SEX, WAR, AND DEATH

We have met the Character Issue, as Pogo would surely have piped from the back of the Clinton press bus, and it is Us.

Collectively in our campaign coverage we have been showing both profiles of the caricature Puritan: prurient curiosity on one side, prissy moralism on the other. We are, in the early running of 1992, sensational and self-righteous; we are self-referential and self-seeking. We seem, at some level, scared stiff of democracy. And yet, in the making and near-breaking of Bill Clinton, we've never been more powerful or more brazen.

Never that I can remember have the (forgive the expression) Eastern media raised an obscure candidate to front-runnerhood as fast as the networks and newsmagazines lifted Bill Clinton. "This was journalistic midwifery," as Howell Raines wrote in The New York Times. It began in earnest at Christmastime when Mario Cuomo chose not to run, and the labor was not long. WITHOUT A VOTE CASE, PRESS PINS FRONT-RUNNER LABEL ON CLINTON, said The Washington Post's page-one headline on January 12. New York magazine put a Clinton pin-up picture on its January 20 cover, and a heavy-breathing Joe Klein announced inside that the Democratic party was moving "tectonically" to the "largely unknown" governor. (In a few choice words, Klein had defined what a "media candidate" is: he's one with earthquake force before he has a political base; he is pronounced "electable" before most people know anything about him.) And then the Time cover that used to be part of the prize for winning New Hampshire was awarded to Clinton in the Juary 27 issue, three weeks before the first primary.

One almost forgot that Clinton's Arkansas constituency had fewer souls in it than Brooklyn, New York. And it hardly seemed to matter that after twelve years of Clinton's governing, Arkansas still ranked forty-seventh, forty-eighth, or forty-ninth in the Union on virtually every measure of social welfare. Conversely, it did not seem to help Jerry Brown that he had been an innovative and popular governor of by far the biggest, richest state in the Union for eight years. Brown was cast in the Eastern media as the Milky Way candidate in 1992. Among New York influentials, Clinton was "this year's pet cracker," as Jimmy Breslin complained in Newsday. Quickly the whole country got the message that Clinton might be inevitable.

Who knows what drives these media fashions? Is it a taste for novelty, or for certainty? For new faces, or safe bets? To be fair to Clinton, it may be a taste for quality. Never to be underestimated in these love affairs is Ben Bradlee-envy, the understanding that a reporter who spots a star can end up the pal of a president. I'll always remember Richard Reeves's lament for our generation after he had swooned over Jimmy carter's campaign in New York magazine in 1976. It was our turn, he felt, to get in on history as Bradlee and Joe Kraft and Joe Alsop had with John Kennedy, but the romance with Carter led nowhere. Several more generations of eager young writers have been lost in the meantime; still more are yet longing to be found by an idealistic young president. For many reporters, Bill Clinton was "such stuff as dreams are made on."

Still, most of the hot air in these balloons comes from the newsmagazines, whose mission usually has some mischief in it. The persistent, almost propagandistic pressure from Time and Newsweek, by my reading, is meant to distance the Democrats from their own working-class economics and emotions. Clinton was the perfect vehicle for this slick liberal-bashing, as Time's late-January cover story acknowledged: the press "came up with Clinton," Time purred, "partly because he seemed the perfect foil to a Northern Big Government liberal: a Southerner who took many moderate stands -- on education and welfare reform, for example -- and talked constantly about the 'responsibility' of people who receive government benefits to do something in return." Newsweek (February 10) phrased it: "He is a policy wonk in tune with a younger generation of Democrats eager to take the party beyond the liberal stereotype."

Clinton has the further benefit of a decisive shift in the focus of pack journalism. It has moved out of the fuselage of the candidates' planes (which were often, in fact, contentious places) to the club chairs of academic lounges like Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. We are in the habit now of holding hands at these watering holes and comparing notes across what should be a proper adversarial gap. In the name of contemplating how press and politics interact, we schmooze pretentiously and endlessly, as if we shared a single enterprise in managing a consensus.

It was at the Barone Center that, of all people, President Bush's nephew, John Ellis, proposed to the networks a "Nine Sundays" master plan of campaign debates for 1992. The New York Times gave op-ed space to Ellis and his proposal, noting his Harvard credentials but not his family connections. Still more among Democrats, the line is hopelessly smudged between players and scorekeepers. Sidney Blumenthal's beatification of Bill Clinton in The New Republic of February 3, 1992, caught perfectly the pick-up team spirit of writers, editors, academics, and freelance thinkers who were ushering Clinton through the new nomination process. Blumenthal dubbed it "The Conversation," a long, loose project that had defined "leaner, activist government" as the agenda of liberalism and the Democratic party. Blumenthal had an insider's grip on the names and the nuances of The Conversation. He caught everything, in fact, but the arrogance of the talkathon and its contempt for mere citizenship. To the question, Who is Bi Clinton? Blumenthal's answer for the Conversationalists was, "If you have to ask, you're not a Democratic honcho. He is one of the best-known people among the party elites."

The spluttering anger among Big Foot writers when Gennifer Flowers jostled the apple cart was surely born of the conviction that we privileged participants in the "invisible primary" had already judged Clinton's credentials. The headline on Blumenthal's piece was "The Anointed." The sub-head: "Bill Clinton, nominee-elect."

The other headline going to press that week was Ms. Flowers's in the Star: MY 12-YEAR AFFAIR WITH BILL CLINTON. This was the story that reversed the food chain of news. It will mark 1992 as the year when the "elite" media fell into uncivil war with the "sleaze" tabloids, and lost control of the conversation.

The rough symbolism of the evening network news used to suggest a national Daddy reading aloud from the newspaper (The New York Times, in particular). In 1992, it seemed that a cacophonous, dysfunctional family was wrestling over adolescent pornography.

News no longer trickles down but bubbles up. As the Gennifer Flowers case illustrated, local television and cable make the first cut of the news video most people see. In an atmosphere conditioned by the Hard Copy sex and scandal shows, they seize what sizzles, and the rest of the media follow.

And still it is inescapably a collective "we" that is working both ends of the market. The Star only printed what all the reporters had been chatting up obsessively for months. I am told that when Bill Clinton auditioned at The Boston Globe early in January, reporters and columnists probed his sex life for an hour -- the same reporters and columnists who huffed and puffed a fortnight later against the Star's revelations. We had all seen the dynamite in the story. The dismay in the elite media was mainly that plain folks had been drawn into our furtive deliberations.

NBC, behaving as elite networks are supposed to, hesitated over the Gennifer Flowers story; but WNBC in New York, owned and operated by the network, ran wild with it. See the pattern? The upscale media baited the trap with hints about womanizing; their downmarket cousins bagged the trophy; and the quality commentators returned, bright clothespins on their noses, to dissect the evidence and tell us what it meant. To audiences it did not look like real warfare in the media but rather like a face-saving division of labor.

Neither is the battle of the sexes in 1992 coverage quite what it seems. On the surface, the feminization of the news business proceeds apace. Bylines like Maureen Dowd's and Robin Toner's in The New York Times, Renee Loth's in The Boston Globe, Cokie Roberts's on ABC and NPR have made the "girls" more prominent and more provactive than "the boys on the bus."

The gathering mass of women watching the campaign trail seems to have elevated the "private life" interest. On candidates and their characters in general, my grateful general impression is that female eyes -- like Mary McGrory's in The Washington Post and Lynn Sherr's on ABC -- tend to be more incisive and somehow more forgiving, at the same time. Maureen Dowd, for example, catches more goofy details about George Bush and sets them in a wider frame, I think, than any man on the White House story.

Not so obvious was the masculinist offensive in the winter war on tabloid trash. As Gennifer Flowers blossomed in the Star, William Safire in The New York Times (January 27) struck swiftly to cut off reinforcements: "You can bet that some professional feminists will take the side of the accusing woman who sees herself as victimized and now seeks fleeting fame and a considerable fortune as a destroyer of a public man." Could it be that, subliminally, the object of Safire's attack was Anita Hill and the female forces she rallied against Clarence Thomas?

Rather a lot of the commentary on Flowers can be read as a revanchist war for male turf that got trampled in Thomas's march to the Supreme court. The danger, as Newsweek said (February 10), was "that the Scandal Machine would claim another victim." Get it? Flowers vs. Clinton was not a woman accusing a man; it was a "scandal machine" at work.

Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune columnist, posed a question (February 2) to liven up a dull party: "How can you believe Anita Hill and not believe Gennifer Flowers?" I would toss variations of the same question to the media consensus: Why was it an urgent public service to vent Hill's charges against Thomas but "tabloid terrorism" to vent Flowers's charges against Clinton? Was it because loose talk, as Hill alleged, about "Long Dong Silver" and pubic hair on a Coke can is more telling evidence than a governor's finding a state job and an apartment, as Flowers alleged, for his girlfriend? Was it because a Supreme Court justice is a more important arbiter of sexual equality than a president? Was it because Flowers got money for her story -- the same way Donald Regan got money for exposing Nancy Reagan's astrologer? Was Bill Clinton's power-tripping with Gennifer Flowers excusable because she consented to the relationship, or was Flowers disqualified from our sympathy for reasons of class, because she fiteatly into the "bimbo" stereotype? And because Hillary Clinton, on the contrary, was such a perfect model of articulate achievement?

Suffice it to say that between the lines of the commentary on Flowers, I heard many men venting what many men had felt during the Thomas hearings but couldn't say in front of Anita Hill. The story is "basically junk," Lance Morrow wrote in Time, " a little sugar rush of news. . . . Human sex life is rich and complex, but its interest is more novelistic than moral." Such, of course, was the Senate Judiciary Committee's thinking last fall when it first passed over Anita Hill's story. But the journalistic sisterhood that rescued Ms. Hill in October ignored Ms. Flowers in February. Gennifer with a G was N.O.K.D. as the Boston Brahmins say -- "not our kind, dear." And the journalistic brotherhood had a clear field.

A. M. Rosenthal tore into the "vermin" and "whores" behind "the print and TV sexual examination that is the monument to American immaturity and prurience." The editor-in-chief of U.S. News, Mort Zuckerman, opined on Flowers and Clinton with the same hostility. "Money for Mischief" was the headline on Zuckerman's editorial against "sex-tales-for-sale," nominally about Flowers. "This voyeurism should not be permitted to run unchecked," he ruled.

Resonating at some level for both men must have been the pain and embarrassment each had suffered when women in their recent pasts had talked. In any case, the subtext was that powerful boys will be boys and shouldn't have to explain, even in a presidential campaign. Joan Beck contributed the only dissent I saw, in the Chicago Tribune (January 30): "In an election year when family issues are supposed to be important, it is troubling for a candidate to seem to be saying that adultery shouldn't matter."

There were, in fact, three unusual and daunting issues -- first Sex, then War, also Death -- that put the Clinton campaign through a sort of Winter Olympics of Morality and posed an uncommon test of campaign coverage, too. This is one man's report card, in early hindsight.

1. The "best in the jungle" of Bill Clinton's candidacy was sex, from the beginning. Gary Hart's shipwreck on the Monkey Business in 1987 marked out the hazards of sexual adventurism with which Clinton was loosely associated. Clinton himself had volunteered in the summer of 1991 that his marriage was flawed -- a curious, come-on announcement even as he shut the door to "have you ever?" inquiries. Reporters who knew nothing of Clinton's "New Covenant" social policies had all heard tell of Clinton's libido. Like the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who came into the 1988 Olympics having used steroids, Bill Clinton brought some dangerous baggage into the presidential race, against the certainty of being tested. A predictable subplot of the 1992 campaign would turn on what he, and we, would find to say about private itches he was compelled to scratch in public.

The Washington Post's January 26 profile by David Maraniss was admirably forthright, quoting Betsey Wright, a close Clinton aide in Arkansas: "I've been watching groupie women around Bill for 20 years, fawning all over him. . . . It used to make me mad how much he enjoyed it. It's an ego thing with men. It's part of the equation of politics and power and sex. Bill Clinton withstood more of that than most men."

This was perhaps all we needed to know, but the Clintons did not leave it there. On 60 Minutes that same night Bill Clinton outlined a "friendly but limited" relationship with Gennifer Flowers, and the next day Ms. Flowers escalated at the Waldorf-Astoria with her own lusty verisimilitude.

To see her on TV was to believe her every hint about bliss with Bill in the shower. Among print reporters, however, television-envy seemed to fire up heroic efforts to evade the obvious. Most papers exaggerated the strength of Clinton's denials, which were never categorical. Many papers hedged solemnly that the issue was not adultery but whether Clinton had lied about it -- a question nobody wanted to pursue. Another red herring: Was it really Clinton's voice on Flowers's tape? Clinton answered that one when he apologized to Mario Cuomo for the voice's Mafia reference.

By then Clinton had a bodyguard of writers around him. Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant announced (January 29) that he was "rooting like a fanatic" for Clinton and urged New Hampshire to "fight . . . back against Big Media's loss of self-control" by voting for Clinton. Sid Blumenthal served up a bizarre defense with a partisan twist in The New Republic (February 17): "While George Bush -- all whiteness -- talks about 'family values,' the Clintons demonstrate them by confessing to adultery." Newsweek roughed up Ms. Flowers for improving her showbusiness credits and passed over her central charge -- the twelve-year liaison with Clinton. "Another of those now classic media sex carnivals," Newsweek sniffed.

More than anything, Big Media averted its gaze from the most talked-about story of the winter campaign. The New York Times in particular seemed in the throes of neo-Victorianism. The newsmagazines appeared to be deferring to their own "electability" myth about Clinton. And the beast still lurked in the jungle.

2. The second big bomb on Bill Clinton in February was The Wall Street Journal's report that the candidate, as a twenty-three-year-old, had manipulated and perhaps evaded the Vietnam draft back in 1969.

The Journal's sponsorhip of the story righted the old food chain. The quality press was calling the tune again, and reporters who had balked at following Flowers and the Star fell cheerfully to work on the Journal's lead. But, in fact, there was less there than met the eye.

The "news" was the colorful commentary that an octogenarian ex-ROTC recruiter in Arkansas put on an old set of facts. Colonel Eugene Holmes told the Journal "Bill Clinton was able to manipulate things so that he didn't have to go in." But the same Colonel Holmes had told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last October, four months earlier, that "he was treated just like I would have treated any other kid. I was giving a lot of kids exceptions."

The damaging force behind the Clinton draft story seemed to come mainly from "transference," in psychiatric lingo. Especially at The New York Times, feelings that had been suppressed on the adultery story came billowing out at the top of page one: CLINTON THANKED COLONEL IN '69 FOR 'SAVING ME FROM THE DRAFT,' was the accusatory two-column headline under the Times masthead on February 13. The assessment inside of "devastating" damage was headed CLINTON CANDIDACY WOUNDED BY WAR HE DISDAINED.

Primary voters, in fact, reached a surprise verdict on the Vietnam and draft question: Medal-of-Honor winner Bob Kerrey was the first Democrat out of the race; the survivors after Super Tuesday were three men -- Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and Bill Clinton -- who had avoided Vietnam service. The real and affirmative meaning of the draft story was in the passionate prose of young Clinton -- "against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam."

Clinton thought the Bush campaign or the Pentagon had leaked his letter to hurt him. As the novelist James Carroll commented in The Boston Globe (February 24), "Clinton backed away from his letter as if Gennifer Flowers had written it." Yet Carroll and many others thought they had glimpsed the best of Clinton in that letter. "The letter shows a candor and anguish that has shrunk," observed columnist Paul Greenberg of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Commercial. "I don't see the anguish now," Greenberg told The New York Times Magazine (March 8). "I wish I had known that 23-year-old."

Perhaps the moral is that candidates should be required to publish some early samples of heartfelt correspondence. The irony is that if Clinton had circulated the letter as an advertisement for himself, the papers might not have printed it, and we might not have read it if they had.

3. Can you identify Rickey Ray Rector? He should be famous by now for the one great issue on which Bill Clinton could find no room to maneuver, but who remembers him?

Rickey Ray Rector died of a lethal injection at the Arkansas State Penitentiary on Friday night before the Super Bowl. The AP report of the execution included the detail that when he was asked if he wished to make a final statement, Rector said, "Yes, I got baptized and saved." Further, that the execution was delayed fifty minutes when medical personnel could not find a suitable vein to inject.

Rickey Ray Rector was forty-year-old black man, convicted ten years earlier in the murder of Bob Martin, a police officer, in Conway, Arkansas. After shooting Martin, Rector had put the gun to his own head and lobotomized

Columbia Journalism Review, May, 1992

himself. His IQ was thought to be 70. "He is, in the vernacular, a zombie," said one of his lawyers.

Three days before Bill Clinton confessed, in effect, on 60 Minutes that he had violated the Sixth Commandment, he denied executive clemency to Rector for having violated the Fifth.

Every story I saw about Rector's death made a parenthetical note of its convenience to Bill Clinton. As the AP reported: "The execution could help Clinton distance himself from his party's soft-on-crime liberal image, said some political observers in New Hampshire."

In other words, it was an element of Bill Clinton's "electability" that Rickey Ray Rector should die, preferably without inflammatory fanfare.

Time and Newsweek, custodians of that "electability" which they'd helped create, made no mention of Rector's fate. And the newspapers and networks, too, were easily distracted on Super Bowl weekend.

Among the scant mentions of Rickey Lee Rector's death, several came in connection with the venting of Clinton's turmoil about the death penalty when he appeared the next day before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition meeting. "Last night," Clinton said, "I thought of Mr. Rector, also of Robert Martin, the police officer who was killed in cold blood. I thought of them all. And I prayed that I had not made the wrong decision."

It's on the death penalty, not Vietnam, that Bill Clinton has expressed anguish but dodged judgment. "He's never wanted to get drawn into the long drawn-out discussion on the death penalty," his Arkansas press secretary, Mike Gauldin, told Peter Applebome of The New York Times. "He's never given any interviews on whether he sleeps the night of executions or how it makes him feel."

Jimmy Breslin wrote a column of fine outrage in Newsday the day before Rector died. "Because he is a class candidate, Clinton will not hold a big fundraiser around the execution," Breslin said. Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson railed at "the killing of human vegetables" as "an exercise for brutes."

But nowhere outside Arkansas did the sacrifice of Rickey Ray Rector make page-one or get serious play on the evening news. It is small credit to the press, much credit to Bill Clinton's finesse, that we have forgotten Rickey Ray Rector.

CORRECTION-DATE: July, 1992 / August, 1992

CORRECTION: In "Sex, War, and Death" (CJR, May/June), Christopher Lydon referred to President Bush's nephew John Ellis, who proposed a "Nine Sundays" plan of campaign debates for 1992, adding, "The New York Times gave op-ed space to Ellis and his proposals, noting his Harvard credentials but not his family connections." The Times did not give op-ed space to Ellies: rather, it published an editorial supporting the plan.

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