“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”
—Bill Clinton
“Bill Clinton never should have won the 1992 Presidential election.”
—Martin Walker, the Guardian (a left-wing paper)
Bill Clinton was the first Democrat since FDR to be elected to two terms
Bill Clinton was the first to offer a “two for-one” presidency
Bill Clinton was the second president to be impeached
Bill Clinton was the first president to grant clemency to terrorists
Bill Clinton was the first president to pardon a family member
Bill Clinton was by universal agreement a highly intelligent man and a supremely gifted politician, and yet he has to be judged as having squandered his gifts and achieved far less than he might have because of his deep character flaws. The news media and the Democratic Party establishment, who both knew of Clinton’s impulsive womanizing and reckless behavior, did not merely cover it up. They argued that character doesn’t matter in a president. But the main lesson of the Clinton catastrophe is that in reality personal character matters to the presidency as well as the nation.
Womanizing was just one of Clinton’s flaws. Another aspect of his character was a volcanic temper, which occasionally burst out in public, such as when he lied directly to the American people about not having “sexual relations with that woman—Miss Lewinski,” or the time he angrily stormed out of a press conference after only a single unsympathetic question from a network news reporter. Clinton, a former professor of constitutional law at the University of Arkansas, stretched and pulled at the Constitution’s limits on executive power, and arguably exceeded them.
Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer to hold the nation’s highest office, but only the third-youngest president. He was the first Democrat since FDR elected to two terms and the first president to serve after the Cold War had been won, so in one key sense he got a free ride. By the account of novelist Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton was the nation’s first black president, displaying “every trope of blackness”—raised in a single parent household, playing the saxophone, liking junk food, and displaying an “unpoliced sexuality.” On the last score he followed in JFK’s footsteps, but he outdid his hero; Bill Clinton was the first, and to date only, president to have his anatomy described on national television, by his lawyer, as “a normal man” in terms of “size, shape, direction.”
Bill Clinton was the first to offer a co-presidency—himself and Hillary Rodham Clinton in a two-for-one special. The Constitution of the United States knows nothing of such an arrangement, but the ambitious Hillary welcomed it. As advisor George Stephanopoulous noted, Hillary “established a wholly owned subsidiary within the White House, with its own staff, its own schedule and its own war room called ‘the Intensive Care Unit.’”
“I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.”
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Hillary Clinton
Other first ladies had not exactly been wallflowers. Edith Wilson guided her husband’s hand in signing bills after his stroke. Eleanor Roosevelt was a leading cheerleader for the New Deal. Florence Harding was instrumental in Warren’s rise. Rosalynn Carter sat in on Jimmy’s cabinet meetings, and Nancy Reagan was blamed for engineering the dismissal of chief of staff Don Regan. Barbara Bush, a shrewd judge of character, was clearly an unofficial advisor to George H. W. Bush. But no First Lady can be compared to Hillary in her influence on the president’s policy and personnel decisions.
“If Hillary makes a stupid suggestion, who’s going to call her on it?” said Ben Wattenberg, a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson. LBJ had been disturbed by JFK’s appointment of his brother Robert as Attorney General, and subsequent legislation had made it impossible for presidents to appoint a relative to a position over which Congress exercises jurisdiction. So the Clinton arrangement had to be unofficial, but it proceeded nonetheless, with FLOTUS in charge of health care reform.
Bill Clinton was not, like Woodrow Wilson, openly contemptuous of the Constitution, at least in word. His actions were another matter, particularly in areas where the president wields unalloyed power: pardons, monuments, and executive orders.
President Clinton made especially heavy use of one particular presidential power: the right to issue executive orders. The first five presidents, doubtless mindful of the abuse of power by royalty, were reluctant to issue such orders. In fact, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe issued a total of only fifteen executive orders. The first by Washington was to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving. (The actual term “executive order” was not used until Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and most executive orders remained unpublished until the modern era, when the State Department began to number them.)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a president Bill Clinton admired, was the Pete Rose of EOs, racking up 3,522—567 in 1933 alone. Ronald Reagan was no match, with only 381 in eight years, and neither was George H. W. Bush, with only 165 in four years. Clinton logged in at 364 EOs, but numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Consider Clinton’s practice of using executive orders to cancel previous executive orders by other presidents, with Ronald Reagan a primary target.
On February 17, 1981, Ronald Reagan had issued EO 12291 “to reduce the burdens of existing and future regulations, increase agency accountability for regulatory actions, provide for presidential oversight of the regulatory process, minimize duplication and conflict of regulations, and insure well-reasoned regulations.” To that end, the order subjected new regulations to cost-benefit analysis, a sensible measure by any standard. A Clinton EO revoked that order.
Reagan’s EO 12612 sought “to restore the division of governmental responsibilities between the national government and the States that was intended by the Framers of the Constitution and to ensure that the principles of federalism established by the Framers guide the Executive departments and agencies in the formulation and implementation of policies.” Therefore bureaucrats were to exercise restraint in taking action that would result in federal preemption of state laws. A Clinton executive order revoked that one, too.
Government zeal to grab private property prompted Reagan’s executive order 12630, which called for caution when “constitutionally protected property rights” were in play. “Executive departments and agencies should review their actions carefully to prevent unnecessary takings and should account in decision-making for those takings that are necessitated by statutory mandate.” A Clinton executive order revoked Reagan’s EO on takings.
Ronald Reagan issued executive order 12606 “in order to ensure that the autonomy and rights of the family are considered in the formulation and implementation of policies by Executive departments and agencies.” Actions were to be evaluated as to whether they strengthened the family and parental rights or “substitute government action” for the function of parents. The impact on family earnings and budget was also to be considered. Bill Clinton duly revoked that order. On his watch federal bureaucrats did not need to consider the consequences of their actions on the American family.
Clinton’s own EO 12836 targeted regulations requiring employers who contracted with the federal government to inform their employees of their rights under Communication Workers v. Beck, a Supreme Court ruling that had limited unions’ ability to collect the money of workers and use it for political purposes. His proclaimed goal was to “eliminate executive orders that do not serve the public interest,” but in effect Clinton’s order meant that more workers would make involuntary political contributions to Democrats. Further, federal contractors were no longer required to post a notice that workers are not required to join unions.
The president’s order on homosexuals in the military instituted a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” prompting gay adviser David Mixner to hail Bill Clinton as “the Abraham Lincoln of our movement,” though Clinton’s own preference was decidedly for women (more about that in due course). Other Clinton executive orders allowed abortions on U.S. military bases overseas and racial profiling in hiring—a government-imposed quota policy known by the euphemism “affirmative action.” Both abortion and racial quotas highlighted Clinton’s hypocrisy: he claimed he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but always supported measures to expand abortion; he even vetoed a law that would have restricted partial-birth abortion. On affirmative action, Clinton claimed he wanted to “mend it, not end it,” but this was nothing more than a smokescreen to obscure his determination to derail any reform of racial quotas.
A Clinton executive order also banned roads in more than 50 million acres of wilderness, a “stroke of the pen, law of the land” action taken without any cost-benefit analysis but duly hailed by environmental activists. It was just one of many Clinton EOs that belied his proclamation that the era of big government was over.
The personal touch also extended to Clinton’s mania for monuments. The California coastline is under the jurisdiction of scores of duly elected local governments (and the California Coastal Commission, an unelected body that manages to combine mafia-style corruption with Stalinist regulation). Yet Bill Clinton declared the entire California coast, more than 800 miles, a national monument.
That particular proclamation illustrates what Barbara Olson described as Clinton’s “pharaonic magalomania.” The Antiquities Act of 1906 calls for national monuments to embrace the “smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects” protected by the Act—originally supposed to be historic and pre-historic ruins and monuments. Thus the Statue of Liberty—not all of New York Harbor—is a national monument. But “smallest” does not fit the Clinton style.
He authorized the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, a full 1.7 million acres, and the Grand Canyon-Parashant National monument, covering 1,104,000 acres. On January 17, 2001, with the clock ticking down to the end of his presidency, he created, count ’em, nine new national monuments: the Carrizo Plain, 204,107 acres; Buck Island Reef, 135 acres; Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, 4,148 acres; Minidoka Internment, 72.75 acres; Pompey’s Pillar, 51 acres; the Sonoran Desert, 486,149 acres; the Upper Missouri Breaks, 377,346 acres; the Virgin Islands Coral Reef, 12,708 acres; and Governor’s Island, 20 acres. Clinton’s grand total comes to 5,686,767 acres of new national monuments, and we should not forget the 50 million acres of national forest that are off limits to logging and road building.
Clinton’s most flagrant abuse of his constitutional power was his use of the presidential pardon. The Constitution of the United States gives the president “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States.” As Charles Krauthammer has observed, this is the most sacred power of the president, and as such should be exercised with the greatest caution. Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 74 that the American Founders made the president’s pardon power absolute because “the sense of responsibility is always strongest in proportion as it is undivided,” and this would “inspire scrupulousness and caution.”
The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House by Barbara Olson (Regnery, 2001).
It has not always seemed to be used scrupulously and cautiously, even in the early days of the republic. George Washington pardoned two leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, and James Madison pardoned pirate Jean Lafitte. Andrew Johnson issued amnesty for ex-Confederates willing to take an oath to the United States. Theodore Roosevelt issued amnesty for followers of Philippine guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo. More recently Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for crimes he may have committed in office. Jimmy Carter provoked a furious controversy by pardoning Vietnam War draft evaders and deserters. Carter also pardoned Patricia Hearst, the kidnapped heiress who became the submachine gun-toting “Tanya” in the Symbionese Liberation Army. George Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger for the Iran-Contra scandal. But all these presidents could make some kind of case that these pardons, even if not scrupulous and cautious, were in the national interest.
I am going to go out on a limb here. Bill Clinton is not a naturally cautious man. In fact, even in elected office he has always been reckless to a fault, exhibiting what Michael Kinsley, a supporter, called “a frightening lack of self control.” An attractive woman named Cyd Dunlop once caught Clinton’s eye, and he called her in her hotel room while she was in bed with her husband, attempting to persuade the woman to step out, right then, and hook up with him. And of course, he let Monica Lewinsky, the eager, thong-flashing “assistant to the president for blow jobs” (APBJ), perform her tasks in his office, where others could—and apparently did—walk in.
More than simple recklessness was in play, however, in Clinton’s treatment of terrorism. This was a development his administration should have seen coming, and not just from the Islamic side. U.S. presidents have been prime targets for some time, with more than twenty attempts against their lives—some successful, as in the cases of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. The unsuccessful attempts also provide a warning. On November 1, 1950, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attempted to assassinate U.S. President Harry Truman at Blair House, where Harry and Bess Truman were living while the White House was being renovated. The attempt failed, though Torresola and Secret Service agent Leslie Coffelt died in the brief gun battle. That failed attempt to kill a president did not end the terror campaign for Puerto Rican independence. Rather, the movement turned to easier targets in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
The Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN) is a violent group seeking an independent Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rico on the Cuban model. The group was responsible for no fewer than 130 bombing attacks in the United States from 1974 to 1983. These attacks killed six Americans and wounded scores of others.
Apprehended FALN terrorists remained unrepentant, and Carlos Romero-Barcelo, Puerto Rico’s delegate in Congress, wrote to President Clinton requesting that he keep the FALN members imprisoned. The FBI opposed their release on the grounds that they were criminals and represented a threat to the United States. Even Attorney General Janet Reno of Waco fame considered them a threat. And Eric Holder, then a deputy Attorney General, wanted consideration for the victims.
Clinton, however, chose to bypass the Justice Department and failed to consult with any victims, or relatives of victims, of FALN terrorism. In September of 1999 Clinton gave clemency to fourteen of sixteen imprisoned FALN members. This was the first case of presidential clemency for terrorists.
One can see here the hand of Co-President Hillary, whose politics were shaped by Liberation Theology—orthodox Marxism-Leninism tricked out in Christian vocabulary which, as Michael Novak (Will It Liberate?) has pointed out, never liberated anyone or anything. Hillary also interned for Robert Treuhaft, a lawyer for the Communist Party USA and husband of Jessica Mitford. Both were Stalinists and so slavishly pro-Soviet that even the New Left and Black Panthers shunned them.
On his last trip on Air Force One, Clinton strode into the press room and asked, “You got anybody you want to pardon?” He had already been flooded with requests, and he was disposed to grant them—largely because of a personal issue that in due time would highlight an important constitutional principle.
The Constitution of the United States nowhere elevates the president above the law of the land. That fact emerged with crystal clarity in the case of Paula Corbin Jones, a secretary with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. She was twenty-four when she caught the eye of Governor Clinton at a May 1991 management conference. Clinton tasked a state trooper to bring Jones to his room. There, a year before he would become president of the United States, Bill Clinton dropped his pants and invited Paula Jones to “kiss it.” She declined and fled, later suing the president for sexual harassment. President Clinton had his political hit squad smear Jones as a white-trash slut and dupe of Republicans. He fought Jones all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that he should not have to defend himself against Jones’s suit as a sitting president—and lost in a 9–0 shutout. Clinton wound up paying out an $850,000 settlement, a large amount for a case that supposedly had no merit.
“You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy.”
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Bill Clinton, on seeing an ancient Inca mummy on display at the National Geographic Society
The Jones lawsuit revealed the existence of Monica Lewinsky, the APBJ barely older than Chelsea Clinton—and ultimately brought on Clinton’s angry denial that he never had sex with “that woman.” George Stephanopoulos described the performance as Clinton “lying with true conviction.” True to form, the Clinton machine smeared Monica as a mental case and sexual predator. Hillary Rodham Clinton, on national television, blamed the whole thing on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
On December 19, 1998, in the wake of the 445-page Starr Report, Bill Clinton became only the second U.S. president to be impeached. He was already the first to give his blood for a DNA test, which helped expose his falsehoods. He vowed to carry on, and did, but if he wanted to avoid prosecution for false testimony in the Paula Jones case, he had to finalize a deal with independent counsel Robert Ray before leaving office:
I will not seek any legal fees incurred as a result of the Lewinsky investigation, to which I might otherwise become entitled under the Independent Counsel Act. I have had occasion, frequently, to reflect on the Jones case. In this consent order, I acknowledge having knowingly violated Judge Wright’s discovery orders in my deposition in that case.
I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal, and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.
It was vintage Clinton—“I did not fully accomplish this goal”—but to no avail. The president of the United States had fought the law, and the law won. The system worked, as they said in the wake of Watergate.
“It depends on how you define alone. . . . There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were.”
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Bill Clinton in grand jury testimony
This admission—not to mention the five-year suspension of his license to practice law—would have been a humiliation for any lawyer, let alone the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, who took a solemn oath to defend the Constitution and uphold the laws. That it left Bill Clinton in a foul mood, disposed to break more records before he left office has to be taken into account when we consider the pardons.
The president may wield absolute authority to grant pardons, but modern presidents have seen fit to develop a careful review process and firm guidelines to prevent the power from abuse or the appearance of corruption. Before a presidential pardon is granted, the case must pass through the office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice. The offense in question must be federal, not a violation of state laws, and a five-year period must have elapsed. Those on probation, parole, or supervised release are not eligible. The FBI and other agencies are supposed to be consulted. Other presidents may have occasionally waived or overridden the formal pardon review process, as in Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. Clinton ignored the process altogether.
Clinton even pardoned some criminals who had not applied for a pardon, including Dan Rostenkowski, the Illinois Democrat who had chaired the House Ways and Means Committee. In 1996 “Rosty” was indicted for mail fraud and sentenced to seventeen months in prison. He had not asked for a pardon and the required five years had not elapsed, but Clinton pardoned him anyway in December 2000. The Christmas pardons at the end of Clinton’s term included Archie Schaffer III, chief spokesman for Tyson Foods, who had been convicted for trying to influence Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. This was doubtless a partisan payoff.
Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel (see Territory of Lies, by Wolf Blitzer), did not make the list, despite support for a pardon from Benjamin Netanyahu. Leonard Peltier, serving two life sentences in Leavenworth for the murder of two FBI agents, drew support from Desmond Tutu, Jesse Jackson, Susan Sarandon, and other luminaries. Even so, Peltier failed to make the cut with Clinton. So did junk-bond king Michael Milken.
As his second term wound down, the Clinton White House badgered the Justice Department to find more pardon cases, and was taking applications from all comers. He saved the worst for last.
True to form, the 140 pardons and 36 commutations on Clinton’s last day in office included Arkansans brothers Art and Doug Borel, convicted of rolling back the odometers on cars. Larry Lee Duncan of Branson, Missouri, committed the same crime and also got a presidential pardon. The president of the United States also pardoned Billy Wayne Warmath, sixty-two, of Walls, Mississippi, who had committed $123.26 of credit card fraud in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was president. Warmath, a Republican, said he was happy about the pardon. The president also deployed his power to pardon Howard Winfield Riddle, a smuggler of banned anteater skins used in cowboy boots. Almon Glenn Braswell had promoted fake cures for baldness and also dabbled in mail fraud and perjury. Braswell got a Clinton pardon and the next day wired $200,000 to the law firm in which Hugh Rodham, the co-president’s brother, was a partner.
Clinton showed a soft spot for frauds. On January 20, 2001, he pardoned Charles D. Ravenel, a former Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Ravenal had looted Citadel Federal Savings Bank in one of the biggest frauds in the history of South Carolina. As Alec Guinness said in Star Wars, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Bill Clinton was up to the challenge.
Clinton also commuted the sentences of twenty-one drug offenders. Some had received long sentences for minor offences, but not all fit this pattern. Manhattan lawyer Harvey Weinig, for example, had helped launder money for the Cali Cartel. The Colombian government denounced his presidential pardon. As it happened, Weinig was related by marriage to a former senior aide in the Clinton White house. What a cozy world.
Bill Clinton became the first president to pardon a family member when he cleared Roger Clinton Jr., his half-brother (Secret Service name “Headache”), of a 1985 cocaine conviction that had landed him in jail for year. Ironically, Roger had been busted in a sting operation authorized by Governor Clinton. Roger was once a driver for Dan Lasater, a restaurant magnate and cocaine distributor Clinton had pardoned as governor. While Lasater was in prison, the executive vice president of his business was Patsy Thomasson, whom the Clintons brought to Washington where she directed the Office of the Administration and managed a White House drug-testing program.
President Clinton also commuted the sentence of Carlos Anibal Vignali, who had shipped nearly half a ton of cocaine to Minneapolis for processing into crack sold in poor neighborhoods. Vignali is the son of Horacio Vignali, a wealthy Los Angeles developer and major donor to Democratic politicians. Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa, and others formed a phone bank to plead with the president for a pardon for Vignali. Horacio also prevailed on Clinton’s U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Alejandro Mayorkas, to call the White House on behalf of the imprisoned drug dealer, whose pardon, like many others, bypassed the usual channels. Hugh Rodham charged the Vignali family $200,000 for work on the pardon.
This presidential pardon prompted a U.S. attorney to resign and sparked outrage among law enforcement. The Clintons ignored the scandal.
President Clinton pardoned Henry Cisneros, the former San Antonio mayor he had put in charge of Housing and Urban Development. In Clinton style, Cisneros had pleaded guilty to false statements in a case involving a former mistress. Richard Wilson Riley Jr., son of Clinton’s Secretary of Education Richard Riley, was convicted of conspiring to sell cocaine in 1993. Clinton gave him an unconditional pardon.
Bill Clinton also pardoned John Deutch, former CIA director, who had gotten in trouble for putting classified information on his home computer. The president pardoned Samuel Loring Morison of Naval Intelligence, who had leaked classified photos. Clinton commuted the sentence of Ronald Henderson Blackley, chief of staff for Mike Espy, who had made false statements in the Clinton style.
Jesse Jackson, another friend, lobbied the president to pardon Mel Reynolds, a former Chicago congressman who had resigned after a conviction for sex with a sixteen-year-old campaign worker and also been prosecuted on fraud charges. Clinton commuted his sentence and also pardoned Dorothy Rivers of Jackson’s PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) organization, who stole $1.2 million in government grants.
Connections did not always carry the day. Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ Whitewater partner, got a pardon; but Webster Hubbell, associate attorney general, did not. This doubtless reflects the president’s preference to go the second mile for women. Jimmy Carter had already pardoned Patty Hearst, but her bank robbery conviction remained on record. Bill Clinton made it go away.
Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, a domestic group of bomb throwers in league with the May 19 Communist Organization, the Black Liberation Army, the Red Guerrilla Resistance, and others, known collectively as “The Family.” Like Bonny and Clyde, they robbed banks, killed police officers, and bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Naval War College, the FBI office in Staten Island, and other targets.
Rosenberg was apprehended with 740 pounds of explosives and an arsenal of weapons. She was sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison and became a celebrity of the left, with Noam Chomsky, William Kunstler, and others lobbying for her release. They got it on the last day of the Clinton presidency, when he not only granted Rosenberg clemency but also commuted the sentence of Linda Sue Evans, convicted in the 1983 plot to bomb the Capitol. The president’s actions provoked outrage from Charles Schumer, senator from New York, and from Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York, who had prosecuted a Family attack on Brink’s. Like the victims, these politicians had no recourse.
One can see the hand of FLOTUS in the Rosenberg and Evans pardons, which gave hope to terrorists everywhere. For all their flair, however, Rosenberg and Evans took a back seat to another case right out of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.
Marc Rich, born in 1934 in Antwerp, Belgium, became a U.S. citizen in 1947 and by 1977 had become the world’s biggest trader in aluminum. He also shipped oil to pariah nations such as South Africa, traded with Iran and Libya, and swapped oil for sugar with Cuba. In 2000, his operations took in some $7 billion. U.S. officials charged him under the RICO statute in a case they called the largest tax fraud in U.S. history, but Rich and his partner Pincus “Pinky” Green fled the country. While Rich was a fugitive, one of his companies, Clarendon, sold more than $4 million of nickel and copper to the U.S. Mint, a division of the very Treasury Department Rich had defrauded.
Marc Rich had all the money and power anyone would want, but these did not suffice. He also sought a pardon. He gave away money to worthy causes, gaining himself high-profile allies such as Ehud Barak and Abe Foxman. Rich was aiming for an unconditional pardon, turning down all deals that involved surrender to U.S. authorities. He opted to play on Clinton’s dislike of prosecutors, and deployed his former wife Denise to lobby the president. She gave at least $1.5 million to causes related to the Clintons at the very time former White House counsel Jack Quinn was pressing Bill Clinton for a pardon. She loaded the Clintons with gifts, including a gold saxophone for the president. Rich got his pardon, along with “Pinky” Green.
In a New York Times op-ed, Clinton denied the pardons were due to Denise Rich’s contributions to the Clinton library foundation. These stories were “utterly false” claimed the president, and “there was absolutely no quid pro quo.” The Times’s own editorial, in contrast, said the pardon “begins and ends with money and the access afforded by money” and was a “gross misuse of a solemn presidential responsibility.”
Clinton’s piece was “in almost every important way a lie,” according to Michael Kelly, who had covered Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the Times.
“No other president ever did what Clinton did,” wrote Kelly. Clinton “sought to corrupt the pardoning process on a wholesale basis. None set up a secret shop to bypass his own government and speed through the special pleas of the well connected and well heeled. None sent the Justice department dozens of names for pardon on inauguration morning, too late for the department to run even cursory checks.” Concluded Kelly, “Eight reasons, four lies. Not bad, even for the old master himself.”
Jimmy Carter went on record that “large gifts” played a role in the pardons, which he called “disgraceful.” Carter’s own pardons and commutations, by the way, included Oscar Collazo, who tried to kill Harry Truman; Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America; and G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame.
In February 2001, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Clinton pardons. According to Charles Schumer, senior senator from New York, “To my mind there can be no justification for pardoning a fugitive from justice. It does not matter that the fugitive believed the case against him was flawed or weak. It does not matter that the fugitive was enormously philanthropic. Pardoning a fugitive stands our justice system on its head and makes a mockery of it.”
For Tom Harkin, left-wing Iowa Democrat, “There’s no excuse for what he did for Marc Rich. This should have not been done.” Joe Biden said, “I think the president had an incredible lapse in memory or was brain dead.” For Barney Frank, “It was a terrible thing he did. It was just abusive. These are people who forgot where the line was between public service and what was personally convenient for them.” Clinton defender Bob Herbert noted that some of the pardons “fit neatly with the standard definition of a bribe.”
Good point. The Constitution gives the president the power to pardon, but nowhere authorizes the president to sell pardons. Clinton critic Charles Krauthammer said the president was as oblivious to the special nature of the pardon power “as he was to the reverence due every other power of his office. . . . It was not bad judgment. It was sacrilege.”
California governor and presidential aspirant Jerry Brown hinted that the Rich pardon might be a crime. As for Bill Clinton, Brown said, “he must have sugar plums dancing in his head,” adding, “President Clinton did not start out with a lot of scrupulosity. Here we are talking about money and venality.”
As far as the Clinton legacy is concerned, I will let liberals, Democrats, editors, and former Clinton defenders have their say.
“Some of Mr. Clinton’s closest associates and supporters are acknowledging what his enemies have argued for years—the man is so thoroughly corrupt it’s frightening,” wrote Bob Herbert of the New York Times. “The president who hung a ‘for rent’ sign on the Lincoln Bedroom also conducted a clearance sale on pardons in his last weird sleepless days in the White House.”
For former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, “In Bill Clinton we had for eight years a truly irrational person in the White House, someone who, I think, lived on the edge of serious mental illness. He was and is a psychologically sick man.” Further, “Clinton was not psychologically healthy enough to have been president of the United States.”
According to the Economist, Clinton was “too dishonest an individual to be trusted with the presidency, however clever he might be.”
“He was an arrogant, no-good son of a bitch,” wrote John Robert Starr, managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “a dirty rotten scoundrel.”
Clinton critics had been right all along, said the New York Observer: “Mr. Clinton was, in fact, an untrustworthy low-life who used people for his own purposes and then discarded them.”
Hamilton Jordan, former chief of staff for Jimmy Carter, attacked the Clintons in an op-ed titled “The First Grifters.” The Clintons’ only loyalty, he wrote, was “to their own ambitions.”
Chris Matthews of Hardball had a different take. “The loser in this deal is the country,” he wrote. “Before this, we laughed at poor little countries that drug dealers and international crooks could buy. We mocked the Third World capitals where a little money in the fingers of a certain family member would open doors or close eyes. Thanks to Bill and Hillary Clinton, we have now forfeited that small national vanity.” The subtext here is that the Clintons were a milestone en route to Third World status for the United States—a rather dubious legacy.
“Ask yourself, what did Bill Clinton get done?” wrote Forrest McDonald, historian and author of The American Presidency: An Intellectual History. “Was there any major legislation he was responsible for? Welfare reform came from the Republican Congress. Health care was a disaster. He simply didn’t get much done. He was a comedy of errors.”
Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years by Rich Lowry (Regnery, 2003).
Bill and Hillary Clinton were sixties (and thirties) re-enactors who showcased no ideas that had not been tried and found wanting. They found true reform difficult and left it untried. The Clinton administration is evidence that people can possess glittering academic qualifications and personal charisma yet remain professionally, psychologically, and morally unfit for public office, especially the nation’s highest office. The Clintons, in effect, came to Washington, dropped their drawers, and told the nation to “kiss it.” For the most part, the nation did. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
As Clarence Thomas might put it, beware of emanations from a penumbra. The Clinton Presidential Center containing the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum is located near the Arkansas River in an old warehouse district known locally as Murky Bottoms. At least one tour guide sees the fearful symmetry with the Clinton legacy, which travel writers like Melissa Roth were touting as early as 2001: “Two hours west of Graceland, Little Rock is becoming a mecca for American scholars, European tourists, and kitsch-collectors, all thanks to the South’s other pelvis-proud king.”
The tragedy of the Clinton presidency is that Clinton held some moderate policy views and from time to time proved himself amenable to compromises with Republicans that advanced conservative goals, such as on welfare reform, balancing the budget, and even, late in his second term, tax cuts. Whether he was willing to work with Republicans on these issues out of sincere conviction or political expediency is hard to know, though it is worth pointing out that his famous rebuke of the rap artist “Sister Souljah” in the 1992 campaign had been preceded by public criticisms of Jesse Jackson as far back as 1984.
In the middle of his second term—we learned subsequently—Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich were secretly negotiating a large deal to reform Social Security and Medicare, which even a decade ago were known to be on a long-term course to insolvency, threatening the nation with fiscal ruin. The outline of the deal was a classic Washington compromise that would have left both sides unhappy to some extent, but also would have advanced both sides’ goals. Clinton was willing to agree to private accounts for both Social Security and Medicare—the main conservative reform proposal—and Gingrich was willing to consider some tax increases to shore up the program for existing beneficiaries. A Clinton-appointed special study commission had recommended just such a course.
Whether such a compromise reform could have passed Congress became a moot point when Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in 1998. Liberals in Congress supported Clinton against the impeachment charges on the condition that he abandon any talk of reforming Social Security and Medicare. In other words, the price of keeping Clinton in office was “no more welfare reforms.” Today, over a decade later, the future fiscal imbalance for Social Security and Medicare has grown to more than $50 trillion, saddling future generations with either crushing tax increases, sudden program cuts that will affect low income seniors who depend on those programs, or economic collapse. In other words, Clinton’s reckless personal behavior didn’t just soil his own reputation and our respect for the Oval Office; in retrospect, his lack of character was a multi-trillion dollar catastrophe for the nation.
“I may not have been the greatest president, but I’ve had the most fun eight years.”
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Bill Clinton
In addition to Clinton’s aggressive use of executive orders and abuse of the presidential pardon power, his judicial appointments also showed a lack of respect for the Constitution. His first Supreme Court appointment, in 1993, was Ruth Bader Ginsberg, whom Jimmy Carter had previously placed on the D.C. District Court of Appeals, the second-highest court in the nation. Ginsberg is a radical feminist, having founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter journal while a law professor at Rutgers University. She later directed the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, where the primary “woman’s right” of concern was unrestricted abortion. About the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion on demand in 1973, Ginsberg said later: “Frankly, I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Ginsberg has also been an advocate of appealing to foreign law when deciding cases before the Supreme Court.
Clinton’s second appointment, in 1994, was Stephen Breyer. Breyer, a former aide to Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, taught at Harvard Law School before becoming a federal judge. Breyer is openly contemptuous of interpreting the Constitution according to the original intent of the Founders, and instead supports an activist judicial philosophy he calls “active liberty,” which in practice means consistently ruling in behalf of expanding government regulatory power and the welfare state. Like Ginsberg, Breyer supports appealing to foreign law when deciding cases. He has voted consistently to uphold abortion on demand—including partial-birth abortion—and he doesn’t believe that the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Clinton clearly knew what he was doing when he chose as his Supreme Court nominees justices who would defend and expand the liberal agenda. If there were a lower constitutional grade than F, Clinton would deserve it.