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of the Clinton-haters
the finger.”
- Chinese proverb
Clinton-hating books are a special past time of mine. I’m always
amazed at the sheer level of bile that Slick Willie can bring out in
his detractors. He did a decent job with the economy, wasn’t
particularly leftist and balanced the budget the way the GOP
always promised to but never seemed to get around to doing.
And most liberals consider him a worthless, “Republican lite” sell-
out to boot. Conservatives should at least tolerate, if not like, the
man.
Yet the white-hot hatred persists. Even years later some still go
into spittle-emitting rages over our 42nd president. Why?
Sometimes if you want to understand the present, it helps to look
to the past. 1996 for example. That was the year Gary Aldrich, an
ex-FBI agent who worked in the White House published “Unlimited
Access,” an ”expose” on the Clinton Administration. Any true
study of conservative unhappiness with the Clinton era has to
start with this book. It may be as useless a waste of pulp and ink
as any since Gutenberg got drunk and sat on a printing press to
make copies of his own rear end but the glimpse it provides into
the psychosis of Clinton hatred is priceless. I recently dusted off a
copy and delved right in.
What Aldrich, who more recently founded something called the
Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty and remains something
of a mini-celebrity in the former growth industry of Clinton-hating,
primarily revealed in his book is unhappiness. He is unhappy with
many things, none of them particularly significant. Generally,
most of his complaints revolve around Clinton people.
Clinton people are nasty and rude. On page 42, Aldrich
describes a meeting with George Stephanopoulos:
“Stephanopoulos made no effort to greet me or to be friendly. He
was clearly annoyed, which seemed to be the usual mood of
Clinton staffers when they met the FBI.” On page 15, Aldrich is
unhappy when a deputy in the Office of Administration refuses to
take a message because she’s not a secretary. “Her voice had
an edge to it…She sounded hostile.”
Or Clinton people are not nasty and rude enough. On the same
page Aldrich complains about a staffer, “Watkins returned my call
promptly, and he was friendly. Actually overly friendly… I thought,
‘What is this guy up to?’” Later, Aldrich would describe him as
“oppressively friendly, like a used car salesman hot to make a
sale.” On page 48, he describes another staffer as greeting him
with “such insincere, excessive friendliness that I felt
uncomfortable.” In yet another exchange, he feared being
hugged.
But the Clinton people didn’t spend all their time attempting to
locate the narrow range of personal warmth into which Aldrich
wished all his human interactions to fall. Instead they found other
ways to annoy him, this - to judge from his book - being anything
but a challenge.
There was President Clinton’s unconscionable replacing of the
White House phone system with one that apparently put Aldrich
on hold too often. A gripping description of this tragedy drags on
for three full pages beginning with an emotional defense of the
old phone network that could bring a misty film to even the most
hardened eye.
“No one had ever complained about the phones before,” writes
Aldrich, launching into the standard refrain of watercooler
curmudgeons fighting productive change the world over. “In fact,
they’d seemed to work pretty well, taking the Reagan and Bush
administrations through twelve years of successfully handled
world crises, including the downfall of the Soviet Union and the
victorious war in the Persian Gulf. To many, the White House
phone system was one of the wonders of the Western World…”
The Western World apparently being a bit hard up for wonders
until the invention of voice mail. For those who think Reagan a
great president, the secret is finally out. It was Ma Bell that really
defeated international communism.
Like the most ardent ideologues, Aldrich constantly claims the
mantle of neutrality, assuming the hackneyed persona of the
poor, apolitical soul thrust abruptly into a creepy world of liberal
intrigue and left-wing radicalism. Yet strangely, even the least
political of situations seems to occasion a chance for him to vent
partisan disgust. This leads to a goodly number of baffling non-
sequiturs. “Sure enough, in 1993, I was invited back to assist in
hanging the Christmas decorations, but I declined. I was fed up
with the attitude of the Clinton administration and its endless
scandals.” Such scandals having endured for the “endless”
period of ten months, the age of the new administration at the
time. What all this had to do with tree trimming is unclear.
Oddly, the next year, Aldrich does accept the invitation leading to
a bizarre rant over Hillary’s choice of tree ornamentation, a
description of which consumes no less than six spine-tingling
pages, every one of them dripping with the sort of grim
seriousness and moral outrage one might normally reserve for
reporting on Sudanese war atrocities.
“I went over to one of the tables I hadn’t looked at yet,” writes
Aldrich. “What’s this? Of course. Two turtle doves, but they didn’t
have shells this time - they were joined together in an act of bird
fornication.”
Vague generalizations are also an Aldrich specialty. These
strange asides pepper the book, always petty, frequently
sanctimonious, occasionally weird.
“There was a unisex quality to the Clinton staff that set it far apart
from the Bush administration,” writes the peevish Aldrich on page
30. “It was the shape of their bodies. In the Clinton administration,
the broad-shouldered, pants-wearing women and the pear-
shaped, bowling-pin men blurred the distinctions between the
sexes. I was used to athletic types, physically fit persons who took
pride in body image and good health. Arnold Schwarzenegger
had called the Clinton friends ‘girlie men’ during the campaign in
1992. I now knew what he was getting at.”
Homophobia is also a fun recurring theme. On page 126…
“And there were certainly plenty of homosexuals in the White
house who flaunted, rather than tried to hide, their sexual
persuasion. I remember walking out my door one day to see two
men with identical ponytails, earrings, turtlenecks, tight-fitting
jeans, and jean jackets, holding hands,” Aldrich writes, adding
breathlessly, “And it wasn’t that unusual a sight.”
Good thing nobody told Aldrich that homosexuals don’t all come
conveniently clad in readily-identifiable turtlenecks and ponytails.
He’d have really felt surrounded.
But aside from women wearing pants, gay men holding hands
and straight men who didn’t look like “The Terminator,” are there
any other horrors Aldrich would care to bring to light? Well, of
course, there is also the usual amount of boilerplate Clinton
rumor-mongering, about alleged trysts at a local hotel,
Travelgate, Vince Foster, etc., often through the hearsay of two
or three other people. There are also lots and lots of gripes
about lax security and poor screening procedures, parts of which
could actually be true for all I know. But it rarely takes Aldrich long
to return to his favorite activity: griping. Hence, much of the book
devolves into more fascinating tidbits of life with Bill and Hillary.
Other scintillating revelations:
* Someone spilling coffee in the White House canteen and
Aldrich having to clean it up. (p. 12)
* Clinton people getting on the elevator in a rude and
disorganized manner. (p. 13)
* Clinton people wearing ponytails and earrings. (p. 10, 16, 126)
* Clinton people committing other fashion no-nos - loud ties, lack
of coats, wrong shoes, lipstick, poor grooming, etc… (p. 12-13,
16-17, 29, 37, 48, 114)
* Hillary once ordering a staffer to purchase three tubes of Blistex
lip balm at an all night drug store and the staffer was never
reimbursed. (p. 88-89)
* Clinton people not being on time to meetings and not returning
calls. (p. 27, 43-44, 67)
* Clinton people using coarse language. (p. 29-32, 42)
* Clinton people being lazy and making personal phone calls
during work hours. (p. 40)
* Clinton people keeping messy offices. (p. 40-42, 48, 124)
* Clinton people not sorting recyclables from non-recyclables
when throwing things away. (p. 41)
* Clinton people mismanaging the White House Easter Egg Roll
and Fourth of July Celebration. (p. 96-100)
* George Stephanopoulos once blowing a bubble gum bubble
during a press conference. (p. 42)
* Hillary demanding too much office space at the expense of Al
Gore. (p. 11)
* Al Gore demanding too much office space. (p. 34-35)
* Third-hand information that the Clintons disagreed over the
design of the White House Christmas card. (p. 103)
* Hillary putting a nude statue in the Jackie Kennedy Garden. (p.
102)
*Clinton staffers stealing U.S. Navy towels during a trip to
Normandy. (p. 52)
* There being too many pictures of the First Lady and not enough
of Al Gore. (p. 33-34)
* Clinton people used, or at one time used or Aldrich suspects
they may have used, drugs. (p. 31, 35, 37-38, all of Chapter 7,
155)
* A Clinton intern walking off with a laptop computer. (p. 38)
* Aldrich hearing from his partner who heard from a White House
carpenter who heard from one of his subordinates that he saw
two guys having sex on a desk in an office once. A similar fourth-
hand story relates two women in a similar act in a shower stall. (p.
38-40)
* Clinton people not answering the phone with a professional-
sounding greeting. (p. 45)
* The administration switching to a form letter rather than a
personalized one to congratulate retiring FBI agents. (p. 49)
* Official photographers being asked to take pictures of staff
birthday parties at the White House. (p. 148-149)
* The president being allegedly rude to his White House service
staff. (p. 142-144)
and my personal favorite:
* Clinton people frequently “double-dipped” at the canteen soda
machine, topping off their drinks while waiting for their order. (p.
50)
This last being exposed just before the revelation of injustices
even more grisly still. In a tone one might use to relate the gory
intricacies of a serial killer stalking his prey, Aldrich spends five
lovingly-detailed paragraphs describing how a member of Hillary’s
health care task force ate frozen yogurt out of his cup before it
was weighed at the register.
Make no mistake, these sorts of incidental asides are not colorful
flavoring for an otherwise gritty ”tell all.” They are the gritty tell-
all. It’s a bit like reading ”All the President’s Men” and finding
hundreds of pages painstakingly critiquing Pat Nixon’s hairstyle.
Unlike many Clinton shockers one may find, “Unlimited Access” is
not so much a ”expose” as a whinefest. To slog through its
content-free pages is to become enmeshed in the dull, self-
important universe of the eternally peeved, a limitless plain of
petty grudges, third-hand gossip and anecdotal gripes, like being
trapped at a party by an unhappy soul who spends the whole
night describing how his college roommate drinks milk straight out
of the carton and never puts the toilet paper on the roll in just the
right way.
Eventually, its the roommate you start to feel sorry for.
And so it goes with Clinton. In the end, “Unlimited Access” proves
only that for many conservatives Clinton-hatred is less about
policy than about pet peeves. And it says far more about the
haters than the target of their ire.
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