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" I caught the two-part PBS special on Bill Clinton the other night, and it was every bit the judicious and &amp;quot;balanced&amp;quot; piece of television that you&amp;#039;d assume it would be, having been produced by the American home office for judicious balance. And tote bags. Until it gets to the events surrounding the impeachment kabuki, and the endless, fruitless investigations that preceded it, whereupon the whole enterprise goes seriously off the rails. The first indication that things might go a&amp;#039;cropper came with the choice of talking heads. Gail Sheehy, author of an extremely flawed psychobiography of Hillary Clinton, was really the only one given substantial time to talk about her, and the Clintons&amp;#039;s marriage, and there was more than a little hint of Lady Macbeth in her evaluation, which was standard-issue Clinton-bashing back in the day. The character of Dick Morris, embattled truth-teller and resolute political genius, was also a clever invention. And, I&amp;#039;m sorry, but you&amp;#039;re going to have to be a bit more thorough than merely identifying Lucianne Goldberg as a &amp;quot;literary agent.&amp;quot; My lord, the woman had a history as a Republican ratcfcker going back to the Johnson administration. The show&amp;#039;s journalistic conscience was Michael Isikoff, who&amp;#039;s done some good work, but who pretty much got played like a violin during the events in question. (At the end, Isikoff argues for a similarity between Clinton and Richard Nixon because both of them attributed their problems to their political enemies. Nixon, however, according to isikoff, thought his enemies were better than he was, so that was why he resigned, whereas Clinton held his enemies in contempt, and therefore didn&amp;#039;t resign. This sets a standard for psycho-historical malarkey that may well go unchallenged even by Maureen Dowd.) There were always two stories going on here. The first one was the incredible recklessness engaged in by Clinton while he was president. (There&amp;#039;s a lot of psychobabbling about this in the PBS production) The other was the story of how there was an organized effort to undermine him from the moment it became clear that he would be the Democratic nominee in 1992. (This story, I would note, has some important contemporary ramifications as well.) With a few honorable exceptions \u2014 Don Van Atta of The New York Times was one, as was the indefatigable Gene Lyons, whose Fools For Scandal remains the ur-text on the largely vaporous Whitewater end of the Whitewater &amp;quot;scandal,&amp;quot; as well as Joe Conason, who partnered with Lyons for the essential The Hunting Of The President \u2014 the second story largely was ignored. The problem, and the essential corruption of journalism, came because the people who were covering the former story had to ignore the latter, including the incredible personal destruction wrought by Ken Starr and his staff on the lives of ordinary citizens in Arkansas, or else their sources would have dried up. None of this factors into the PBS documentary at all. None of those people is interviewed. And it&amp;#039;s not like PBS didn&amp;#039;t know how to find Lyons. In fact, the film says nothing about the actual pursuit of Bill Clinton and his wife by his political enemies beyond saying that he had political enemies. It blames the early nonsense about Clinton&amp;#039;s haircuts and the firing of the politically connected, if conspicuously light-fingered, folks in the White House travel office as inevitable result of the rise of cable news, as though the truth of things doesn&amp;#039;t matter. (Sheehy gets a chance to rummage around in Hillary Clinton&amp;#039;s head one more time.) Vince Foster&amp;#039;s suicide gives David Gergen \u2014 Oy! \u2014 the opportunity to flap his jowls about the effect that &amp;quot;Washington&amp;quot; might have had on the Clintons, but there&amp;#039;s no mention of the egregious Wall Street Journal editorialsthat Foster specifically mentioned in his suicide note. The documentary even implies that the Whitewater scandal-mongering had its beginnings with the &amp;quot;mysterious&amp;quot; disappearance of &amp;quot;files&amp;quot; from Foster&amp;#039;s office, and not with the godawful reporting done by Jeff Gerth in The New York Times during the campaign, which Lyons utterly demolished, first in an article in Harper&amp;#039;s and, later in his book. Nobody was really guilty. It was just &amp;quot;the culture.&amp;quot; Oh, and the Clintons&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;stonewalling.&amp;quot; The Arkansas Project never comes up, but there&amp;#039;s the usual flapdoodlish innuendo about the &amp;quot;mysterious&amp;quot; reappearance of the Rose Law Firm billing records. The dismissal of Robert Fiske in favor of Starr, a pivotal moment as regards what would come later, just sort of happens in the documentary. There&amp;#039;s no mention of the fact that Fiske got defenestrated by prominent Republicans because he&amp;#039;d discovered that there simply was no there there in the Whitewater matter, and because he declined to be a ghoul on the subject of Vince Foster&amp;#039;s suicide, or that those Republicans determined that Starr was more likely to give them what they were looking for. (In fact, the oleaginous presence of Starr himself in the documentary, explaining how he was just an honest guy, and not a sheet-sniffing partisan yahoo, is the only truly nausea-inducing moment in the whole production.) Inexcusably, talking heads are allowed to talk darkly about the &amp;quot;secret evidence&amp;quot; that persuaded dubious House members that Clinton should be impeached. That PBS plays all of this down what it perceives as the middle is nothing to celebrate. The fact is that the whole Clinton impeachment saga has gone straight down the memory hole. The Democrats decline to discuss it. For all the proud fulminating that the Republicans did about how they were acting in the highest national interest in defending the rule of law -- Remember the one guy who took a long walk on the beach before casting the vote? All of those high-minded quotations from Robrt Bolt&amp;#039;s play about Thomas More? -- hardly any of them mention it any more, either. The world-historical event never comes up at Republican conventions; the only impeachment firebrands still prominent in our politics today are Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Joe Scarborough, who hosts a TV show. Some of the reporters who made their careers chasing phantom crimes all over Arkansas are still around, but the second impeachment of a president in our history might as well have taken place on the moon. There are a number of reasons for this. I generally include shame among them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12914/bill-clinton-pbs-documentary-6962157/>