How Richard Nixon Created Hillary Clinton
As a young lawyer, she helped investigate Watergate. For the First Woman of American politics, those chickens are always coming home to roost.
By Sam Tanenhaus
Nov 5, 2015 5:00 AM EST
Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, in all its layered meaning, overpowers cogent analysis and even neutral description. It was unsettling, strange, riveting—and without any true precedent: A front-runner for her party’s presidential nomination, and the first woman ever to be a serious contender for the job, interrogated, often with unconcealed hostility, for the better part of a day, with breaks for in-studio score-keeping, followed by postmortems, and spin on all sides. Even as committee Republicans took hard hits—“disturbing” (David Gergen on CNN), gripped in “psychosis” (David Brooks on PBS NewsHour)—conservatives dug in: “Hillary Clinton is corrupt, and vomits up lies,” Mark Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program. “You can hear the contempt in her voice when she answers questions ( http://tinyurl.com/ovgh5yr ), she believes she is above questioning.”
Either way, it has been Hillary Clinton’s most vivid and accomplished public moment, eclipsing her solid performance in the first debate. Great politicians, Murray Kempton once observed, “are capable of as many roles as there are sins to commit.” Hillary proved herself the Mirren or Streep of the political witness stand—cast as defendant, an all-too familiar role in our politics. After so many years, both Clintons evoke many feelings, but the strongest is of déjà vu. And in Hillary’s case each new controversy or scandal or pseudo-scandal—we’re never sure— arrives trailing gusts of previous ones. We—and she—have been here before. Nothing about the Benghazi theater was routine, but it was familiar nevertheless. She brought along her troupe as well. There was David Kendall, the Washington lawyer whose collaboration dates back to the Whitewater investigations, seated behind her in the hearing room, impassive as ever. And there was Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s voluble e-mail buddy, not seen but quoted with almost comical zeal by Trey Gowdy and company.
It was all a reminder of just how long Hillary Clinton’s dominion over our politics has lasted, and how powerful her gift still is for embroiling us in her dramas. Other politicians have phases, ups and downs, smooth sailing and rough patches. But Hillary’s political life, deep into its fourth decade, has been a fable of twice- and thrice-told tales, replayed in an endless loop. “We're seeing history repeat itself,” Bill Clinton told Fareed Zakaria back in September. “Ever since Watergate, something like this happens.”
Clinton of course didn’t mean—couldn’t mean—that his wife’s latest troubles, whatever they finally amount to, approach Richard Nixon’s crimes and breaches of constitutional law. He was referring to something else, less damning but if possible even more dispiriting—the transformation of our politics into a form of continual inquest. We know the cycle: accusation, counterattack, pitched battle to control the “narrative.” The Washington Confidential of a previous era, with its winking hostesses and careerist snitches, has given way, in our grimmer moment, to the beltway as no-end-in-sight C.S.I. series (the Benghazi Committee, we were often reminded, was the seventh—or was it eighth—rehash).
It’s the result—must it be repeated?—of what seems the unshakable fact of our political period, its hyperpartisanship combined with extreme polarization. There are no disagreements, only the culture war fought and refought on multiple, overlapping fronts. Hillary Clinton is very good at it, which isn’t surprising. She learned the rules from Nixon. He was the presidential author of modern politics. Hillary Clinton is his heir. She is Eve or Lilith, and was present at the creation.
The strange Nixon-Clinton bond was formed in the spring and summer of 1974, the last act of Nixon’s downfall following the break-in and arrest at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972. In the next months, the broad outlines of White House crimes were sketched out and painstakingly filled in. The numbskull burglars had been caught. The henchmen G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had been convicted. John Dean had dazzled a Senate committee with his punishingly total recall. All that remained was to tighten the cinch on Nixon. The job was undertaken with delicacy and tact by the House Judiciary Committee, which was drawing up articles of impeachment, with a staff of bright law school graduates, including Hillary Rodham. She was 26, a year out of Yale Law School, and she got the job after her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, turned it down.
Continued below:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/20...ry-clinton
As a young lawyer, she helped investigate Watergate. For the First Woman of American politics, those chickens are always coming home to roost.
By Sam Tanenhaus
Nov 5, 2015 5:00 AM EST
Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, in all its layered meaning, overpowers cogent analysis and even neutral description. It was unsettling, strange, riveting—and without any true precedent: A front-runner for her party’s presidential nomination, and the first woman ever to be a serious contender for the job, interrogated, often with unconcealed hostility, for the better part of a day, with breaks for in-studio score-keeping, followed by postmortems, and spin on all sides. Even as committee Republicans took hard hits—“disturbing” (David Gergen on CNN), gripped in “psychosis” (David Brooks on PBS NewsHour)—conservatives dug in: “Hillary Clinton is corrupt, and vomits up lies,” Mark Steyn said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program. “You can hear the contempt in her voice when she answers questions ( http://tinyurl.com/ovgh5yr ), she believes she is above questioning.”
Either way, it has been Hillary Clinton’s most vivid and accomplished public moment, eclipsing her solid performance in the first debate. Great politicians, Murray Kempton once observed, “are capable of as many roles as there are sins to commit.” Hillary proved herself the Mirren or Streep of the political witness stand—cast as defendant, an all-too familiar role in our politics. After so many years, both Clintons evoke many feelings, but the strongest is of déjà vu. And in Hillary’s case each new controversy or scandal or pseudo-scandal—we’re never sure— arrives trailing gusts of previous ones. We—and she—have been here before. Nothing about the Benghazi theater was routine, but it was familiar nevertheless. She brought along her troupe as well. There was David Kendall, the Washington lawyer whose collaboration dates back to the Whitewater investigations, seated behind her in the hearing room, impassive as ever. And there was Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s voluble e-mail buddy, not seen but quoted with almost comical zeal by Trey Gowdy and company.
It was all a reminder of just how long Hillary Clinton’s dominion over our politics has lasted, and how powerful her gift still is for embroiling us in her dramas. Other politicians have phases, ups and downs, smooth sailing and rough patches. But Hillary’s political life, deep into its fourth decade, has been a fable of twice- and thrice-told tales, replayed in an endless loop. “We're seeing history repeat itself,” Bill Clinton told Fareed Zakaria back in September. “Ever since Watergate, something like this happens.”
Clinton of course didn’t mean—couldn’t mean—that his wife’s latest troubles, whatever they finally amount to, approach Richard Nixon’s crimes and breaches of constitutional law. He was referring to something else, less damning but if possible even more dispiriting—the transformation of our politics into a form of continual inquest. We know the cycle: accusation, counterattack, pitched battle to control the “narrative.” The Washington Confidential of a previous era, with its winking hostesses and careerist snitches, has given way, in our grimmer moment, to the beltway as no-end-in-sight C.S.I. series (the Benghazi Committee, we were often reminded, was the seventh—or was it eighth—rehash).
It’s the result—must it be repeated?—of what seems the unshakable fact of our political period, its hyperpartisanship combined with extreme polarization. There are no disagreements, only the culture war fought and refought on multiple, overlapping fronts. Hillary Clinton is very good at it, which isn’t surprising. She learned the rules from Nixon. He was the presidential author of modern politics. Hillary Clinton is his heir. She is Eve or Lilith, and was present at the creation.
The strange Nixon-Clinton bond was formed in the spring and summer of 1974, the last act of Nixon’s downfall following the break-in and arrest at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972. In the next months, the broad outlines of White House crimes were sketched out and painstakingly filled in. The numbskull burglars had been caught. The henchmen G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt had been convicted. John Dean had dazzled a Senate committee with his punishingly total recall. All that remained was to tighten the cinch on Nixon. The job was undertaken with delicacy and tact by the House Judiciary Committee, which was drawing up articles of impeachment, with a staff of bright law school graduates, including Hillary Rodham. She was 26, a year out of Yale Law School, and she got the job after her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, turned it down.
Continued below:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/20...ry-clinton
