Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (64 page)

Several less heated conclusions about Monicagate seem irrefutable. First, though the partisan confrontation had been extraordinary, it was but the most sensational episode in a series of highly politicized conflicts over cultural issues that had arisen in the 1960s, that had divided American society in the 1970s and 1980s, and that had exploded in the culture wars of the early 1990s. Those struggles, like Monicagate, had revealed ideological polarization over standards of sexual behavior, as well as sharp differences over religion and a range of other socially divisive matters. The impeachment and trial of the president was the latest (though it was not to be the last) of these politicized struggles, most of which liberal Americans, backed especially by younger people, had won.

A second conclusion is that the sorry business dashed Clinton’s high hopes of going down in history as a great president. He had acted irresponsibly and had irreparably damaged his reputation. He destroyed whatever opportunity he might have had after 1997 of advancing desired liberal goals—or even of enhancing serious and productive discussion of public issues, terrorism included. As the historian Joseph Ellis put it, Monica Lewinsky had become a “tin can that’s tied to Clinton’s tail that will rattle through the ages and through the pages of history books.”
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In the immediate aftermath of the trial, it also became evident that the nation’s capacity for commercialization of sensational news events remained apparently inexhaustible. In March 1999, Lewinsky appeared on television’s
20/20
to be interviewed by Barbara Walters. An estimated 70 million Americans watched her appearance. No single network “news” program had ever been seen by so many people. ABC demanded and received record payments from advertisers for commercials. And what commercials! These included Victoria’s Secret lingerie, the Oral-B Deluxe toothbrush, and a promo for the movie
Cleopatra
that included the voice-over: “When she was twenty, she seduced the most powerful leader in the world.” A Maytag ad boasted of its product, “It actually has the power to remove stains.”
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Lewinsky then toured Europe to promote
Monica’s Story
, a hastily put together book about her life. It rose briefly to the best-seller lists. Marketers estimated that she would pocket $600,000 from royalties on the book, as well as another $600,000 for an interview on European TV. These efforts would help to defray her legal bills, which were huge (as were Clinton’s). Hustles of this sort indicated how easy it continued to be for scandals involving sex and celebrity, a potent combination, to dominate the media and to entrance people both at home and abroad.
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F
REE AFTER FEBRUARY 1999 TO CONCENTRATE
on the business of government, Clinton soon found that foreign policy concerns, as during his first term, continued to pose dilemmas. This was notably the case regarding the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Albanian Muslims, who comprised some 90 percent of the population there, had been intensifying their efforts for independence. Serbian president Milosevic, however, regarded Kosovo as a sacred part of Serbian soil. Seeking to stamp out armed resistance, his forces resorted to brutally efficient ethnic cleansing in an effort to drive Muslims from the province. Later estimates placed the number of Albanian Muslims who were displaced by the summer of 1999 at 863,000 and the number killed at up to 10,000. By early 1999, the savagery in Kosovo was commanding world attention.
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At first Clinton, backed by the Joint Chiefs and by Defense Secretary William Cohen, refused to get seriously involved—in part because he did not believe that giving military support to insurgents in Kosovo was in the strategic interest of the United States, in part because he vividly remembered what had happened at Mogadishu, in part because there seemed to be little popular support within the United States for such a move, and in part because the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army of Muslim revolutionaries, which had been staging ferocious guerrilla attacks on the Serbs, struck some knowledgeable people as ultra-nationalistic thugs and terrorists.
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In considering military action to manage this mounting crisis, Clinton recognized that he could not count on international backing. It seemed highly likely that U.N. opponents of armed intervention, led by Russia, would oppose such a move. Fearing a veto from Russia or China in the Security Council, Clinton bypassed the U.N.
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As in the earlier troubles involving Bosnia, NATO nations, notably France, were also reluctant to intervene.

Hesitation of this sort irritated General Wesley Clark, an American who was then serving as supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe. Backed by Madeleine Albright, whom Clinton had appointed as America’s first female secretary of state in 1996, Clark pressed hard for the dispatch of NATO troops, including Americans. Clinton put him off. Recalling his frustration, Clark later complained about the continuing hold of memories concerning the Vietnam War on American military and political leaders: “The attitude [of Clinton and the Joint Chiefs] was, “If you take losses, you’re a loser. Your career is over. It was assured that politicians wouldn’t support you, that they’d run away as soon as there were body bags. That became an article of faith.”
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When frantic multi-nation attempts at negotiation failed in March 1999, setting off a wave of new atrocities in the province, Clinton still refused to commit American troops, but he supported NATO bombing of Serbian positions. The pilots were instructed to fly high—at 15,000 feet—to avoid getting hit. Clark complained that the bombing, which he called “tank plinking,” was accomplishing very little. Because observers on the ground (placed there as a result of negotiations in October 1998) had been instructed to leave before the bombing, Milosevic used the occasion to intensify his ethnic cleansing. After forty-five days of high-level attacks, Clinton agreed to escalate the action and to authorize strikes on the Serbian capital of Belgrade. One such raid (by a B-2 Stealth bomber that flew 10,750 miles from Missouri and back to complete its thirty-hour mission) hit the Chinese Embassy there in mid-May, killing several embassy staffers and exacerbating Sino-America relations. (The United States said that the hit was accidental.) The raids by NATO planes, along with the withdrawal of Russian diplomatic support of the Serbs, finally forced Milosevic to accept a settlement in June. The overall bombing effort, lasting seventy-eight days, tore up Kosovo and was estimated to have taken the lives of some 5,000 Serbian forces, hundreds of civilians, and 500 Kosovar rebels. No pilot was killed during the campaign.
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The longer-range results of this intervention were hard to judge. On the one hand, Clinton had succeeded in winning the support of NATO nations. Kosovar refugees began to return to their villages and towns. The U.N., charged with oversight of the province, supervised peacekeeping by NATO forces, which included American soldiers. Milosevic was voted out of office in 2000 and later prosecuted as a war criminal. Clinton, having pursued a course that did not endanger the lives of American soldiers, managed to steer clear of political disaster.

But the settlement called for the disarming of the Kosovo Liberation Army and said nothing about conducting an election that might offer independence for Kosovo. In the next few years, unemployment ravaged the area. Vengeful Albanian Muslims, furious that the province remained part of Serbia and Montenegro, periodically killed Serbs who had not fled the region. Five years after the end of the bombing, approximately 18,000 troops—the largest peacekeeping force in the world—still participated in an uphill struggle to police the area. Some 1,800 were Americans. Other American forces stayed in Bosnia, long after Clinton had indicated that they would be withdrawn. In the maelstrom of hatreds that had long roiled the Balkans and where internationally imposed protectorates remained necessary to minimize bloodletting, even a military giant such as the United States could not impose its will.
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I
N
1999
AND
2000, C
LINTON MANAGED TO DEFEND
a number of liberal policies against determined conservative opposition. As earlier, this defensive stand was a major legacy of his time in office. Having learned a hard lesson from the health care fight in 1993–94, however, he knew that the Republican-dominated Congress would not enact liberal legislation concerning Social Security, health, or education. Licking their wounds from the impeachment battle, Republicans refused to agree to another hike of the minimum wage, to approve a so-called patient’s bill of rights, or to pass legislation providing prescription drugs for seniors. In October 1999, the Senate dealt Clinton a sharp blow by rejecting a treaty that aimed to place restrictions on nuclear testing. It was clear that Republicans in Congress, having earlier made it possible for Clinton to secure two of the most significant legislative developments of his presidency—NAFTA and welfare reform—continued to wield the whip hand on Capitol Hill.

The president also had to contend with ongoing squabbling that afflicted his own party. These, as throughout his two terms, featured conflict between centrists and advocates of globalization, such as himself, and more liberal Democrats, many of whom were close to labor interests. Exports from China’s cheap-labor industries, these liberals continued to complain, were undercutting manufacturing in the United States and throwing Americans out of work. Even as trade deficits mounted, however, Clinton resisted protectionist policies.
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These struggles over trade, which enlisted many Republicans on the president’s side, revealed the persistence of Democratic divisions. They further indicated that simplistic labels typing all Democrats as “liberals” and all Republicans as “conservatives” continued to obscure the ideological complexity of some of America’s political battles.

Despite these difficulties, Clinton had reason to be optimistic about the prospects for Democratic victory in 2000. A number of politically engaged groups continued to stand strongly behind him, among them African Americans. Henry Louis Gates, a leading black intellectual, proclaimed: “We are going to the wall with this President.”
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As in earlier battles, Democrats could also expect considerable support from women. Most labor union leaders, however miffed they might be about NAFTA and other trade issues, nursed grievances against corporate bosses and were all but certain to remain reliable foes of the GOP.

Clinton also sought to protect his party against charges that it might be weak on issues of national defense. In 1999, he earmarked spending of $10.5 billion over the next six years for development of a National Missile Defense (NMD) program. This proposed to rely primarily on land-based rockets that would hit incoming warheads, not on the lasers in space that Reagan’s Star Wars had envisioned. Though Clinton deferred action in October 2000 on development of the program, his move indicated that he hoped to improve America’s military defenses. The next administration, of George W. Bush, picked up where Clinton had left off, making anti-missile defense a higher budgetary priority in early 2001 than measures against terrorism.
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Clinton’s greatest political asset in 1999–2000 continued to be the state of the economy. Danger signs persisted, to be sure, notably in the nation’s unfavorable balance of trade, which was huge and growing, and in the mountain of personal indebtedness that consumers were building up.
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What would happen to the economy, editorialists asked, if foreign central banks (especially from Asia) who were investing heavily in American government securities pulled back? Other experts warned prophetically about the overpricing of stocks, especially in dot-com companies. Many of these companies collapsed in 2000. They asked how America, a consumption-addicted society where expectations were high and savings were low, could sustain key entitlements in the future, notably Social Security and Medicare, benefits from which millions of retiring boomers would begin to demand in a few years.
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Both the stock market and economic growth began to taper off in 2000, prompting alarm that the nation might be headed for recession.
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Even so, the mood of most people remained upbeat. The percentage of Americans who were poor or unemployed had reached new lows by that time. The welfare law of 1996, though still excoriated by a number of liberals, seemed to be working—at least to the extent of cutting back the welfare rolls and placing many former recipients in jobs. Single-mother households, though poor on the average, appeared to be a little better off than they had been in 1996.
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Most encouraging, rates of violent and property crimes continued to fall.

While many liberals complained that Clinton was not fighting very hard for larger social expenditures, they conceded that mounting federal budget surpluses (which the administration used to pay down the national debt) were popular with the American public. Clinton rarely missed opportunities to claim that his expert fiscal management had brought unparalleled prosperity to the United States. In his State of the Union message in January 2000, he bolstered a mood of optimism—not to say smugness—that was palpable in the country. “Never before,” he proclaimed, “has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.”
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