Bill Clinton: A
Reckoning
Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States
in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history; is it finally time to
make things right?
By Caitlin
Flanagan
The most remarkable
thing about the current tide of sexual assault and harassment accusations is
not their number. If every woman in America started talking about the things
that happen during the course of an ordinary female life, it would never end.
Nor is it the power of the men involved; history instructs us that for
countless men, the ability to possess women sexually is not a spoil of power;
it’s the point of power. What’s remarkable is that these women are being
believed.
Most of them don’t have
police reports or witnesses or physical evidence; many of them are recounting
events that transpired years—sometimes decades—ago. In some cases, their
accusations are validated by a vague, carefully couched quasi-admission of
guilt; in others they are met with outright denial. It doesn’t matter. We believe
them.
Moreover, we have finally come to some kind of national consensus about
the workplace; it naturally fosters a level of romance and flirtation, but the
line between those impulses and the sexual predation of a boss is clear.
Believing women about assault—even if they lack the means
to prove their accounts—as well as an understanding that female employees don’t
constitute part of a male boss’s benefits package, were the galvanizing
consequences of Anita Hill’s historic allegations against Clarence Thomas in
1991.
When she came forward during Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing,
and reported that he had sexually humiliated and pressured her throughout his
tenure as her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it was an
event of convulsive national anxiety.
Here was a black man, a Republican, about
to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and here was a black woman, presumably a
liberal, trying to block him with reports of repeated, squalid, and vividly
recounted episodes of sexual harassment. She had little evidence to support her
accusations. Many believed that since she’d been a lawyer at the EEOC she had
been uniquely qualified to have handled such harassment.
But then something that no one could have predicted
happened. It was a pre-Twitter, pre-internet, highly analog version of #MeToo.
To the surprise of millions of men, the nation turned out to be full of
women—of all political stripes and socioeconomic backgrounds—who’d had to put
up with Hell at work. Mothers, sisters, aunts, girlfriends, wives—millions of
women shared the experience of having to wait tables, draw blood, argue cases,
make sales, all while fending off the groping, the joking, the sexual
pressuring, and the threatening of male bosses.
They were liberal and
conservative; white collar and pink collar; black and white and Hispanic and
Asian. Their common experience was not political, economic, or racial. Their
common experience was female.
For that reason, the
response to those dramatic hearings constituted one of the great truly feminist
events of the modern era. Even though Thomas successfully, and perhaps rightly,
survived Hill’s accusations, something in the country had changed about women
and work and the range of things men could do to them there.
But then Bubba came
along and blew up the tracks.
How vitiated Bill
Clinton seemed at the last Democratic convention. Some of his appetites, at
least, had waned; his wandering, “Norwegian Wood” speech about his wife struck
the nostalgic notes of a husband’s fiftieth anniversary toast, and the
crowd—for the most part—indulged it in that spirit.
Clearly, he was no longer
thinking about tomorrow. With a pencil neck and a sagging jacket he clambered
gamely onto the stage after Hillary’s acceptance speech and played happily with
the red balloons that fell from the ceiling.
When the couple
repeatedly reminded the crowd of their new status as grandparents it was to
suggest very different associations in voters’ minds.
Hillary’s grandmotherhood
was evoked to suggest the next phase in her lifelong work on behalf of women
and children—in this case forging a bond with the millions of American
grandmothers who are doing the hard work of raising the next generation, while
their own adult children muddle through life. But Bill’s being a grandfather
was intended to send a different message: Don’t worry about him anymore; he’s
old now. He won’t get into those messes again.
Yet let us not forget
the sex crimes of which the younger, stronger Bill Clinton was very credibly
accused in the 1990s.
Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she was a volunteer
on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet him in a hotel
coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to her room in the
hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said she fought against
Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied.
At a different Arkansas
hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones, and, Jones
says, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite, where he
exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it. Kathleen Willey said that she
met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and that he
groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his crotch.
It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged
violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of
the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks.
But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused
men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine
feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation and it
was willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de
seigneur.
The notorious 1998 New
York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most
regretted public actions of her life. It slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and
age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused.
Moreover (never write an op-ed in a hurry; you’ll accidentally say what you
really believe), it characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary
of the Democratic Party.
The New York Times published Gloria Steinem’s essay defending Clinton in March 1998 (Screenshot from Times Machine)
Called “Feminists
and the Clinton Question,” it was written in March of 1998, when Paula
Jones’s harassment claim was working its way through court. It was printed
seven days after Kathleen Willey’s blockbuster
60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley.
If all the various allegations
were true, wrote Steinem, Bill Clinton was “a candidate for sex addiction therapy.”
To her mind, the most “credible” accusations were those of Willey, whom she
noted was “old enough to be Monica Lewinsky’s mother.”
And then she wrote the
fatal sentences that invalidated the new understanding of workplace sexual
harassment as a moral and legal wrong: “Even if the allegations are true, the
President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a
gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life.
She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words,
President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”
Steinem said the same
was true of Paula Jones.
These were not crimes; they were “passes.”
Broaddrick
was left out by Steinem, who revealed herself as a combination John and Bobby
Kennedy of the feminist movement: the fair-haired girl and the bareknuckle
fixer.
The widespread liberal response to the sex crime accusations against
Bill Clinton found their natural consequence 20 years later in the behavior of
Harvey Weinstein: Stay loudly and publicly and extravagantly on the side of
signal leftist causes and you can do what you want in the privacy of your
offices and hotel rooms.
But the mood of the country has changed. We are in a
time when old monuments are coming down and when men are losing their careers
over things they did to women a long time ago.
When more than a dozen
women stepped forward and accused Leon Wieseltier of a serial and
decades-long pattern of workplace sexual harassment, he said, “I will not waste
this reckoning.” It was textbook Wieseltier: the insincere promise and the
perfectly chosen word.
The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of
the way it protected Bill Clinton.
The party needs to come to terms with the
fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his
stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its
central principles.
The party was on the wrong side of history and there are
consequences for that.
Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this
public accounting.
If it is possible for politics and moral behavior to
coexist, then this grave wrong needs to be acknowledged.
If Weinstein and Mark
Halperin and Louis C.K. and all the rest can be held accountable, so can our
former president and so can his party, which so many Americans so desperately
need to rise again.
