SLICK WILLY

Last weekend I had lunch with Bill Clinton in New Zealand.

Well, not actually. On a business/family visit to the “ Land of the Long White Shroud” I did a touristy thing and took myself to the revolving restaurant at Auckland’s Sky Tower more than 300 metres above the city.

And for company, dining alone, I took along Bill Clinton’s massive 900-page tome My Life.

Unlike most people, I did not go straight to the index to look up Monica Lewinsky (“I did not have sex with that woman… Miss Lewinsky”) and did not then go immediately to Page 773.

I started at the beginning where William Jefferson Clinton did. Literally. The first paragraph: “Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in south-west Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.”

Gimme a break. I waded through about 200 pages before Willy – and his willy-- got out of high school. And I learned about who sold the best apple crumble in the south and what a great place New Orleans was to have a holiday. Clinton also said that at high school he kissed a lot of girls. Gosh, golly, gee!

Maybe I am biased and cynical because I have just been through the experience of writing and publishing a frank autobiography. But if I had been Clinton’s publisher – and having paid him an advance of around ten million bucks – I would have insisted he open with the Lewinsky saga and then slipped back into his folksy days of “lying down in Arkansas grass”.

The most telling theme in this near-1000 page bestseller is his self-serving mea culpa and lack of respect or dignity for the women he bedded – apart from Hillary Rodham who became his wife.

(He writes that she is named after the conqueror of Mt. Everest, New Zealand’s Ernest Hillary, which I find strange because she was born seven or eight years before Hillary conquered the mountain).

He virtually dismisses Paul Jones – the State employee he allegedly hunted and propositioned in a hotel room when he was Governor of Arkansas—as unreliable trailer trash.

The alleged 12-year-affair with sometime singer Gennifer Flowers didn’t happen.

And Lewinsky? Well, he was disgusted with himself. He famously denied they had “sexual relations” and, under oath, tried to describe what did and what didn’t constitute “sexual relations”. The cigar didn’t get a mention.

He did admit to “inappropriate encounters” with Lewinsky and sort of admits to heaps of sexy phone conversations. “Selfish stupidity” I think he called it and in an interview with Dan Rather he said he did it for the worst reason: because I could. And, yes he gave her presents. Including, I recall, the same book of romantic poems he had once given Hillary.

Clinton reports in detail the impeachment speech in his defence by veteran Dale Bumpers. A personal friend.

Bumpers said: “Put yourself in his position. We are, none of us, perfect. He should have thought of all that beforehand. And indeed he should have, just as Adam and Eve should have”.

He then pointed dramatically at the Senators and declaimed: “Just as you and you and you and you and millions of other people who have been caught in similar circumstances should have thought of it before. As I say, none of us is perfect”.

Clever, persuasive, rhetoric – but inappropriate rubbish.

Bill “Slick Willy’s” crime was NOT that he had an affair. Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy had done that. Reporters have too. But he went public and lied to the American people. And he lied under oath. “ I did not have sexual relations with that woman… Miss Lewinsky”. That, said in the White House, in front of his wife

The Chief Law Officer of the United States committed perjury. And, at the same time, as Commander in Chief of the US military, Clinton committed adultery while several officers were being drummed out of the Air Force for doing just that with subordinates.

Which brings me to, what I believe is the biggest, often-ignored, issue here. Monica Lewinsky was a young, impressionable intern at the White House. Bill Clinton was her boss. He had a duty of care. He abused it.

She was star-struck. No doubt. My God… I am unzipping the fly of the President of the United States. He gave her books. She gave him neckties. And a lot more. She naïvely dreamed he would one day leave Hillary and maybe even marry her.

People in positions of power know how impressionable young people can be. Males in radio and television know how impressionable and vulnerable young work experience girls can be.

But you don’t take advantage – as Bill Clinton admits – “because you can”. How shallow can you get?

Clinton’s My Life is a self-serving, hokey, trip down a me-me-me memory lane. The women he has used will read this and realize they have been used. And yet this is the American President that the feminists love.

A friend of mine who has spent time with Bill Clinton says that he is the most charismatic person he has ever met. “If you talk to him you feel that you are the only person in the room”. If you are female I suggest you check to see if he has his trousers on.

Slick Willy was aptly named.

July 4, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004