CHAPTER 14 The Age of the Long Lie

William Jefferson Clinton, while breaking down barriers with his progressive agenda, was also helping to break down society’s tolerance for moral absolutism. From a liberal perspective, not all creeds or sects or relationships were perceived as being beholden to an ultimate set of practices and principles. And yet this rejection of a common, fundamental value system also had its troubling downside. It allowed the ethically ambiguous individual—it allowed the president himself—to play fast and loose with the truth. It allowed him to waffle in his public pronouncements and private behavior, and then to recalibrate, reboot, and be redeemed.

Clinton, during one of his first crucial moments on the national stage, had been untruthful. And he would ultimately admit the obvious in his memoir—long after his initial encounter with Ms. Gennifer Flowers: “Six years after my January 1992 appearance on 60 Minutes, I had to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case, and… I acknowledged that, back in the 1970s, I had had a relationship with [Gennifer Flowers] that I should not have had.” In reassessing that TV appearance, 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft now says, with a bit of perspective, “The thing that I was most proud of about the interview: that we put him on record [addressing] what he thought about [the Flowers accusations] and that he was either lying or telling the truth. And, it turned out, he was lying.… There was no question he was lying to me.”

Many of us had first met Bill Clinton on national television as we watched him lying about sex. His first week in office, he had laid the groundwork for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” an executive directive that mandated lying about sex. Indeed, he had almost lost the presidency by lying about sex under oath. But the lies about sex, in the end, didn’t seem to faze the nation. For all the pique and wincing and mincing, this tendency to parse the truth was a Clinton habit, a strategy, an ethical tic—and one that the citizenry appeared to be adopting in many facets of modern life. If the president had told a white lie? Big whoop.

The lesson of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s had been that the lie—the cover-up—was always worse than the crime. (Corollary: no man, even the president, is above the law.) But modern presidents have long terms and short memories. Clinton, and George W. Bush after him, would elevate lying into spin art. Over the sixteen-year span of their back-to-back administrations, truth, as presented by White House aides and political spinmeisters and news outlets, became rhetorical taffy. News consumers became seasoned skeptics, learning to expect and tolerate a certain level of elastic veracity (a quality later identified by comedian Stephen Colbert as “truthiness”).1

Apropos of Clinton and Bush, Frank Rich, the columnist and cultural observer, would propose a name for a politician’s impulse to pontificate in complete fact-check freedom: “post-fact syndrome.” Rich defined the term in 2006 as a collective bargaining agreement between politicians, the media, and the commonwealth in which “anyone on the public stage can make up anything and usually get away with it.” Expounding on this thesis in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Rich would conduct a granular analysis of the George W. Bush administration’s spin machine: “It dramatized its fable to the nation and made it credible to so many, even when it wasn’t remotely true.… Only an overheated 24/7 infotainment culture that had trivialized the very idea of reality (and with it, what once was known as ‘news’) could be so successfully manipulated by those in power.… The very idea of truth is an afterthought and an irrelevancy in a culture where the best story wins.”

In the walkup to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (and then Bush’s spuriously advertised “Mission Accomplished”), for example, it would only belatedly dawn on the country, in Rich’s view, “that the reasons sold to the public and the world by the administration were decoys.… The real crime was the sending of American men and women to war on fictitious grounds.”

Much of this flimflam, of course, predated the 2000s. Elastic veracity in the second half of the twentieth century had been rolled out by Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam advisers and spokesmen, honed by Nixon and his White House aides, and fine-tuned by Reagan—all before the preeminence of cable news and the World Wide Web. (We had traveled light-years from those noble days when Watergate reporter Bob Woodward defined journalism as being “the best obtainable version of the truth.”)

But to circle back to the decade at hand. It was William Jefferson Clinton, first and foremost, who turned out to be the Michael Jordan of this craft: deft, cunning, and convincing, a born debater, talker, and persuader. He perfected the spin default at the very moment that truthiness was becoming an acceptable response in human interactions of every kind—on Wall Street and the ballfield, in the boardroom and the bedroom.

“I think we do live in a Clintonized culture,” said Arkansas journalist Paul Greenberg, as Clinton was making his second run for the White House. “Just turn on your television set, or read your newspaper, or try to find out what the latest spin is, and you can see what counts is the right sentimental expression, the right style, rather than anything below the surface.” (Indeed, columnist William Safire, that same year, would brand First Lady Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar.”)

It was, in a phrase, the age of the long lie.

Bill Clinton, as the ’90s progressed, began to incarnate the equivocal. Journalist Joe Klein, in a famous 1994 essay for Newsweek, would call it “the politics of promiscuity.” In making his case, Klein was describing both Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom he had rather canonized during the early swoon of the ’92 campaign. “A clear pattern has emerged—of delay, of obfuscation, of lawyering the truth,” he wrote. “With the Clintons, the story always is subject to further revision. The misstatements are always incremental. The ‘misunderstandings’ are always innocent—casual, irregular, promiscuous. Trust is squandered in dribs and drabs. Does this sort of behavior also infect the president’s public life, his formulation of public policy? Clearly, it does. A president’s every word, the nuances of each position he takes, must be carefully considered. There is no room for carelessness—or promiscuity.”

Klein would see this promiscuity—this compulsion to share or receive affection and admiration indiscriminately—as a deep character flaw when it came to assuming the job of leader of the free world.4

Dee Dee Myers is more charitable, if critical nonetheless. “[It] was a tactic that Clinton used more effectively—and I don’t mean it in a good way—than anyone I’d ever worked for,” she says. “In politics, people lawyer the truth, and Clinton did. That’s a fair criticism. Clinton would say things that were technically true but that created a misimpression that kind of intentionally sent people in the wrong direction. Or, more often, I think he tried to leave himself wiggle room and change his mind and say he never said [that].

“Did he do that in his personal life? I tried to make the argument for a long time—to myself and publicly—that there was a [distinction]: a private morality and a public morality. Not that the private morality wasn’t important; it is, because it does create trust. But isn’t it more important that the public acts—the things that affect the commonweal—are much more [significant] than what affects his marriage? Can you separate those two things? I think, in a way, you can. But it’s not a healthy thing to do.”

True, Clinton had arrived into this shift in American conscience. But he was also subject to laws, judges, and prosecutors that seemed less flexible than in previous eras. “People often lie when interrogated about sex, and American law used to be more sensitive to human frailty than it is now,” notes the journalist and legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen in his book The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. “For most of American history, courts didn’t put people under oath in situations where they might be tempted to perjure themselves.”

America, then, had learned an important lesson from the man running for its highest office. If there is anything we are given the green light to lie about, it is sexual fidelity. Author and journalist Jonathan Rauch has a refreshing take on it all. Looking back on Clinton’s false statements about sex, he recently told me, “I’m a fan of hypocrisy,” contending that one’s love life is not a fair litmus test for how one will behave in public office. “No, lots of estimable politicians have had affairs. [In Clinton’s case], he showed ridiculously poor judgment, [eventually] attempted to smear [Monica] Lewinsky, and broke real laws—lying to the grand jury. But that’s a function of Clinton, not an expression of decent hypocrisy.”

Rauch’s thesis, which he would lay out in a series of articles in the New Republic beginning in 1997, is that human beings over the course of “two or three millennia of social experimentation” have come up with a code regarding adultery and other ethically sticky behavior, which Rauch dubs “genteel hypocrisy.” As he deconstructs it, the code amounts to “a Chinese box of rules.… If you absolutely must fool around, keep it out of sight. Within that rule is a still more subtle one: If you pretend not to do it, we’ll pretend not to notice. [And] if the cuckolded spouse either doesn’t know or pretends not to know, then no hanky-panky is going on.… Not even James Madison could have invented a better set of checks and balances.”

Rauch would go a step further, insisting that our tacit adoption of “hidden law” (outside the legal realm) is “not only hallowed but indispensable” to upholding society’s larger ethical scaffolding. “The one sort of lie that a civilized culture not only condones but depends upon [is] a consensual lie about consensual adultery.… The only way to insist that adultery is intolerable while actually tolerating it is by hiding it in the closet.”

In other words: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Rauch expounds on the Clintons as a case in point. “In the ancient social compact,” he states, “it is up to Hillary to decide whether to accept her husband’s behavior. If she pretends to believe him, then we pretend to believe her.” The problems would come, in Rauch’s view, only when the press pressed on and, come the late 1990s, when political and legal remedies—“the sexual harassment law, the tort law, the independent counsel law”—put Clinton in jeopardy.

That’s all well and good if you buy Rauch’s argument. Or if you’re a die-hard Hill and Bill fan. Or if you have the backbone (or the stomach) to accommodate parsing the truth. William J. Bennett does not. The conservative commentator, who worked in both the Reagan and Bush administrations, would pick apart Rauch’s rationale and, in so doing, make a larger culture-war case.5

To Bennett, there is no justification for collectively excusing adultery in an ethically grounded society. “Much, if not most, of the public commentary about President Clinton’s adulterous relationships makes them seem unimportant, trivial, of no real concern,” he would write in his polemical tour de force The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (published in 1998, as the independent prosecutor was concluding its investigation of the president). “Sex is reduced to a mere riot of the glands,” Bennett observes. “Apologists for the president are attempting to tap into a new attitude in the country toward sexual relations, one that has been deeply influenced by the sexual revolution.… [Many believe that] sexual relations between consenting adults… are a personal matter that we ought not judge whatever the context.”

Instead, Bennett ventures, civilized societies over the centuries have regarded sex—perhaps the most “special and powerful” human interaction—as “a quintessentially moral activity.… Far from being value-neutral, sex may be the most value-laden of any human activity.… Sexual indiscipline can be a threat to the stability of crucial human affairs. That is one reason why we seek to put it under ritual and marriage vow.

“Adultery,” he believes, “is a betrayal of a very high order, the betrayal of a person one has promised to honor. It often shatters fragile, immensely important social networks.” For this reason, Bennett denounces Clinton in particular, along with those in the culture who would argue that extramarital sex is a morally relative matter, depending on the sex partner and the circumstance:

Civilizations understand that we need to construct social guardrails to protect the vulnerable against the rapacious. And these social guardrails are not simply the products of the law; they are built as well by moral codes. Leaders who flout moral codes weaken them.…

Chronic indiscipline, compulsion, exploitation, the easy betrayal of vows, all suggest something wrong at a deep level—something habitual and beyond control. The behavior appears to be incorrigible; it does not occasion contrition, a need for absolution or change.… Yes, we are, all of us, sinners. But aren’t we at least supposed to struggle to do better and to be better?… If ever there has been a case in which adultery matters because of what it reveals about the corruption of a man’s loves and his aims, as well as of his governing character… it is the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

In the 1990s, the public wasn’t buying Bennett’s argument. Even when the president was judged most harshly—during his second-term sexual revelations and his impeachment trial (when an ABC/Washington Post poll found that only 28 percent of Americans believed he had “high personal moral and ethical standards”)—Clinton’s concurrent approval numbers still hovered around 60 percent. They would climb at one point to a whopping 73 percent.

Bill Clinton himself, in addressing the results of the 1992 election, would assert in his memoir that voters “usually pick the right leader for the times.” He asked rhetorically, “How did Americans come to choose their first baby-boom President, the third youngest in history… [c]arrying more baggage than an ocean liner?”

William Bennett had a ready answer in The Death of Outrage: “The history books may describe how a diffident public, when confronted with all the evidence of wrongdoing and all the squalor, simply shrugged its shoulders. And, finally, that William Jefferson Clinton really was the representative man of our time.”

In the battle about how we judge others’ sexual behavior, Bennett and company were on the losing end. As a culture, we were becoming more and more comfortable excusing sexual indiscretion in our leaders, in our neighbors, and in ourselves. And by living through the age of the long lie—the trail of mistruths that would help typify many of our national leaders, our clay-footed heroes (from Pete Rose to O. J. Simpson), and even our ’90s-born information sources (from the Drudge Report, to hyper-partisan news outlets, to the rank recesses of social media)—we were finding it easier and easier to live in good conscience with our own dissembling.

We realized that we routinely rely on fiction to leaven the facts as we edit and temporize the story of our lives.