Nothing that is now known about the forty-second president of the United States, in other words, was not known before the New Hampshire primary in 1992. The implicit message in his August 1998 testimony to the Office of the Independent Counsel was not different in kind from that made explicit in January 1992: I think most Americans who are watching this … they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more than candid. By the time of the 1992 general election, the candidate was before us as he appears today: a more detailed and realized character than that presented in the Office of the Independent Counsel’s oddly novelistic Referral to the United States House of Representatives but recognizably drawn to similar risk, voraciously needy, deeply fractured, and yet there, a force to contend with, a possessor of whatever manna accrues to those who have fought themselves and survived. The flaws already apparent in 1992 were by no means unreported, but neither, particularly in those parts of the country recently neutralized by their enshrinement as “the heartland,” were they seized as occasions for rhetorical outrage. “With 16 million Americans unemployed, 40 million Americans without health care and 3 million Americans homeless, here’s what we have to say about presidential aspirant Bill Clinton’s alleged previous marital infidelity,” the Peoria Journal-Star declared on its editorial page at the time of the 60 Minutes appearance. “So what? And that’s all.”
There were those for whom the candidate’s clear personal volatility suggested the possibility of a similar evanescence on matters of ideology or policy, but even the coastal opinion leaders seemed willing to grant him a laissez-passer on this question of sex: “To what degree, if any, is the private action relevant to the duties of the public office?” the Los Angeles Times asked on its editorial page in January 1992. “Shouldn’t our right to know about a candidate’s sex life be confined … to offenses such as rape, harassment, or sex discrimination?” The New York Times report on the 60 Minutes interview, which appeared on page A14 and was headlined “Clinton Defends His Privacy and Says the Press Intruded,” was followed the next day by an editorial (“Leers, Smears and Governor Clinton”) not only commending the candidate for having drawn a line “between idle curiosity and responsible attention” but noting that “he won’t provide details and he need not, unless it develops that his private conduct arguably touches his public performance or fitness for office.” The same day, January 28, 1992, A. M. Rosenthal wrote in the Times that Governor and Mrs. Clinton had “presented to the American public a gift and a lasting opportunity”:
The gift is that they treated us as adults. The opportunity is for us to act that way…. We can at least treasure the hope that Americans would be fed up with the slavering inquisition on politicians’ sexual history and say to hell with that and the torturers. That would be a thank-you card worthy of the gift from the Clinton couple — the presumption that Americans have achieved adulthood, at last.
Few in the mainstream press, in 1992, demanded a demonstration of “contrition” from the candidate. Few, in 1992, demanded “full remorse,” a doubtful concept even in those venues, courtrooms in which criminal trials have reached the penalty phase, where “remorse” is most routinely invoked. Few, in 1992, spoke of the United States as so infantilized as to require a president above the possibility of personal reproach. That so few did this then, and so many have done this since, has been construed by some as evidence that the interests and priorities of the press have changed. In fact the interests and priorities of the press have remained reliably the same: then as now, the press could be relied upon to report a rumor or a hint down to the ground (tree it, bag it, defoliate the forest for it, destroy the village for it), but only insofar as that rumor or hint gave promise of advancing the story of the day, the shared narrative, the broad line of whatever story was at the given moment commanding the full resources of the reporters covering it and the columnists commenting on it and the on-tap experts analyzing it on the talk shows. (The 1998 Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokespersons tellingly provides, for producers with underdeveloped Rolodexes of their own, 1,477 telephone numbers to call for those guests “who will drive the news issues in the next year.”) In Spin Cycle, a book in which Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post endeavored to show the skill of the “Clinton propaganda machine” (similarly described by Joe Klein, despite what might seem impressive evidence to the contrary, as “the most sophisticated communications apparatus in the history of American politics”) at setting the agenda for the press, there appears this apparently ingenuous description of how the press itself sets its agenda:
A front-page exclusive would ripple through the rest of the press corps, dominate the briefing, and most likely end up on the network news. The newsmagazine reporters were not quite as influential as in years past, but they could still change the dialogue or cement the conventional wisdom with a cover story or a behind-the-scenes report. Two vital groups of reinforcements backed up the White House regulars…. One was the columnists and opinion-mongers — Jonathan Alter at
Newsweek
, Joe Klein at
The New Yorker
, William Safire and Maureen Dowd at
The New York Times
, E. J. Dionne and Richard Cohen at
The Washington Post
— who could quickly change the Zeitgeist…. the other was the dogged band of investigative reporters — Jeff Gerth at the
Times
, Bob Woodward at the
Post
, Glenn Simpson at
The Wall Street Journal
, Alan Miller at the
Los Angeles Times
.
Once the “zeitgeist” has been agreed upon by this quite small group of people, any unrelated event, whatever its actual significance, becomes either non-news or, if sufficiently urgent, a news brief. An example of the relegation to non-news would be this: Robert Scheer, in his Los Angeles Times review of Spin Cycle, noted that its index included eighteen references to Paula Jones and sixteen to John Huang, but none to Saddam Hussein. An example of the relegation to news brief would be this: on August 16, 1998, after hearing flash updates on the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland (“worst attack in almost thirty years of violence … latest figures as we have it are 28 people dead … 220 people injured … 103 still in hospital”) and on the American embassy bombings in East Africa, Wolf Blitzer, on a two-hour Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer otherwise exclusively devoted to the “legal ramifications, political considerations, and historic consequences” of Monica Lewinsky, said this: “Catherine Bond, reporting live from Nairobi, thanks for joining us. Turning now to the story that has all of Washington holding its breath …”