The Clinton Wars: An Insider's Account of the White House Years By Sidney Blumenthal

The campaign to bring down Bill Clinton was vicious and corrupt, says Cal McCrystal. But why did it find so many supporters?

This is a deeply alarming book about American politics and those charged with monitoring its course. The author is a highly intelligent journalist who joined President Bill Clinton as an assistant and senior advisor. He describes in distressing detail how White House colleagues coped with right-wing Republican attempts to destroy the president and wreck his liberal Democrat agenda by inflating non-criminal sexual peccadilloes into an unjustified campaign for his impeachment.

At one point in the story, a subdued Clinton observes: "That's what this thing is about. It's about power." The remark, and the context in which it was uttered, brings to mind a professorial cynicism which I imbibed, without much conviction, long ago: that power is nothing if it be conscientiously applied. The man who gives only to the deserving, who punishes only the guilty, who absolves only the innocent, has really no power at all. This was all but true in Clinton's case, for those who blackened him and had no time for such wimpish virtues had all the power in the world.

The conspiracy to disempower Clinton - launched by America's neo-conservatives ("neocons") and colluded in, either with intent or by default, by America's mainstream media - was an attempt to frustrate the president's programme to bring corporate America to heel, to curb its excesses, counter "special interest" lobbies, raise the minimum wage, provide decent health care, wipe out a horrifying federal deficit inherited from Republican Administrations, and reform the system by which election campaigns are financed.

The arrival of the Clintons in Washington DC was met with widespread nervous prostration, a universal derangement which painted events and non-events in the colouring of mythology. In the hallucinatory melancholia of Orestes, Aeschylus painted the rage of the Furies following and tormenting their victim: "Behold them, like Gorgons clothed in black, surrounded by the coils of many serpents." Try to picture that, and you'll identify Clinton's Washington.

Inside and outside Congress, the "neocons" induced impotence by whatever means took their fancy, and at whatever cost to the nation, the constitution and the highest office in the land. Consequently, the brilliant (if morally peccant) young politician from Arkansas discovered Washington DC to be, in his own words, "a goddamned jungle, a sick perverted place."

The hounding of Clinton was reminiscent of the secular hysteria (Zeithysterie) that enveloped 15th-century Germany, the deep-rooted devil-delusions in which religious enthusiasm and sexual excitement played a crucial part, just as they continue to do in fundamentalist America today. Highly personal though Blumenthal's account is, it convincingly conjures up a "neocon" and media view of the president as a kind of werewolf capable of strangling and eating babies. The response is to pursue him with spears, halberds, pikes, crossbows and sticks of every shape and size. What we read here is not only a history of contemporary sleaze-politics but a depressing exposé of skunk journalism, conducted in gusts from the hindquarters followed by self-protective dashes for the undergrowth.

I think it is the skunk journalism, increasingly featured in Britain too, which shocked me more than anything else about this book. The Clintons - and their young daughter Chelsea - endured a degree of partisanship as vile and vicious as it was corrupt and cruel. The commentator Rush Limbaugh joked on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News TV channel: "Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" He then held up a picture of 12-year-old Chelsea.

Partisanship wears many coats, and it's interesting to find so many versions of the garment on the notoriously self-regarding American communications industry. In The Clinton Wars, partisanship is at once pompously ideological (Wall Street Journal, the "neocons" bible), scurrilous (New York Post, owned by Murdoch), demented (Washington Times, owned by the Rev Sun Myung Moon), histrionic (Fox TV), snobbish (Washington Post), careless (New York Times), and slavish (others, including the major networks). Blumenthal is accused of being partisan too, but who would expect him not to be? He believed in Clinton's policies and was a loyal friend of Clinton's wife Hillary. But as a former writer for The New Yorker, his integrity and professionalism was widely admired.

Here he reveals how right-wing (often bent) lawyers, big-mouth propagandists, iniquitous congressmen, small town crooks, unspeakable clergymen and assorted flim-flam artists hammered away at the presidency over the so-called Whitewater scandal in which the Clintons were eventually cleared of any misdemeanour, and the Monica Lewinsky affair in which the president at first denied, then confessed to having had a sexual encounter with the young woman White House employee who had stalked him for sexual favours.

These conspirators fed lies, gossip and unsupported allegations to their pet reporters. They did so while insisting on, and receiving, anonymity. The skunks gulped down the rotten carrion and puffed it out in their readers' and viewers' faces. Little or no checking of facts was carried out. When published assertions turned out to be phoney, the media very often declined to print or broadcast corrections. The reputation of newspapers glorified by Nixon's Watergate was casually tossed aside. As Blumenthal observes: "This was not [the late owner] Mrs Graham or [former editor] Ben Bradlee's Washington Post any more." While reporters and editors were offering themselves as stenographers for a rabid right-wing kampf, this "pursuit of pseudoscandals was radically eroding their public standing," the author says. It is hard to argue with that. George Bush, who entered the White House on the dung-cart of right-wing malice and skunk journalism, holds reporters in open contempt, bestowing on them whatever nicknames he finds amusing.

Why should this have happened? Blumenthal offers this explanation: "[T]here was protection in conformity, as there always is in packs, and in social panics one loses status only by standing alone. Journalistic values were now inverted: skepticism was abolished in favour of credulity masquerading as toughness."

Or perhaps it was forever thus. It is no surprise to learn that a survey conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists over one week of 1968 revealed that of the 1,565 statements and allegations repeated by major television programmes, newspapers and magazines, only 1 per cent were based on two named sources, 41 per cent had no claim of factual reporting at all, and 40 per cent were derived from anonymous single sources. Nor is it surprising to read that a producer of an ABC current affairs programme deliberately kept pro-Clinton views off the air, or that American publishers voted for Bush against Clinton's would-be successor (Vice-President Gore) by three to one, or that the man behind Fox News's premature hailing of Bush's dodgy presidential election victory was the candidate's own first cousin.

On the other hand, the erosion of trust in the office of president has also progressed. With intelligence, unbiased analysis and honesty no longer in circulation, the present incumbent relies massively on emotive forces such as are aroused at times of war or exaggerated national peril. The rabid right, having brought some disgrace to Clinton and sabotaged Gore, needs to induce secular hysteria in order to stay in power. This requires allies who will collude in the transmission of delusions amounting to psychical contagion. We've seen it over the Iraq adventure. No doubt we shall see it again.