The Clinton warrior: face it: Sidney Blumenthal was right

Washington Monthly, June, 2003 by David Greenberg

IT'S LIKE A TALE FROM KAFKA: SIDNEY Blumenthal awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a snake. "Rattle, rattle, rattle. Hissssssssss," editorialized The Weekly Standard during the Republican drive to impeach Bill Clinton. "Sidney Blumenthal is a creature of the dark." During Clinton's presidency, Blumenthal, previously known as a cerebral political journalist for The New Yorker and The New Republic, came to be demonized for his links to the Clintons--denounced as the devil, as "Sid the Human Ferret," and as "Sid Vicious," a Democratic Chuck Colson. The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal's new memoir, is really several books in one: apologia pro vita sua of a man who was pilloried but long kept silent; an insider's view of the most fascinating administration since Nixon's; a sociology of the contemporary Right; and a usually even-toned but sporadically gleeful settling of accounts with old adversaries.

Buried within The Clinton Wars are also thoughtful discussions of Clinton's domestic and foreign policies--including, notably, reminders of his efforts to combat terrorism, which give the lie to the recent blame-shifting claims by the Bush men that their predecessors dodged the issue. Yet the heart of this book is, appropriately, the 1998 campaign by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, Republican leaders, and their allies in the so-called conservative movement to impeach the president--a morass into which Blumenthal, as a high-level White House aide, was inevitably drawn.

In its account of the impeachment, The Clinton Wars follows the outlines of the legal writer Jeffrey Toobin's now-standard work on the subject, A Vast Conspiracy (1999). But it gains freshness from Blumenthal's personal perspective, from his new material (most compellingly his interviews with some former antagonists), and from his insights into the workings of the increasingly ruthless conservative movement. If it tosses some barbs at former tormentors, and if it indulges in the self-justification intrinsic to political memoirs as a genre, The Clinton Wars is nonetheless a vigorous, bravura performance that brings home again what a tragedy and travesty Clinton's impeachment really was.

Pack Rats

Little in Sid Blumenthal's early career seemed to mark him for the fate of Republican bete noire. In the 1980s, he was a rising star in political journalism, writing for The New Republic and The Washington Post. His well-received books illuminated structural trends in postwar American politics, from the ascendancy of image-making consultants to the rise of the power-keen conservative movement. His magazine writing forged beyond the workaday columnist's easy opinionating to grapple with deeper forces in American history and political culture, a la Garry Wills or the best of Teddy White. An unabashed liberal, Blumenthal was often unsparing toward his ideological opposites, but his robust argumentation made him no less shrewd an interpreter of the scene, no less enlightening to read.

In mid-1992, Tina Brown, tapped to be the new editor-impresario of The New Yorker, summoned Blumenthal to lunch at the Royalton Hotel. Praising his coverage of Clinton's primary campaign, she asked him to join the ailing weekly as her Washington editor, to write, he recalls, "opinionated and informed" dispatches in the swashbuckling British style she knew best. The choice made sense. Clinton was the rage, The New Yorker was liberal in its traditions, and Blumenthal was not just a respected journalist but was friendly with and had sympathy for the wunderkind who seemed to be hurtling toward the White House.

For a while, Blumenthal did his job without controversy. As his sometime New Republic colleague Michael Lewis argued in 1999, "The stuff he wrote, because it came from the inside, was often riveting ... It was true that the pieces he wrote were wildly partial to his subjects. They didn't dish the dirt. But they had real value: they gave you some idea of what life was like inside the skin of our new president."

Then came the feeding frenzies of Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Haircutgate, Troopergate, and other would-be scandals. Throughout these controversies, Blumenthal not only continued to write admiringly of Clinton, with whom he had developed a professional friendship over the last half-dozen years; he also chided his scandal-mad colleagues--as he had since 1988, when a prowling press forced Gary Hart from the presidential race for marital infidelity--for descending into sexual scandal-mongering. Appearing on "Nightline" in December 1993, he urged the news media to scrutinize those who were retailing the Clinton scandals. But given the mood of the moment, with Clinton on the ropes, Blumenthal notes, "This 'Nightline' appearance marked me as somehow having crossed the line from the media's side to the President's." Consigned to the doghouse of Washington society, he endured a cascade of ad hominem attacks.

These attacks were peculiar. After all, dozens of Washington journalists enjoy cozy contacts with presidents and reflect these friendships in their writing. Far from paying a price, they are celebrated. George Will consorted with Ronald Reagan, to no detriment to his career. David Frum cashiered his service as a speechwriter to the incumbent into a best-selling book, The Right Man--only to return to writing pro-Bush pieces. In a slightly different vein, Tony Snow was the liaison between anti-Clinton dirt peddlers Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg and now styles himself a disinterested newscaster for Fox.