November 9, 2021

By Beth Arnold

I HAD HAD enough. I was sitting in a classroom of the University of Arkansas Law School at a taping of A Little Rock Townhall Meeting for an episode of Chris Matthews’ Hardball show on MSNBC. It was 1998. Matthews had come to town to take Arkansas politics and our then current president Bill Clinton verbally apart.

I was sick of hearing about how corrupt the politics were in Arkansas. It had been a theme of the national press during Clinton’s presidency, and this political spin had been expertly flogged to grab audiences in print as well as on TV. It was repeated over and over during the taping. Among the participants that Matthews had gathered together: Michael Medved, Lois Romano, Doug Eakeley, David Maraniss, Robert Reich, and a crew of old Clinton friends and Arkansas journalists. My husband James Morgan had written Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley’s book, and he was on the panel.

I had only come to watch until I couldn’t stand it any longer and got in line to voice my offense. I had worked in Washington for Senator John McClellan (D), who became Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee while I was there and at a time when Arkansas had the most powerful delegation in Congress. Congressman Wilbur Mills (D) was head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Senator William Fulbright (D) chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  

All of these national lawmakers were family friends. My uncle was a powerful lobbyist in D.C., and my late father was a prominent attorney and the head of the Democratic Central Committee in the Arkansas county where I grew up. He had schooled me in Democratic politics my entire life and was planning to eventually run for governor, but he tragically died before that could happen.

I had privileged information about that shark-infested, power-hungry town and the people who ran it, and I knew that this false indignation was just that. If Arkansas was so corrupt, then Washington, D.C. was drowning in diabolical power games and nasty political intrigue. I felt that the average American had no idea about the extent of it, but these journalists surely knew. They lived there. They socialized there. They preyed upon the innocent as well as the guilty and had historically kept this town’s sexual secrets. I pointed my finger in Chris Matthews’ face and said as much.

In his dissection of Bill Clinton that day was the question of whether the president had had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This was before the truth had publicly come out, and I told Matthews that I didn’t know the answer, but what I did know was that Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and plenty more presidents had girlfriends. At the break, he said, “Ike wanted Mamie to come to the European theater.” I rolled my eyes.

The fact of the matter was that there was no lack of Republican and Democratic male lawmakers who had dates, girlfriends, or mistresses. They were common as pig tracks. Money may be an intoxicating aphrodisiac, but in the end, power trumps it. And Washington is a town where power is the name of the game from the lowest flunkeys on Capitol Hill to the highest in the land.

Hardball had a live one with me, and when a break came, my face was fluffed with powder. I have a low tolerance for deceptive and regurgitative political spin, and I womansplained to Matthews that every journalist in Washington ought to have to live in the middle of the country six months of every year.

My husband told Matthews that I was his wife. “That’s your wife?” he asked incredulously.

*

WATCHING RYAN MURPHY’S excellent new American Crime Story’s Impeachment brought the whole situation back up and made it fresh in my mind. Frankly, I already had a different opinion about the Clinton-Lewinsky fiasco, and I was no longer on Bill’s side. Over the years, my Clinton tide had turned in many ways.

Let me set the stage: Instead of six degrees of separation there are only two degrees in Arkansas. The odds were good that voters either knew Bill himself, or they were connected to someone who did. During Clinton’s years as governor, everyone in Arkansas loved him. He was a consummate politician who showed Arkansans that he was in their corner. He related to his constituents. In fact, he held their votes in the palm of his magnetic hand.

Arkansans mostly loved Hillary, and she was a hero to me and many women in our state. She didn’t have Bill’s personal charisma or politicking acumen, but what she did share with him was keen intelligence, ambition, and the ability to be a catalyst for change that was thrilling to see, especially for women. She was a great example to us.

After Bill lost the only election of governor he ever forfeited, Hillary could see the writing on the wall. It was time to rebrand herself in a more likeable way to more conservative Arkansans and eventually to the rest of the country. It was one indication of Hillary seeing the political future, when she made the tactical decision to go from Hillary Rodham to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

My older daughter was in nursery school with Chelsea. After Hillary researched the nursery schools in Little Rock and moved Chelsea from one to another, many of us followed her lead and congratulated ourselves for doing so. Back then, the average Jane had no sense that Hillary had any thoughts about running for office herself. It seemed that she was going her own way for issues she cared about not to mention bringing home the bacon for her family as a lawyer at a prestigious law firm as well as an investor and a corporate board member.

Oh, most everyone had heard stories about Bill’s numerous alleged sexual assignations. We all thought we knew people he’d allegedly slept with or with whom he was having ongoing affairs. One acquaintance bragged to me that Bill brought women to his apartment.

And we all knew women were going to be a problem when Bill Clinton ran for president. There were a few rumors about Hillary as well, but it has been acknowledged that the woman problem was what kept Bill from running earlier. A whole strategy about how to deal with it had to be set in place.

In 1992, when the so-called “bimbo eruptions” started—a term famously coined by Clinton Chief of Staff and political operator Betsy Wright—the Clinton campaign and the Clintons themselves were ready to attack the women who came forward. Betsey Wright has since said that she regrets coming up with that dismissive term.

But did she regret trying to destroy those women, so Bill could be elected? Did Hillary? Hillary was certainly involved as Ryan Murphy successfully portrays many times in his on-point series, and as others have in other books and movies like Primary Colors.

One fact that became obvious during the Clinton years—both Bill’s and Hillary’s—is that they embraced “the end justifies the means,” when it came to politics. Along with their crack strategists James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos to guide them, they had the political muscle to put that intention into quite the effect.

One notion I’d always felt strongly about Bill and Hill before they got to the White House was that they weren’t greedy. My opinion about that has emphatically changed.

Times have changed as well. The #MeToo Movement has purposefully decreed that a slew of rich, powerful men have finally been held accountable for their lurid sexual abuse. Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen among others have had their reckonings, and in Weinstein’s case, convictions.

In his brilliant book Catch and Kill, Ronan Farrow writes:

“Hiring the agency was only a part of Weinstein’s larger effort to prevent the disclosure of the sexual-abuse claims. He also hired the private-investigation firm co-founded by Jack Palladino, who was best known for working to undermine women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.”

My belief is that Bill Clinton had plenty of willing sexual partners without harassing them. And make no mistake about it, they weren’t all “bimbos.”

*

IT WILL BE interesting to see what comes out in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in November, meaning is she going to reveal any information about the absurdly wealthy and powerful friends of alleged gun-runner and underage girl trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to save herself? Clinton reportedly was on Epstein’s plane many times, and Ms. Maxwell was in Clinton’s entourage in the early 2000’s. She was seated in a coveted aisle chair at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010.

I am now embarrassed to say that back during the days when Ms. Lewinsky was being publicly tortured by American government infrastructure and media we all made excuses for Bill Clinton. We thought we were being sophisticated to say that we didn’t care who he slept with. It was so European, we commented to each other. The sad truth is that what happened to Ms. Lewinsky and those other women didn’t matter to us.

But it should have. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

We had let our anger about the “Vast Right-Wing conspiracy” that Hillary named overtake our compassion not to mention we were frankly used to women being abused, which was matter of fact. In Impeachment, seeing George Conway and Brett Kavanaugh involved in the Right-Wing shenanigans during that time period is sobering. How did Kavanaugh ever get confirmed for the United States Supreme Court? Oh, yes, back to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy that flourishes today. At least in the last election, George Conway saw his way clear to do the right thing. He has shown his personal integrity in placing country over party.

In the summer of 1992 when the Clintons were running for office, I sat in a hot tub at the Golden Door spa in California with Bella Abzug, That’s what we always said—that voters weren’t just getting Bill in the election. They were getting Hill, too.

But Ms. Abzug didn’t like them. The Arkansas power couple weren’t liberal enough for her. They were selling out enlightened Democratic ideals.

Oprah Winfrey was also at the spa, while I was touting the Clintons. I suggested she should shoot a show in Hot Springs. She’d get a sense of how able the couple was. The night Bill Clinton was elected. Oprah called me, but my daughter answered the phone. I was out celebrating.

*

WHAT RYAN MURPHY has done with his latest season of Impeachment: American Crime Story is set the record straight for Ms. Lewinsky and for this country. I hope Ms. Lewinsky can finally create a good life—a life she deserves—after the cultural rape she unfairly received.

Beth Arnold is an award-winning journalist whose prime topics are culture, politics, travel, art, and design. She is the author of Jours of Our Lives: On the Road in France and Beyond, a chronicle of her and her husband’s move to France, where they lived for a decade. You can reach her at beth@betharnold.com .