This 'liar' business - press coverage of the President and Mrs. Clinton - Column

National Review, Feb 12, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

I want in on the Hillary business, for reasons natural (that's where the action is) and unnatural (I am among those who think it important what language you use). The water she lives in had been getting hotter and hotter, and then a few days ago columnist William Safire of the New York Times ran his diagnostic fingers over the accumulation and concluded that Hillary Clinton is "a congenital liar."

One winces a little on seeing the charge against her expressed in exactly that language. To begin with, we don't know -- do we? -- whether when she emerged from the womb shouting Beeeh! she knew very well that the situation called for her to shout Baaah! but as a congenital liar she could not avoid dissimulation. A liar being someone who somewhere along the line took to telling untruths, a congenital liar is someone who tells untruths because the truth simply won't come out of his lips. In the feud a few years ago between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, kindled by Miss McCarthy's saying nobody could believe anything Miss Hellman said, Lillian complained, and Mary reiterated that everything Lillian writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

At that level, of course, charges and countercharges become polemical flourishes intended to titillate onlookers. They are no longer clinical distinctions between the truth and the non-truth. So by adding the qualifier "congenital," Mr. Safire gave away too much ground, and soon the whole country was seeing a smiling President telling a crowded press conference that, as President of the United States, he suffered under certain "constraints" which prevented him from dealing with Mr. Safire as he'd have done in private life. For those whose imagination wasn't keen enough to know just what that was, the White House press secretary Mike McCurry had given a hint. Citizen Bill Clinton would have poked Citizen Bill Safire in the nose.

Now what seeps through all that stuff is, actually, some idea of what remains of the House of Chivalry. Not much. When that house was intact, you would never see a man seated in a bus while a woman was left standing. Any man who threatened publicly to poke another man in the nose wouldn't be noticed nowadays, on the grounds that that threat was probably made in a crowded bar, where nobody heard or cared, or else it was made in a press conference announcing what the intention was of Mike Tyson to do to the challenger sometime in the future in Las Vegas. It is really surprising that the women's lobby didn't resent the language used by Mr. Clinton against Mr. Safire on the grounds that manifestly, it was sexist-talk. He wouldn't have said it if Mr. Safire's quarry had been a male.

And so we arrive at the piquancy in this situation. Mrs. Clinton said a half-dozen things that weren't correct, most conspicuously that she hadn't personally insisted on firing the seven-man White House Travel staff. In fact, according to her ex-employee and Clinton pal Mr. Watkins, she did want them fired.

But what fascinates is that this episode and a few others having to do with the nature of her relationship with the Madison Guaranty outfit invite the formal scrutiny of investigating panels and, theoretically, the courts themselves, because perjury is contingently involved.

But the man who, if he weren't President, would poke Bill Safire in the nose, "lies," if that is the word for it, quite consistently. Anyone who has watched the tube over the past couple of months will have lost count of the frequency of Mr. Clinton's telling the people that the objective of the Republican Party's budget drive is to hurt the old, the homeless, the sick, the lame, the children, and the environment. If something is not true, and it is nonetheless affirmed, that gives us a lie, and the generator of that lie, is -- a liar? Forget the "congenital" business -- about which most of us don't know very much, since our memory reaches back only to when Mr. Clinton in the Sixties took marijuana but didn't inhale. How is it that politicians are shielded as they are? To get to the White House one promises one thing, does another. Or else reaffirms on Monday what one repudiates on Tuesday? Some would go so far as to guess that if he were simply "Mr." Clinton even then he wouldn't actually go to Mr. Safire's office and poke him in the Republican Party, or Congress, or the voters who vote for the wrong people. The voters who were lied to.