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By BILL THOMAS
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 20, 2000
Once Richard Nixon was Washington's greatest gift to psycho-historians: the Checkers Speech, the White House tapes, the goodbye to his staff. Could anything possibly be more compellingly weird than the inner workings of Tricky Dick? For over a quarter century the answer to that question was an unqualified, "No." But not any more.
Now there's Bill Clinton. And if you think you've heard everything about Bill, Hillary and the whole cast of characters who make up the Clinton years, think again. The recent boomlet of books on the Clintons and company is nothing compared to what we'll be getting when the administration is history and ex-insiders start lining up to come clean.
It's tempting to say: "Slick Willie, we hardly knew ye." But thanks to the revelations produced by Clinton's hots for Monica Lewinsky, there's a lot we know already.
Which might normally make the Starr Report Disrobed must-reading for anyone who likes his or her high-level sleaze based on academic research. The problem is that academic research tends to make everything it touches unbearably boring. The Starr Report is one of the most entertaining official documents in American history, but in Fedwa Malti-Douglas' feminist deconstruction, it becomes merely a way of exposing the "vast right-wing conspiracy" responsible for de-pantsing the president. (Professor Malti-Douglas, it should be mentioned, teaches gender studies at the University of Indiana.)
If you buy the author's premise that Starr's investigation of Clinton was a conservative witch hunt, motivated largely by sexual repression and anti-feminism, you'll probably accept her conclusions. If you don't, just about everything she says about Starr will make you wonder.
"The Report," she declares, "clearly feels obligated to amass an enormous amount of data relating to [Clinton-Lewinsky] sexual encounters and feed them to the unsuspecting reader."
I thought prosecutors were supposed to amass data? And what reader, who lived in this country as the scandal unfolded, could ever be called unsuspecting?
But it's when Malti-Douglas probes Starr's attack on what she calls Bill and Hillary's "heterosexual marriage" that things get really interesting. The problem for Starr, as the author sees it, is Hillary's frequent absence from the White House. Every time she goes on a trip, it seems, Bill and Monica rendezvous in the Oval Office.
"Is the reader to surmise that Mrs. Clinton's travels are what set the events in motion?" she asks. "The moral is clear: a wife should be by her husband's side. In the sexual-moral world of the Starr Report, the liberated-woman First Lady has her share of responsibility in the affair."
That Bill and Monica never engaged in sexual intercourse, Malti-Douglas takes as a positive sign of the president's hidden strength. "Clinton kept Lewinsky out of his private quarters," she writes. Nor does he give in to her desire for sexual intercourse. Here she even quotes the Starr Report as evidence: Clinton "responded that he could not do so because of the possible consequences. The two of them argued, and he asked if he should stop calling her. No, she responded."
Just in case you missed the point, the author explains: "The male seems to be the completely passive object: His desires are not articulated, nor is he even asked about them." Historians take note: The president of the United States was set up and seduced in a vicious plot.
Clinton may not be off the hook yet. But with apologists like this hard at work, it won't be long.
Bill Thomas is the author of Club Fed: Power, Money, Sex and Violence on Capitol Hill and other books.
By Fedwa Malti-Douglas
Columbia University Press, $39.50