Now that Bill Clinton's days (and nights) at the White House have ended, I find myself recalling a letter I got from an intellectually trusted friend in Washington DC, in October 1991. Enclosed with it was a cutting of a New Yorker article containing these words: "The style of politics perfected in the Reagan years has become the American standard in many ways of public decision other than judicial selection. It is a style that is nasty, base and aggressive - hell-bent on the achievement of ends, with scant concern about means."
After Reagan came Bush the Elder, a clone and an acolyte of Reagan, both of them washed in the blood of Milton Friedman, high priest of trickle-down economics. Clearly, it was time for a change from "nasty, base and aggressive" politics.
Arkansas governor
In that 1991 letter, my DC friend told me that she had just been to Washington University, where she had listened to an address given by the Governor of Arkansas, one Bill Clinton. who, in her discerning eyes, looked like fine presidential material. If nothing else, she thought, a Clinton presidency might make a supportable change from the fur coats and limousines of the Reagan-Bush years.
In my reply, I wondered how a Fullbright scholar ("an Oggsford man," says Meyer Wolfshiem) would fare with that 50 per cent of the electorate that bothered to vote. Eggheads do not rise high in the American Hit Parade. After all, poor old Adlai Stevenson had never looked more silly than in the 1956 campaign, when, ill-advisedly wishing to match the rough-house style of Estes Kefauver, he dressed in a denim jacket and blue jeans and rode a bronco into a small Californian fruit-and nut town.
If Pat Buchanan was already finding the elder Bush "a wimp and a liberal", what easy meat might candidate Clinton be to the right-wingers and the holy rollers? In a country whose politics is a branch of the munitions industry, would the Pentagon - with far-flung consuls in every State - manage to block Clinton?
The night Clinton was elected, I wrote again to my DC friend, rejoicing with her at the end of the Reagan-Bush hegemony; though, I said, I did not find Clinton a wildeyed left-winger but a skilful politician - and that fact, I confessed, bothered me, because politicians fake and prevaricate and trim. (Some years later, I read Gore Vidal on Clinton, of whom he broadly approved. "Clinton's greatest asset is a perfect lack of principle," he said.)
Along the way, Clinton took up the cause of divided Ireland: took it up manfully and stayed manfully with it to the end. Perhaps the only thing that may have set the teeth of some of our countrymen on edge was hearing that, if we were good and we settled our ancient differences, America, while not matching the billions per annum it gives to Israel, might send us a one-off present of $40 million. A reason: we are not strategically located. Another reason: though we built American cities and railroads and spilled our sweat across the New World, we cannot, it seems, put the bite on Washington as Israel can.
Charisma
Now that Clinton has gone - and been dodgily replaced by the light-headed Bush Junior - we are going to miss him. He had charisma, everyone said; and charisma is just a Sunday word for charm. He brought with him a fragrant whiff of the South, like a rediscovered lost chapter from Gone With The Wind. If Margaret Mitchell had known him, she might have fitted him into her great novel. Perhaps, if we search carefully, we may find that somewhere in the sweep of that long story she foreshadowed him. I am not so foolish as to suggest, however, that we find in Scarlett O'Hara the prototype of "that woman".
We are told that, when the historians come to write the final assessment of Clinton, Monica will stand between him and greatness. Not even historians, I feel, will be so foolish or so blind. Perhaps it is the anthropologists who should take Clinton apart and put him together again. Only they - not the historians or the psychologisers - would know how a male is calculated to respond when a female "presents", as science puts it. The male is biologically geared to take notice of the presenting female, and nothing that the right-wingers or the holy rollers say can disjoin that binomial theorem (so to call it) from its actuating formula.
White House nights
Late at night, in the White House, as had often happened throughout the recorded history of that building, an available female presented to a male, and the male acted in the belief that she knew what she was doing, and meant it. There is no necessity to linger over the picturesque details in order to appreciate the profoundly anthropological situation in which the resident tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue found himself. And there can be no doubt about the intention of the presenting female.
The trouble began when a so-called special prosecutor, casting around for any old withered tree on which to hang Clinton, heard about the goings-on in the White House, and thought, "Ah, let's hang him on this one". But, in the end, Clinton's charisma - his charm - was proof against the special prosecutor and the spoilsport brigade. Even history, cold-blooded as it is, will finally accommodate itself to the good sense of anthropology. And even now, the American nation, stuck with Bush Junior, has begun to respond in its peculiar idiom: "Miss you awreddy, Bill!"