What happened to America in the 1990's is that a small band of people composed of: 1 die-hard segregationist, some zealous Christian vote organizers, 1 wealthy conspirator, and a number of unscrupulous operators of all kinds attempted to blacken the reputations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. With the help of an out-of-control and inept Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, they were able to bring a set of charges into Congress that they called an impeachment case. But the "case" was a worse embarrassment to the lawyers who concocted it than to the Clintons. So flimsy was this set of charges that it took the President's lawyers less than 24 hours to destroy the "case" it took 5 years and $70M to build. The impeachment could never have been brought if the country's "mainstream" press had not faithfully printed everything the conspiracy wanted them to print for all six years after the Times broke the Whitewater "story." The complicity of the press in spreading the endless lies of the conspirators was much more dangerous than the conspiracy itself, because it means that for the moment, America has no national news purveyor it can trust to be more interested in the truth than its own convenience and parochial prejudices.
It was a conspiracy, and it was one the American media have not discovered to this day. But Mr. Blumenthal is not half as interested in skewering the conspirators as he is in reporting a real live presidency in all its hard work, focus, intelligence, ingenuity, and barely controlled chaos.
It is a pleasure to be able to recommend Mr. Blumenthal's book highly on several grounds: first, it's a first draft of the history of the era, and a damned good one; second, Mr. Blumenthal writes clear and sometimes eloquent prose; and third, the book gives an irreplaceable account of what it was like to be working at the White House, assisting President Clinton effectively, and to be rewarded by having your public reputation blackened by the same kind of malodorous lies that Bill and Hillary Clinton were suffering. Among other virtues, the author's wry and gentle humor demonstrates one of the qualities it took to survive the ordeal the author's public service turned into. You meet a human being in this book, a smart, hard working, ethical one, who understood going into his White House job what was in store for him. The first lie about him arrived in the Drudge report the night before he reported to work. Welcome to the Clinton White House, Sid Blumenthal.
The book is a model of concise reporting on events the author was part of. Everything is footnoted, and the personalities of people Blumenthal knew are sketched insightfully and even-handedly. Blumenthal's politics are progressive, and he, like Bill Clinton, has a vision of what political power exercised on behalf of all the people of this country and all the people in the rest of the world, can accomplish. He reports on what was accomplished in the midst of the hideous static of unending journalistic attacks. Among many other matters, he reports on how seriously President Clinton took terrorism in general and Osama bin Laden in particular, and he reports on the amount of anti-terrorism legislation Clinton sent to a Republican congress (where much of it died) and on the successes the administration enjoyed in preventing bin Laden's army from blowing up more things than they did. He clearly respects and admires both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he says why. After overexposure to the endless psychobabble and rumor mongering that press coverage of the Clinton presidency became, Blumenthal's account of what the President wanted to do and how much of it he accomplished is wonderfully refreshing. He reports both the successes and the failures with political acuity.
I paid this book the supreme compliment of carrying all 2+ pounds of it back and forth to work so that I could read it on the bus. (Normally I don't carry books over 7 ounces for commuter reading.) I found it as gripping as a novel, despite the fact that it tells a story whose basic plot I already knew. It is a much better story he has to tell than the cartoon drawn for us by the mainstream media. For those whose minds are not already made up, it is an indispensable book.
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