While I had been enjoying the gypsy life of a roving foreign policy writer and editor, Bob and Dan had been dealing with domestic issues that took a surprising turn in 1992. In that election year, the Democrats had nominated as their presidential candidate a young governor of Arkansas, William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton. George H.W. Bush had alienated much of the Republican base by breaking his “read-my-lips” pledge not to raise taxes, and Texas third-party maverick Ross Perot was a Republican spoiler, siphoning off enough of the conservative popular vote to have changed the outcome. Bill Clinton became the new president-elect with a Democratic Congress.
Clinton brought with him an ardent Progressive—his wife, Hillary. Things were about to change, and not in a good way in the view of Bob and Dan.
After the climactic events of 1990 and 1991, the world had calmed down a bit. I devoted more columns to the efforts of the European states to form a more perfect union. These included fumbling efforts to stabilize currency exchange rates, efforts we at the Journal very much approved of in principle, even if we sometimes scoffed at the petty disputes and wrong turns that accompanied this endeavor. We had long argued that sound money and stable relationships between the major currencies was a boon to world trade and economic growth. The Bob Mundell principle that there is only one economy, the global one, had been part of our syllabus. And indeed, Professor Mundell had a key role in designing Europe’s transition to a single currency, the euro.
But things warmed up a bit after the 1992 election. Bob became preoccupied with exposing the shady behavior of the Clintons when Bill was governor of Arkansas. Bob was offended by what he called the “Arkansas mores” the Clintons and their former associates in Little Rock brought to Washington. Over the eight-year Clinton era, the Journal editorial page gave the administration intense coverage, most of it critical. Bob and Melanie Kirkpatrick, features editor, assembled all that coverage into a six-volume set of books bearing the title “Whitewater” to commemorate the real estate scheme the Clintons had allegedly used in Arkansas to milk funds from a local savings and loan association.
There was plenty to write about. One subject was the installation of a slippery crony from Hillary’s Rose Law Firm in Little Rock as de facto attorney general. This associate, Webster Hubbell, later went to jail for defrauding Rose clients out of nearly a half million dollars. There was Hillary’s mysterious windfall profit of $99,000 from trading in cattle futures just after Bill was first elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. There were the various complaints from women, one of whom, Juanita Broaddrick, accused Clinton of raping her on April 15, 1978. One woman who didn’t complain was the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But when a friend leaked her account of giving the president oral sex in the Oval Office, it triggered an investigation by a special counsel, Kenneth Starr, that ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment. The Senate did not convict him.
On home leave early in the first Clinton term, I asked Bob if he might be overdoing the attack on the new president. Was there any public policy issue at stake in what he was doing, I wanted to know. He replied that yes, there was. The most important was to try to prevent Hillary from nationalizing the health care system. In that, he and other opponents, who even included some congressional Democrats, were successful. And after more and more revelations of shady doings by the Clintons hit the news, I no longer thought that Bob had overreacted to Bill’s misbehavior.
Indeed, the Clintons only had two years of working with a Congress of their own party, and those were not entirely successful from their point of view. The Democrats flinched at a massive energy tax the president proposed and at the national health system cooked up by Hillary in illegally secret task force deliberations. They did pass a less destructive tax increase, and that was enough for the voters, who returned the Republicans to majority power in Congress in 1994 and kept them there for 12 years until the Republicans themselves became corrupted by the temptations to do favors for special-interest constituents.
In 1995, I ran across a Boston University commencement speech delivered by the university’s acerbic, controversial and brilliant president, John Silber. It was titled “Obedience to the Unenforceable,” in which he cited the importance of manners and morals to the health of a society or, in other words, the willingness of a people to adhere to certain standards of conduct without any need for compulsion. Or in still other words, morality cannot be legislated. I liked the speech so well, I quoted it in two separate columns that year. One was a column about Pope John Paul II’s visit to New York during which he admonished a huge crowd in Central Park to “not be afraid.” The other was a column about international crime, which had taken on a new dimension with the advent of the Russian criminal mafia that had come into being in Europe and the United States after the Soviet collapse, as former KGB agents sought remunerative employment.
In the first column, I quoted the pope as saying that the revolutions in central Europe in 1989 were inspired by “a profound and powerful vision, the vision of man as a creature of intelligence and free will, immersed in a mystery that transcends his own being.” Citing the Silber lecture, I concluded the column by writing that John Paul’s message was that America needs a restoration of moral authority and that “The nation will have to find that for itself. It won’t be delivered by the state.”
In the column about crime, after detailing examples of the breakdown of law enforcement worldwide, I again cited Silber’s view that disdain for moral conduct cannot be healed by law enforcement alone. “Dealing with moral conduct on a global scale is a tall order, but that is what civilization is all about.”
Very much on my mind when I wrote those words was the Journal’s campaign to expose the moral failings of the Clinton administration. When Arkansas governor Bill Clinton had visited the Journal 14 years before he became president, he seemed amiable enough, but otherwise left little impression on our small group.
Bill Clinton as president was a wholly different matter. It is not necessary for a president to be a Bible thumper, and it is in fact probably not even desirable, as issues of moral behavior are best left to the church and moral philosophers, not to the nation’s chief law enforcer. But that does not mean that a president should not set an example for the nation in his own personal behavior. A president who invites a young intern to administer fellatio to him as he conducts business in the Oval Office and then lies about this gross behavior is hardly setting a good example for the youth of America.
It was this kind of conduct, dating back to the financial and sexual peccadillos in Little Rock, that so offended the moral sensitivities of Bob Bartley. If Bob were alive today, he would be nonplussed at the realization that the Clintons were still with us in 2016, this time with Hillary in the limelight and Bill in the shadows.
In the introduction to a booklet of Journal opinion pieces published in 1996, Bob wrote that during the 1970s, he had written mostly about foreign and military policy, which was, of course, appropriate at the height of the Cold War. In the 1980s, he said, he had focused on economic policy, again appropriate because we were deeply engaged in the supply-side revolution and were concerned about how to restore some order to the international monetary system.
The volume he was introducing was concerned with moral issues, which had become his area of focus in the 1990s. Said his introduction: “The moral canons of the welfare state have not succeeded in building the good society, and the nation is striving for a new moral balance between compassion and individual responsibility.” He was thus presenting the writings of intellectuals, such as William J. Bennett, secretary of education in the Reagan administration; Charles Murray, author of the 1984 book “Losing Ground” arguing that the LBJ War on Poverty was actually creating perpetual poverty for the underclass; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian whose 1995 book, “The De-Moralization of Society, from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” presented a similarly gloomy view of the current trends in moral values. The booklet contained essays by other thinkers along with Journal editorials related to the morality theme.
After only two years of Democratic Party control of both the White House and Congress, Republicans led by Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich had retaken Congress by presenting a reform agenda called the “Contract with America.” Thus, the governmental achievements of the second half of the 1990s, such as the welfare system reforms encapsulated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, were in part a product of the Gingrich “contract” although mostly the result of pressure from state governors who were worried about the rising burden on their own budgets of the swelling number of people seeking a dole. Bob’s wish of stalling Hillary’s efforts to nationalize health care was realized, postponing that effort for 14 years, when a renewed effort by Progressives, who still could count Hillary as one of their inspirational leaders, would achieve that result with ObamaCare.
Bill Clinton had some achievements on his side of the balance sheet in his two years of one-party governance. While early in his presidency he had flirted with gratifying the wishes of a labor movement that had become increasingly protectionist in the 1990s, he pulled away from that position early on. The 1994 North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) lowering barriers on commerce crossing the borders between the United States, Mexico and Canada passed Congress with strong Republican help, and he signed it into law. He also deserves some credit for signing onto welfare reform.
Bob’s steady drumbeat of questions about the personal integrity of some of Clinton’s key employees and of Clinton himself may have played a role in the 1994 Democratic rout. But it was not enough to prevent Clinton’s reelection in 1996, a victory that ironically may have been partly the result of the free trade and welfare reforms that came about through the president’s cooperation with the opposition Republicans.
The 1996 election pitted Clinton and Vice President Al Gore against the amiable senator Robert Dole of Kansas and his running mate, our old friend Jack Kemp, who had played such an important role in the supply-side revolution. The Republicans were again weakened by a third-party bid by Ross Perot, who siphoned off some 8 million conservative votes, although not so many, statistically, to have cost Dole the election.
While Bob adhered to our tradition of not endorsing a candidate, he left no doubt about which side he wanted defeated. Just before the election, when a Clinton win seemed likely, he filled the Review & Outlook space with a long editorial titled “Four More Years,” which was a catalog of Clinton legal and ethical issues in his first term. Among them were a string of high-level resignations, most of them involving legal issues.
There also was the mysterious suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster and testimony by a Secret Service officer that he had seen Clinton’s chief of staff Maggie Williams carrying an armload of files from Foster’s office just after the tragedy.
Then, there was a litigation against Hillary for allegedly conducting hearings of her Health Care Task Force in secret in violation of federal law. There were all sorts of legal issues including the May 28, 1996, conviction of James and Susan McDougal, owners of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association in Little Rock, for bank fraud and conspiracy. In the ’80s, the McDougals had been partners with the Clintons in the Whitewater Development Co., which built vacation homes in the Ozarks, and investigators had found questionable dealings between Madison Guaranty and Whitewater.
Also in the long list was the charge by Paula Corbin Jones in May 1994 that she had been sexually harassed by Clinton when he was governor. The editorial was a long bill of particulars against the president, but it didn’t prevent his reelection.
Perhaps most Americans were less affronted by the bad behavior of politicians than we were at the Journal editorial page. The 1990s were a freewheeling age in which standards of taste were almost nonexistent in the popular culture. But the aforementioned John Silber raised a good point in asking whether his new crop of college graduates in 1995 understood the importance to a society of obedience to the unenforceable. Dan Henninger would write in March 1993 an editorial titled “No Guardrails” that further explored the erosion of moral standards.
Dan deplored what he saw as a change from a time “when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?” Dan, stipulating that many would disagree, dated this cultural shift back to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago when the party found itself “sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.”
“The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.
“With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance—against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.
“What in the past had been simply illegal became ‘civil disobedience.’ If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience—taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts—the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the ‘dissidents’ (in the ’60s and ’70s) and ‘activists’ (in the ’80s and now).”
Dan wrote that the intellectuals and politicians who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift emerged unscathed. “But for a lot of other people it hasn’t been such an easy life to sustain . . . Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn’t handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain . . . These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They’re guardrails.”
The editorial attracted a lot of attention, deservedly so. Dan had defined how even a well-ordered society, with strong institutions, can have no assurance that those institutions will survive that all-too-human tendency to smash icons and overthrow established beliefs. That is why John Silber’s treatise on the enforcement of the unenforceable was worth pondering.
Clinton was impeached in December 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury in the Paula Jones case but not convicted by the two-thirds majority required in the Senate. After his acquittal, he was cited for contempt of court by federal judge Susan Webber Wright for his testimony in the case and had his law license suspended by the State of Arkansas the next year.
After his acquittal, Clinton went back on the offensive with: “We must stop the politics of personal destruction. We must get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity and uncontrolled anger.”
Bob quoted those lines in an editorial titled “After Impeachment.” Then, he suggested that we review the politics of personal destruction, such as when Clinton’s aide James Carville had slandered Paula Jones with the insult, “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find,” or when the Clintons fired the entire White House Travel Office staff (called “Travelgate”) and caused its director, Billy Dale, to be indicted for fraud. (At his trial, a jury acquitted him in two hours.)
The editorial reminded readers that Clinton was not impeached for his sexual sins but for his “mockery of the judicial system” which, of course, referred to his lying in the Paula Jones case.
Said the editorial: “In a grave and at times moving debate on the House floor, the Democrats time and again agreed with their Republican colleagues that Mr. Clinton’s behavior—not merely his appetites but his insistence on what Rep. J.C. Watts called ‘the edges of truth’—was contemptible and condemnable. But while the Republicans sought impeachment, Democrats fashioned the rubber lifeboat of compromise and censure.”
The editorial expressed some sympathy for the plight of the Democratic senators when the president from their party was in the dock. But it argued that in the politics of personal destruction, the first step is for Democrats and their media allies to admit that the Republicans have a point about the rule of law and the president’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
The editorial concluded that “Bill Clinton has brought the presidency to the lowest repute since the impeachment of Richard Nixon.”
In January 2001 when the Clintons ended their second term, Bob would write an editorial titled “Who Is Bill Clinton?”, a reprise of the editorial with the same title he had written in March 1992 when the Clintons first emerged from their relative obscurity in Arkansas. Bob was no more sparing than he had been when Clinton was in power. He wrote that “Bill Clinton’s flaw is that he sees everything in the whole wide world as his personal property. Mr. Clinton seems to have believed that he could use everything as he wished, not because he is an officer of the state of Arkansas or of the United States, but because he is Bill Clinton.
“And so the things he saw as belonging mainly to him included the Presidency of the United States, the Oval Office, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, the Secret Service of the United States, the lawyers of the White House counsel’s office, Ron Brown’s Commerce Department, the Democratic National Committee, the Department of Justice, the landing patterns at Los Angeles Airport, Madison Guaranty, the Lincoln Bedroom and, not least, the rest of the world . . .
“These columns have argued that this behavior is sociopathic. Psychiatrists who don’t trust their profession’s categories objected, but whatever the medical precision, a neurotic recklessness was clear enough. Yes, other personally reckless men have risen into the Presidency, but none were so oblivious to the need for personal or political temperance while serving as the nation’s first public officer. He asked an army of federal officials and federal institutions to protect him from the consequences. His legacy is that they did so.”
Bob concluded that the “great paradox of the Clinton Presidency is that even as it achieved so little, the economy flourished beginning in 1994, a breakpoint in the Clinton Presidency. In fact, bonds, as an index of economic well-being, languished midway through the first Clinton term, then rose smartly in November 1994 precisely when the GOP won control of the House.”
This has a politically partisan ring to it that might be resented by Democrats, but there were indeed some important successes, including the two mentioned above, during the six years when power was split between a Democratic presidency and a Republican House. It has led a number of political theorists to argue that the republic is safest when that kind of two-party balance exists. Opinion polls have shown that the public, by and large, thinks so as well. That became an especially interesting view when the Democrats gained control of both the White House and Congress again in 2009 and loosed a new torrent of dubious Progressive policies, most particularly the widely unpopular ObamaCare.