Christopher Hitchens - No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

NO ONE LEFT
TO LIE TO

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

BOOKS

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

Why Orwell Matters

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

Letters to a Young Contrarian

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Thomas Paines Rights of Man: A Biography

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The Portable Atheist

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Arguably: Essays

PAMPHLETS

Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britains Favorite Fetish

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

ESSAYS

Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports

For the Sake of Argument

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

COLLABORATIONS

James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)

When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kash)

International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)

Vanity Fairs Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

NO ONE LEFT
TO LIE TO

THE TRIANGULATIONS OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON

Christopher Hitchens

This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2012

Published in the United States by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, by arrangement with Verso, an imprint of New Left Books

Copyright Christopher Hitchens 1999, 2000
Foreword to this edition copyright Douglas Brinkley 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
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ISBN 978 1 74331 193 6

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Laura Antonia and Sophia Mando,
my daughters

Contents

Lets be clear right off the bat: Christopher Hitchens was duty-bound to slay Washington, D.C., scoundrels. Somewhere around the time that the Warren Commission said there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy and the Johnson administration insisted there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, Hitchens made a pact with himself to be a principled avatar of subjective journalism. If a major politician dared to insult the intelligentsias sense of enlightened reason, he or she would have to contend with the crocodile-snapping wrath of Hitchens. So when five-term Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became U.S. president in 1993, full of I didnt inhale denials, he was destined to encounter the bite. What Clinton couldnt have expected was that Hitchensin this clever and devastating polemicwould gnaw off a big chunk of his ass for the ages. For unlike most Clinton-era diatribes that reeked of partisan sniping of-the-moment, Hitchens managed to write a classic takedown of our forty-second presidenton par with Norman Mailers The Presidential Papers (pathetic LBJ) and Hunter S. Thompsons Fear andLoathing: On the Campaign Trail 72 (poor Nixon)with the prose durability of history. Or, more simply put, its bottle vintage holds up well.

What No One Left to Lie To shares with the Mailer and Thompson titles is a wicked sense of humor, razorblade indictments, idiopathic anger, high lan, and a wheelbarrow full of indisputable facts. Hitchens proves to be a dangerous foe to Clinton precisely because he avoids the protest modus operandi of the antiwar 1960s. Instead of being unwashed and plastered in DayGlo, he embodies the refined English gentleman, swirling a scotch-and-Perrier (the perfect delivery system) in a leather armchair, utilizing the polished grammar of an Oxford don in dissent, passing judgment from historys throne. In these chapters, the hubristic Hitchens dismantles the Clinton propaganda machine of the 1990s, like a veteran safecracker going click-back click-click-back click until he gets the goods. Detractors of Hitchens over the years have misguidedly tattooed him with the anarchistic bomb-thrower label. Its overwrought. While its true that Hitchens unleashes his disdain for Clinton right out of the gate here, deriding him on Page One as a bird-dogging crooked president, the beauty of this deft polemic is that our avenging hero proceeds to prove the relative merits of this harsh prosecution.

Hemingway famously wrote that real writers have a built-in bullshit detectorno one has ever accused Hitchens of not reading faces. What goaded him the most was that Clinton, the so-called New Democrat, with the help of his Machiavellian-Svengali consultant Dick Morris, decided the way to hold political power was by making promises to the Left while delivering to the Right. This rotten strategy was called Triangulation. All Clinton gave a damn about, Hitchens maintains, was holding on to power. As a man of the Left, an English-American columnist and critic for The Nation and Vanity Fair, Hitchens wanted to be sympathetic to Clinton. His well-honed sense of ethics, however, made that impossible. He refused to be a Beltway liberal muted by the moral and political blackmail of Bill and Hillary Clintons eight years of reptilian rule.

I distinctly remember defending Clinton to Hitchens one evening at a Ruths Chris Steak House dinner around the time of the 9/11 attacks. Having reviewed Martin Walkers The President We Deserve for The Washington Post, I argued that Clinton would receive kudos from history for his fiscal responsibility, defense of the middle class, and an approach to world peace that favored trade over the use of military force. I even suggested that Vice President Al Gore made a terrible error during his 2000 presidential campaign by not using Clinton more. I mistakenly speculated that the Clinton Library would someday become a major tourist attraction in the South, like Graceland. Douglas, he said softly, nobody wants to see the NAFTA pen under glass. The winning artifact is Monica Lewinskys blue dress. And youll never see it exhibited in Little Rock.