American Rhapsody (11 page)

Even as Bill Clinton raged and shrieked and smashed his chair arms, there were other new allegations: A White House makeup person didn't like the way she said he “flirted” with her . . . . One of the stews on the campaign plane said he'd folded his arms and wiggled his finger across her nipple while Hillary was only a few feet away, napping.

It seemed he'd continue to have, in his aide's phrase, more “personal exposure” on this issue, and in his frustration and rage, screaming and shrieking, Bill Clinton wished he could be more like one of his aides, Harold Ickes, who had said to the White House counsel, “You better get this fucking straight and listen up! You better keep your fucking nose out of this! And if you don't like it, you can just go fuck yourself!” God, Bill Clinton thought, how he'd love to say that to Kenneth W. Starr! God, the president of the United States thought, how he'd love to make that speech live, prime-time: “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Listen up! Keep your fucking nose out of this! If you don't like it, go fuck yourself!”

It was no fun being around the White House. Imagine: The preacher's son, that sanctimonious wimp, was talking about sending over a search warrant . . . a search warrant! As if the White House were some kind of crystal meth lab! . . . Looking for Hillary's Rose Law Firm billing records. Then the FBI had come over to fingerprint first Hillary and then himself, the president of the United States . . . the whole deal you see on NYPD Blue . . . a full roll of every finger, then the palm and the side of the hand. White House staffers were wearing rubber gloves, looking at files they were afraid Starr might want. And all this time, that evil roving spotlight was fixed on the center of his private gravity, the place where he'd led so many hands. He scheduled another trip to L.A . . . . to raise some more cash to better America . . . to play some more golf . . . to smoke his cigar in his golf cart.

Time flew fast in L.A., the place where real life was only a few reels long. Nobody in Hollywood cared anymore about Mike DeLuca's blow job, or Farrah Fawcett's defecation, either. Everybody was talking now about the size of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee's willard, exposed in a video with Pamela Anderson Lee that was being messengered all over the studios. I got mine by messenger from an executive at Disney in the same package with
The Lion King
and
Beauty and the Beast.

The women in Fox's publicity office weren't impressed, though. They had something called the P-file—a collection of stills taken from the outtakes of movies. Plenty of big male stars. All full-frontal nude. Forget Tommy Lee, the women said. Check out Willem Dafoe. Hurray for Hollywood! The president of the United States found solace in the only place in America, maybe on earth, where people were talking about other willards.

[8]

The War on Acid Reflux

“I didn't kiss a boy for four years,” Monica said.

“Really?” Linda asked.

“When I was in high school,” Monica said, “oh, this was like the most depressing time of my life. How depressing is that?”

“Well,” Linda Tripp said, “you sure made up for it, dear.”

G
ood evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.
Let's go to press! It was a million-megaton story. Bill Clinton was hip-deep in the Big Muddy now, under the Tallahatchie Bridge, gasping for air like Brian Jones.

The Pentagon Papers hadn't been as publicized as the
Starr Report
. Nixon's incursion into Cambodia hadn't gotten as much bad press as
his
semi-incursion into Monica. If the failure of Nixon's Vietnamization policy hadn't resulted in calls for Nixon's resignation, then why was his masturbation prompting so many calls for
his
resignation? Nixon was guilty of aerial atrocities; all he'd done were oral sodomies. Nixon had had it easy. Well, yes, there was the war and there were all those demonstrations, but Nixon had all those orbitings and moon walks and
Apollos
and
Saturn Fives
and
Surveyors
. “I am not a crook” didn't sound
that
bad in the context of “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the eagle has landed.”

Bill Clinton had dodged the draft and now found himself the target of a television air war, tap-dancing around land mines on the slippery slopes of a slimy Ho Chi Minh trail, strafed, bombed, barraged by editorialists howling, “Resign! Resign! Resign!” Even Bob Dole had been drawn into the scandal. Dole, the lobbyist now that he always should have been, Monica's next-door neighbor at the Watergate, was handing out doughnuts to the press camped outside, sharing the weekly supply he received for doing Dunkin' Donut ads.

“If you're in big trouble over something,” Dick Morris had said to Bill Clinton before Dick's own disgrace, before Dick's preference for toes shared the same tabloid pages with Marv Albert's werewolf imitation, “the best strategy is to distract 'em.” Or, as Harry Truman said, “If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.”

But how could Bill Clinton
distract 'em
or
confuse 'em
when the media Beast was feeding on this in its own gluttonous way—“All news all the time! Continuous twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage!” What could he throw the Beast so it would feed on something or someone else? What could the Beast possibly enjoy more than this feast of food so rich that ratings were skyrocketing even on Fox News?

Searching for a distraction, his more pointy-headed aides argued for “a redefinition of the big picture, a reframing of historical context,” to make a case that there was nothing that was really unseemly or un-American or unpresidential or
unique
about Bill Clinton's actions. Researchers turned into private eyes, snooping the history books and memoirs for anything that might be . . .
relevant
to this.

George Washington was probably bisexual (irrelevant) . . . . Thomas Jefferson fathered a black child (bingo! jackpot! very relevant) . . . . Benjamin Franklin liked threesomes (maybe relevant) . . . . James Buchanan may have been gay (probably irrelevant) . . . . Warren Harding made love to a young mistress in the White House closet (so relevant), but Harding was such a corrupt sleazeball—
Whitewater was not, was not Teapot Dome!
—that any attempt to craft a Harding shield would only hurt . . . . FDR and his mistress Lucy Mercer, one of several, had a lot of oral sex (full-scale relevance alert!), but FDR was bound to a wheelchair, so oral sex was a near necessity . . . . LBJ said, “I get more pussy in twenty-four hours than Jack Kennedy got his entire life” (probably relevant), but LBJ was such a barnyard hick that drawing parallels between LBJ and Bill Clinton could boomerang . . . . JFK was a sex fiend (directly relevant, but, unfortunately, old news, gorged and gobbled by the Beast way too often to distract it from what was on the table now).

Besides researchers turned into private eyes, veterans of more recent scandals were out there, too, tipping the White House to juicy morsels that might distract the Beast. They remembered the stripper Fanne Fox and octogenarian Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills . . . nontyping secretary Elizabeth Ray and near-octogenarian Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes . . . Teddy Kennedy under the table at Sans Souci, plastered out of his mind, trying to force an unwilling waitress to . . . (Oh, not relevant! Sad-eyed old congressmen and fat old Teddy, the little brother who couldn't, disgraced forever anyway for fatal cowardice at Chappaquiddick.)

And Gerry Ford? Gerry Ford had had more problems with women than anyone, but no one understood why. Why did Squeaky Fromme want to kill him? Why did Sara Jane Moore want to kill him? And what about that seventy-seven-year-old woman who rammed the White House gates with her car, got arrested, got released, went home, got in her car, and rammed the gates again that same night? What was there about flatulent, pipe-smoking, mild-mannered Gerry Ford that made women want to kill him?

Unfortunately, there was no riskless way to reframe the historical context. The history of American politics was an unswept minefield and rusted shrapnel posed the danger of tearing Bill Clinton's head off. Besides that, the Beast was being savagely criticized by the soccer moms for feasting on all this garbage. To throw more maggoty food atop the table now would further enrage those moms . . . and then someone (Hillary?) had a brilliant idea. Feed the Beast a different taste to distract it—something sweet.

Sweet
? But what? What was
sweet
in this story? A small box of chocolates as payoff for phone sex and blow jobs? A last “Christmas kiss”?
Sweet
? No, no, Monica was the wrong woman to focus on. The right woman was Chelsea. And her mom and dad. A family in crisis. A family healing. A family forgiving. Give the Beast a soap opera, feed it schmaltz, play it some violins. How could the Beast not like that?

It was beautiful! It was uplifting! The Beast gobbled it up . . . and so did we. It was sugar-coated breakfast cereal that snapped and popped in our mouths. Not for nothing had we become the sensitive, in-touch-with-real-feelings generation. The generation of communication, intervention, closure, and venting. We had designed ourselves, ever since the sixties, to buy this story. “Love is all you need,” the Beatles had said.

And so, out of the detritus of cigar butts, we conjured for ourselves—at the Beast's urging—a sappy, universal love story. He cheats. He's sorry. He loves his wife. They love their daughter. Will mommy and their daughter forgive him? Stay tuned! “All news all the time! Continuous twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage!”

We were torn away now from the Oval Office and Bill Clinton's private office, the scene of the noncrime crime. We were watching a different show:
The First Family in Crisis!
We were away from XXX into PG country, away from
Boogie Nights
and safe with
The American President
or a nineties remake of
Kramer vs. Kramer
. Some of us got tears in our eyes. Oh, look at poor, brave Chelsea! Trying to carry on so heroically with her hellish schedule at Stanford after daddy's screwed the pooch! Poor, poor Chelsea, even her nice, clean-cut, white-bread swim-star boyfriend dumped her because he didn't want anything to do with someone whose father . . . Poor, poor Chelsea!
People in the streets were dressed up as human cigars! Signs on overpasses screeched
HONK IF HE SHOULD RESIGN!
How could poor Chelsea possibly deal with this? Such a brave, noble, innocent,
sweet
young woman?

And look at poor Hillary, her fate the fate of most of America's women. Betrayed, humiliated, victimized! Oh, she thought she was so highfalutin for a while there, didn't she? Wearing her fancy black coat with the silver Deco design into the grand jury hearing, even autographing her book for a juror, acting in general like hers didn't stink . . .
not anymore
! Brought down off the throne now, just one of millions of cheated women now, one of us now. But how brave she was in the face of this smell. Noble. Crying behind her sunglasses. Because she . . . loved . . . him . . . and . . . he . . . loved . . . her! You could just tell . . . and they both loved their little girl and they'd love each other forever and live happily ever after and he'd never cheat again! The Beast was happy and so were we. We fell for it like Monica fell for him. Jesse Jackson and ministers everywhere waved their applause signs at us in case we had second thoughts:
LOVE! HEALING! FORGIVENESS! NOT RESIGNATION! NO IMPEACHMENT! FINISH OUT THE TERM!

Yes, there were a few critics who said, Please! It's horse manure! Tripe for the masses! Dick Morris's distraction strategy at full throttle! . . . Morris had also said, “My job is to run the pump and the motors, not to fix the hole at the bottom of the boat” and “Polls are the ultimate master of the Western World” . . . but there was no doubt the strategy was working. Bill Clinton's approval rating was sky-high and, now that she was off of her throne and one of us, now that she'd been humiliated, Hillary's approval rating was sky-high, too. (Some of her aides worried about that a bit. If we liked Hillary only after she'd been humiliated, did that mean we liked humiliating her? Do you really like a person whom you want to humiliate?)

First we watched
A Time to Heal!
 . . . Bill Clinton saying he was sorry, over and over again, sometimes choked up, though it was difficult to determine what exactly he was sorry for. In his words, “inappropriate actions”—which could have meant anything from using the
N
word, using the
F
word, or cutting a loud and rude one aimed at Arafat while at Camp David. In an increasingly appropriate America, it could have meant just about anything, but whatever it was, Bill Clinton was sorry. So sorry, so very, very sorry. During this period of healing, he hung out with ministers the way he'd hung out with Steven and Jeffrey and David, and clutched his Bible like a man with emphysema clutches an oxygen tank, or like a man robbing a bank clutches a gun.

Then, after this period of healing, choreographed for a monthlong period, like a ratings-sweep television miniseries, we watched
A Time to Forgive!
Hillary, back at his side, the sunglasses gone, Chelsea between them, even Buddy, the puppy, wagging his tail once again (and no longer squatting on the Rose Garden lawn).

Even the most successful show, however, comes to an eventual end: Those insane Republicans kept yammering about impeachment—“The elephant has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and, as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of his predecessor,” Adlai Stevenson had said—and the Beast, jittery and petulant, was showing signs of suffering sugar rush. So, to act out the screenplay written by Dick Morris,
another
distraction was needed.
Impeachment
? Had the Republicans completely lost their minds?
Impeachment
? With Bill Clinton's approval rating sky-high and the economy booming?
Impeachment
? With even Hillary, the big loser in the midterm election of 1994, triumphant again thanks to her abject humiliation, admired again in her disgrace.
Impeachment
? No way! Not a chance! Nada! Zip! But still, just to make sure . . . another distraction was imperative.

The policy wonks got together and wonked! An issue, maybe? Gay marriage? A new offensive in the war on big tobacco? How about a sequel to health care now that Hillary wasn't radioactive anymore? More empowerment zones? A war against a new disease? How about a war against one of those diseases people were always hearing about on TV?
That
would guarantee an already-receptive, preconditioned audience. A war against hemorrhoids? Incontinence? Diarrhea? Male-pattern baldness? The ever-elusive Epstein-Barr virus? Constipation? A war against acid reflux?

Some of the more hypochondriacal policy wonks waged a spirited campaign to expand the putative medical offensive from the
limited
target of acid reflux to the wider
killing zone
of heartburn. In arguing for the War on Burps—it admittedly didn't have the ring of the War on Poverty or the War on Illiteracy—they pointed out that antiburp medication was already a $1.4 billion industry. A lot of dyspeptic Americans would rally gassily, their gastric juices sloshing, behind this distracting New Age flag.

The War on Burps, some policy wonks explained, would also be seen as part of the administration's Holy War on Cancer. Overflowing gastric juices left the esophagus with scar tissue and altered the cells that line it, thereby making those altered cells more likely to develop the dreaded terror, so much scarier than Saddam and all those other war criminals in biblical robes, Public Enemy Numero Uno . . .
the Big C!
But no, the wonks were just being wonkish. Cancer had already been wonked and milked even by liberal Republican wonks, the Compassionate Conservatives (which, some Hollywood wags said, was as oxymoronic as saying “lady producers”).

What Bill Clinton needed desperately was a wild boar national tragedy, some hard-shell and awfully cynical pols felt (the kind of pols who thought Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets passed the first Civil Rights Bill and James Earl Ray's the second; who thought Reagan would have been nailed for Iran-Contra without Hinckley). Bill Clinton needed a humongous hurricane with thousands of deaths, or anthrax in Central Park, or a Three Mile Island meltdown on a Chernobyl scale, or the Big One in California voiding a chunk of coastline into the sea, or a Texas tower–type sniper in a ballpark.
Something
 . . . on that tragic level. (The shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, much later, would have been perfect.)