How Should Textbooks Treat the Clinton Scandals?
In the past two weeks, however, a spate of news stories about textbook coverage of the Clinton impeachment/Clinton scandals have appeared, most of them concerned more with the question of “how salacious should history be” rather than the more serious question of why Bill Clinton was the first elected president ever impeached. As usual, textbook coverage extends across the spectrum from liberal writers who argue that the impeachment process “hurt both sides” to the nuts-and-bolts treatment of Clinton’s impeachment and acquittal, usually without the details of the sexual issues underlying the perjury. Certainly the nature of textbook writing prohibits extensive investigation into any scandal, whether in Ulysses Grant’s time or our own. Still, the Clinton impeachment saga demands more than just a cursory mention, with, say, the same space one would give to the Whiskey Ring or Grover Cleveland’s alleged “love child.”
The most important characteristic of a good textbook discussion of the Clinton impeachment—obviously, next to accuracy—is balance. How much space, or how many words, does the author give to Clinton versus, say, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Michael Allen, my co-author on A Patriot’s History of the United States, conducted a cursory examination of a few texts on this issue, and found that an older version of John Blum’s popular text, the National Experience, dedicated about 750 words to the Johnson impeachment, and a recent edition of Bernard Bailyn’s text, The Great Republic, has almost exactly the same word count. What one includes in the overall subject of “impeachment,” however, can be somewhat open. Does one include Johnson’s prior battles with the Radical Republicans over Reconstruction? If so, which ones? At any rate, Michael Allen and I consider Clinton’s impeachment—because he was elected president, whereas Johnson was only elected vice president and only became president through Lincoln’s assassination—to be at least as deserving of serious discussion as Johnson’s. Our Patriot’s History gives each impeachment almost equal treatment as measured by word count—although again, whether Whitewater, Travelgate, and the early Clinton sex scandals in his campaign all fall under the aegis “impeachment” is open to debate.
How one teaches the impeachment will also depend largely on the grade level of the students. It is probably not necessary to discuss what Clinton lied about with 7th and 8th graders, but the issue will almost certainly come up with high schoolers, who will want to know, “Yeah, but what did he lie about?” (usually knowing full well already what he lied about). Indeed, surveys showing that large numbers of American teenagers think oral sex is not sex—and who often cite Clinton as their source that it’s “ok”—suggest that the students are far more mature than we suspect.
For college students, however, the historical issues posed by the Clinton impeachment, and its contrasts with the Johnson impeachment, provide a rich field for exploring Constitutional history, political shifts, and political history. For example, one textbook claimed that the impeachment damaged both political parties, which is plainly false. Although the short-lived Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston (R-LA) resigned his speakership as a result of exposes by Clinton’s cronies, no major Republican figure was politically damaged at all in the impeachment process. The Republican Party went on to win three straight elections, including two presidential elections, one of which should have been a “gimme” for Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, whose campaign was clearly damaged by Clinton’s “sleaze factor” and who was unable to position himself as being “of” the Clinton administration by the need to distance himself from the taint of impeachment. As late as 2006, Democrats find it extremely difficult to gain any traction on issues of “corruption” due to the lingering memories of Clinton, Chinese money-laundering, John Huang, and other unethical practices for which formal charges were never filed. (The Barrett Report, however, still hovers and, according to sources, contains serious charges that the Clinton administration routinely illegally used the IRS to attack political enemies).
When contrasted with the Johnson impeachment, one sees a hard-headed, unpopular president who is opposed by virtually all of Congress, fighting a battle of principle over proper powers of the legislative and executive branches. While Johnson clearly could have taken a safer route through the courts, his purpose in violating the Tenure of Office Act was to, in the words of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, to “pack a fight.” Ultimately, the Senate decided that the harm done to the Executive Branch’s powers by a conviction would surpass the temporary gain of getting Johnson out of the Senators’ rapidly-diminishing hair, and they acquitted him.
Clinton, however, had no such lofty ideals in his self-made scandal. He brought sex into the arena by first lying to the public during the campaign over Jennifer Flowers; then again by attempting to hush Paula Jones in her civil suit; then finally by giving false testimony to a Grand Jury. In the process, he managed to become the only president ever to be disbarred by allowing his attorney to submit a false statement to a federal judge. (There must be a standing joke here to the effect that if you aren’t moral enough to be a lawyer . . . .) Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal was also worthy of historians’ treatment because it possibly marked the demise of the “mainstream media” as a journalistic monolith. The key stories were broken by Matt Drudge on his Internet site, and indeed, the mainstream media sought to contain the story that would damage the Democratic Party. Talk radio, the Internet, and Fox News all took center stage for bringing new information to the attention of the public. Teachers might examine the rise of these “alternative” news sources with the rapid and steady decline of the circulation of so-called mainstream papers and the incredible drop in viewership of the “Big Three” nightly news shows.
In light of the revelations by the 9/11 Commission that Clinton, with almost wanton disregard for the evidence, dismissed warnings about al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and terrorism; that he turned down three offers by the Sudanese government to hand over bin Laden; and that his Justice Department, courtesy of Jamie Gorelick, erected “the wall” between the CIA and the FBI that later had to be torn down after the horror of 9/11, the central question that many students will have about the Clinton impeachment is, “Why was lying under oath all that the prosecutors could indict Clinton for?” It will take good teaching, indeed, to explain why laundering campaign money through sources of a hostile Chinese government, or why insisting on a law enforcement model of pursuing terrorists as opposed to a wartime model, were not themselves impeachable offenses. When these issues are addressed in detail, it might well be concluded that, in fact, the Clinton years not only “included” impeachment, but that the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton was, in the big picture, the most important thing that occurred in his two terms.