The Kennedy Half-Century (77 page)

Clinton’s second term turned out to be anything but a victory lap, though. Instead of building “the bridge to the twenty-first century” that he had talked about on the campaign trail, Clinton mainly answered for scandals in his past
and present. The problems, many stemming from Clinton’s gubernatorial tenure, had been mounting throughout his White House years. Less than a year into his presidency, some Arkansas troopers and other state employees began talking to various news media outlets, claiming they had facilitated Governor Clinton’s extramarital affairs in Little Rock and elsewhere.
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Precisely a year after the inauguration, Attorney General Reno acceded to Republican demands and named an independent counsel, Robert Fiske, to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in an Arkansas real estate development called Whitewater, which had been discussed during the 1992 campaign and became a press obsession in 1993 and 1994.
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A few months later, a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, filed a civil lawsuit claiming Governor Clinton had made explicit sexual advances toward her, including exposing himself, in 1991.
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The water was rising behind a dam that, fortunately for Clinton, would not burst until after he was safely reelected.

Just short of a year into Clinton’s second term, the die was cast when former solicitor general Kenneth Starr, who had replaced Robert Fiske as the independent counsel in 1994, received permission from Janet Reno to expand his investigation beyond Whitewater. His focus was on some explosive information he had received—that President Clinton had carried on an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky from November 1995 until March 1997. On January 17, 1998, Clinton gave sworn testimony for the Paula Jones lawsuit. In the deposition, he denied having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. Within a few days, the story was fully public, virtually wiping out all other news and dominating the headlines until 1999.
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In front of reporters and TV cameras in the White House, an angry President Clinton wagged his finger and repeated his denial in the most-replayed video clip of his tenure (“I did not have sexual relations …”).
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The country avidly followed a presidency that became a high-stakes soap opera. By August Clinton was forced to admit to a grand jury (the first ever in which a president appeared in his own defense) and then to the nation in a televised address that he had had “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
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By this time, Clinton knew that Ken Starr had accumulated evidence of the affair; as it happened, the proof included a blue dress worn by Lewinsky during one of her encounters with Clinton that was stained with his semen.
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Clinton continued to insist that he had not lied in the Jones deposition because of his use of the present tense—that is, denying only that the affair was a current one. By that time, he was no longer seeing Lewinsky. Clinton also claimed that because only fellatio was involved, no real sexual relations took place—an assertion that produced widespread scorn and gave late-night comedians a ratings boost.

On September 9, 1998 Starr delivered to Congress a scathing, explicit
report about his four-year investigation. Having lied under oath, Clinton was an impeachment target in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. On December 16 President Clinton became the second chief executive, after Andrew Johnson, to be impeached by the House, which justified its action on the basis of Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice. There was never any chance Clinton would be convicted by the Senate, since a two-thirds vote (67 senators) was required for conviction and there were only 55 GOP senators. Clinton’s long ordeal officially ended on February 12, 1999, when the Senate failed to convict on any charge. Two months later Clinton was held in civil contempt of court by a federal judge, and he was eventually compelled to pay Paula Jones’s lawyers $90,000 in compensation for the extra work they performed because of Clinton’s false testimony.
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Separately, Paula Jones had also been awarded $850,000, though all but $200,000 of that was for her legal expenses.
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Clinton paid from a legal fund he had established, but admitted no wrongdoing in her case. In a final indignity, handed down just a day before he left the White House in 2001, Clinton’s law license was suspended for five years by the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Responsibility, and Clinton had to pay an additional fine of $25,000.
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While Clinton was a diminished president after the airing of his very dirty laundry, the Republicans did themselves no favor either. The public wanted Clinton censured, not ousted from office, and the electorate punished the GOP for overplaying its hand, depriving the party of expected gains in Congress during the 1998 midterm election. The Republicans lost five seats in the House, and added no seats in the Senate, despite early expectations that they would gain substantially in both houses. Instead of Clinton leaving office, it was Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich who resigned his post, forced out by an unhappy GOP caucus that learned he had been conducting an extramarital affair at the same time he had been capitalizing on Clinton’s woes.
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The nation learned anew that hypocrisy is often the lifeblood of politics.

The contrast between the standards for presidents applied in the 1960s and the 1990s is stark. John Kennedy’s sexual shenanigans in the White House were likely more frequent and every bit as outrageous as Bill Clinton’s. JFK carried on an affair with a young intern, too, and did so more or less openly in front of trusted staffers.
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The moral reprehensibility is clear in both cases, but the accepted norms under which the men operated were akin to night and day. In JFK’s time, public men, even presidents, were given a free pass by the press on their dalliances, while Clinton had had lesson after lesson on the dangers of adultery during his governorship, his 1992 campaign, and his pre-Lewinsky White House days. Clinton paid dearly for pretending that he was above the rules that applied to his contemporaries. And of course JFK,
for all his talents, could never have survived the press and legal scrutiny of the 1990s.

Bill clinton May have duplicated some of JFK’s bad behavior, but he was determined not to make Jimmy Carter’s political mistake. Clinton stayed close to Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy family throughout his presidency.
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Substantively, the Clinton-Kennedy intersection was health care. While in the end, the Clinton plan to provide health insurance for every American would not be passed, Clinton took care to consult with Senator Kennedy and gain his imprimatur for the approach he and Mrs. Clinton were taking.
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And Kennedy, who had dreamed of universal health care coverage for decades, did his best to advocate for the Clinton plan, especially within the balky Democratic Senate caucus.
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On a personal level, the ties between the first families were strong and well tended. No doubt the Kennedys were delighted that a JFK acolyte who cited President Kennedy at every turn was in the White House. They had already accepted that Ted would never run again, and the younger Kennedys were years away from any potential presidential bid. Thus, there was little direct competition or jealousy, unlike the case of Carter, who had been seen as supplanting or even usurping the Kennedys’ place of honor. For good measure, Clinton appointed Jack and Ted’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith as U.S. ambassador to Ireland.
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He spoke at the memorial service for Robert Kennedy on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his assassination and offered a moving tribute to JFK at the formal dedication of the John F. Kennedy Library Museum.
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He celebrated the quarter-century mark of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Peace Corps.
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He was everywhere the Kennedys asked him to be.

Few were surprised when the Clintons vacationed at Martha’s Vineyard with the Kennedys in August 1993. Jackie Kennedy was the official hostess for a five-hour sailing luncheon, and she was joined by daughter, Caroline, and brother-in-law Ted, among others.
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Just a few months later, in January 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. A heavy smoker for most of her life, she died on May 19 at home in New York, just sixty-four years old, surrounded by her family. President Clinton said upon her death, “Even in the face of impossible tragedy, she carried the grief of her family and our entire nation with a calm power that somehow reassured all the rest of us.”
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Most Americans paused to remember an elegant First Lady who had endured the unspeakable. Homes were again filled with the images of Camelot’s sparkling years, and the four black November days that ended it. She was buried next to President Kennedy and her two children who did not
survive infancy, with the eternal flame she had lit thirty-one years earlier providing light and warmth.

If there can be fortune in early death, it was in Mrs. Kennedy’s passing away before her son, John Jr., aged thirty-eight, was killed on July 16, 1999, in the crash of a small plane he was piloting to a family wedding. John’s wife and her sister also died. The crown prince of Camelot, as he was often called, was expected to enter politics eventually, perhaps even aspire to the presidency. News channels provided round-the-clock coverage of the search for his plane at sea as Americans came to terms with yet another awful Kennedy heartbreak. Born late in the month his father was elected president, John Jr. had never lived a day without being a public person. If his father’s had been, in the words of historian Robert Dallek, “an unfinished life,” John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s was a life of enormous potential, now never to be realized on the public stage. As his uncle Ted said at his funeral, “Like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”
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For Americans of the second half of the twentieth century, John Jr.’s enduring image would always be the innocent courage and unknowing loss of a little boy saluting his daddy’s coffin.

With the deaths of Mrs. Kennedy and her son, President Kennedy’s legacy was, more and more, slipping into the past. But it was still a past often invoked. For his entire term, President Clinton never failed to revel in his moment with President Kennedy in the Rose Garden. For six of his eight years, he hosted the Boys Nation group, joined by the Girls Nation delegation, at the White House. Clinton would bring out special guests, such as Vice President Gore or Senator Kennedy or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and regale the youngsters with stories of his special day in 1963. Once, he recalled that his Boys Nation group had passed a resolution against racial discrimination just before the trip to the White House. President Kennedy thanked them, noting “that we had shown more initiative than the nation’s Governors,” who had recently refused to do something similar at their national conference. “We [of Boys Nation] loved it, but the Governors didn’t like it very much, and it got [President Kennedy] in a lot of hot water with them.”
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Most of all, President Clinton would take the time to shake hands and pose for a photograph with each delegate. As Clinton wrote in his autobiography, “I hope some of those photos turn up in campaign ads someday.”
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When evaluating the unusual historical relationship between John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, it is vital to remember that the bond was created by Clinton’s memory of a moment. A brief handshake may be enough for a powerful political commercial, but it hardly suffices to explain anything. The two were of dissimilar generations and mindsets, and the challenges they faced as president were dramatically different. The old Lloyd Bentsen line, “I knew John F. Kennedy, and you’re no John F. Kennedy,” applied almost as well to
Bill Clinton as it had to Dan Quayle. The two Vietnam War–avoiding Baby Boomers had little in common with a man shaped by World War II.

In Clinton’s case, it was more about hero worship than anything else. He adopted JFK as a role model in his youth, and while he may have striven to be like Kennedy, Clinton was his own person, and certainly no photocopy of Kennedy. Clinton was as smart and politically shrewd as the thirty-fifth president, but less polished and suave. Instinctively and generationally, Clinton was more liberal than Kennedy on a host of issues, his positioning as a “New Democrat” notwithstanding. How could Clinton not be more to the left? JFK had not lived to see the counterculture sixties, the cynicism-producing disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, the economic failures of the seventies, and the defining movements for women’s rights, gay rights, and the environment—all of which molded the nineties version of Bill Clinton. Just to cite one direct result of cultural changes: The Clinton administration was packing to leave the White House as First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was her husband’s RFK during his presidency, was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. In the 1960s, no one—least of all Jackie—could ever have imagined that Jacqueline Kennedy would run for office.

Aside from the pure adulation that Clinton felt for Kennedy, there was a clever political calculation. Clinton understood well that Democrats—and most of the country—had longed for a Kennedy restoration since the 1963 assassination. But they wanted a credible, nonthreatening restoration. Ted Kennedy seemed too liberal and scarred by Chappaquiddick. So Clinton became the next best thing: the same age as JFK when he died, quoting Kennedy frequently and ardently, full of vigor and New Frontier–like proposals, a moderate presence compared to the leftist candidates that had dominated the Democratic Party in many recent presidential cycles. This image can be sustained for the duration of a campaign, but it fades into the reality of the presidency, when Americans live with a man day in, day out for eight years and get a better sense of the individual behind the political pose.