view. Mandatory drug testing of employees by private companies, the increase in each state's application of the death penalty, mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals convicted of a third offence . . . All are Clinton's fault.
In the waning days of the effort to impeach Clinton, Hitchens signed an affidavit for prosecutor Kenneth Starr that accused White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal of lying in a deposition about the Monica Lewinsky matter. In signing the affidavit against a man who had been his friend for 15 years, Hitchens disclosed an off-the-record comment once made to him by Blumenthal.
Nothing came of the affidavit, with much of America sick to death of the Lewinsky matter and all those associated with it. Hitchens, however, earned the wrath of most journalists and those who regard a betrayal of friendship with some seriousness. The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, no fan of Clinton's, called him "Snitchen Hitchens".
And so, perhaps, Hitchens is right when he says "Clintonism poisons all". Infected with his self-created brand of Clintonism, Hitchens's credibility has been weakened, and his writing compromised, by a venom and confused vengence that, in the end, is easily forgotten.
Book Service:
To order this book, or any book on these pages, and have it sent directly to your home or office, call the Irish Times Book Service at 1850-30-60-60