Slow Burn - Season Two

There was a time in our nation not too long ago when things were humming along so well that we wasted months of our lives obsessing over the sexual peccadilloes of our President. In Season Two of Slow Burn, Leon Neyfakh examines the scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. For the first seven of the season’s eight episodes, Neyfakh brings the same attention to detail, deft storytelling, and addictiveness that made his retelling of Watergate so enjoyable, but the season finale turns the entire story on its head by making the case that Clinton was a rapist who got away with it. It is an editorial decision I am sure Neyfakh defends, but it taints the entire product. 

For those old enough to remember the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Neyfakh is quick to remind us that the affair was the culmination of years of Republican attacks on Clinton that predated his election but became louder and more aggressive once he took office. There is, for example, the shameful display of partisan outrage after the tragic suicide of Vince Foster and the naivete of White House lawyers trying to be respectful of the man’s death twisted into something mendacious and secretive. 

Early episodes focus on how the sometimes clumsy handling of things like personnel decisions were perverted into the “-gate” du jour for scandal mongering conservatives whose antipathy for Clinton only rose the longer he was in office. Of course, the Clintons exacerbated the problem by digging in their heels as the investigate state that arose around them kept probing more deeply into their conduct. It was the quintessential “whiff of scandal” that rarely bore fruit but made them look like they had something to hide and followed them all the way to Hillary’s 2016 run for President. 

As the season unfolds, the modern day connections, not just in the “cloud of suspicion” framing the media came to use about everything involving the Clintons, but the more direct links between Clinton-Starr and Trump-Mueller come into sharper focus. Where Trump rails about a prosecutorial witch hunt, Neyfakh shows what one actually looks like, how the disparate threads of a far-flung Arkansas real estate deal, the allegations of a young state employee, and a handful of Arkansas State Troopers lingered long enough so that when Clinton did give his enemies the ammunition they needed to take him down, the foundation had already been laid. When you hear Rudy Giuliani talk about a “perjury trap,” the Paul Jones lawyers actually set one for Clinton. Unbeknownst to him, they had the goods on his affair with Lewinsky and his lawyerly parsing of their definition of “sex,” among other actions, was the seed corn what would ultimately become a bill of particulars for his impeachment. 

There is no question Clinton’s behavior was sleazy and gross but what comes across even stronger is how much Clinton’s foes overreached in trying to convert his awful personal decisions into a vehicle to topple his Presidency. They missed, to borrow from the law, the fact that people saw the allegations against Clinton as what we would call “fruit of the poisonous tree.” That is, having decided that the initial “crime” - consensual sexual conduct - was not worthy of a multi-million-dollar investigation, much less the removal of a popular President from office, voters saw everything that flowed from it as illegitimate. Unlike Watergate, where the phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” was born, here, the cover-up was viewed as an understandable attempt to conceal an affair, not an impeachable offense separate and apart from the underlying conduct. Put differently, as Neyfakh wisely observes, Nixon was brought down because he used the power of the presidency corruptly, whereas Clinton’s failings were ones any person could fall victim to. 

Like its predecessor, Season Two of Slow Burn is a fully-formed eight-episode arc, but also provides stand out, stand alone episodes. The most difficult (and rewarding) of which is the fifth, entitled Tell All. It focuses primarily on Linda Tripp, a name many of us had erased from our memory hoping to never hear from again, but here she is, 20 years later, still as hopping mad at the Clintons as she was then, a Judas who was recognized for what she was at the time back to try and correct the record in the most hypocritical and histrionic of ways (she claims to have feared that the Clintons were going to have her killed, no joke). 

Tripp trots out her well-worn protestation of innocence, of merely trying to act as a sort of protective mother to Monica Lewinsky when every one of her actions at the time suggest precisely the opposite. It is not just the tape recording of their phone calls, it was the willful efforts to get Lewinsky to retrace the entire story in order to create incriminating evidence that could be used against Clinton. Moreover, Tripp’s rumination on Lewinsky as a naive young woman being taken advantage of by Clinton also runs counter to her own behavior - not the least of which was encouraging Lewinsky to preserve the now infamous blue dress knowing Clinton’s semen was on it in order to maintain its evidentiary value and, after each was issued a subpoena by Jones’s lawyers, recording conversations where Lewinsky does not even suspect it was Tripp who got the ball rolling with the Jones team. 

In fact, for those who thought Hillary’s riff on a vast right-wing conspiracy was hyperbolic, Neyfakh essentially exposes it at its creation. Tripp knew Tony Snow, a George HW Bush speechwriter, who put her in touch with a publicist named Lucianne Goldberg (whose son Jonah has made a nice career for himself in the same fever swamps as his mom), and Goldberg’s contacts with some outside attorneys assisting Paula Jones (including Kellyanne Conway’s now-husband and a a then-little known attorney named Ann Coulter) tipped Starr’s team to the whole story. 

All of which culminated in the pornographic work product Starr’s team produced. The Starr Report became a national sensation and a shame walk at the same time. Starr exposed all of Clinton’s dirty laundry in excruciating, prurient detail while readers would be excused if they missed any comment on the supposed scandals - Whitewater, Travelgate, etc. - that spurred the hiring of Starr’s predecessor, Robert Fiske in the first place. In fact, as Neyfakh notes, Whitewater is mentioned just four times in a report that clocks in at nearly 500 pages.

But just when you think you know how the story ends, Neyfakh throws a massive curveball in the season’s final episode. Instead of focusing on what was a preordained outcome - impeachment by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives followed by acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate (a two-thirds majority was needed for conviction which everyone understood was never going to happen), Neyfakh takes the controversial tack of spending nearly the entire fifty-minute finale on Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegation against Clinton. It is an unseemly choice for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that Neyfakh buries much of the evidence discounting Broaddrick’s claim under a largely sympathetic framing of her story. 

It is fair to assume that but for the #MeToo movement, it is unlikely Broaddrick’s allegations would have been given this much attention, but while I understand Neyfakh’s inclination to include her claim, in doing so, he throws out a very serious charge - rape - with the same “cloud of suspicion” reporting that suffuses much of what has done with Bill and Hillary Clinton for the past 25 years. Indeed, Peter Baker, one of the reporters Neyfakh interviewed, puts his finger on the issue. He notes that with Bill Clinton, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, but he fails to take that important observation to its logical conclusion. 

In their zeal to tar Clinton, Republicans blurred the two, and in their zeal to show they were not the “liberal media,” reporters did the same thing. NBC reporter Lisa Myers huffs that her interview with Broaddrick was initially kiboshed, but was it responsible to air such an extreme allegation without much support? Broaddrick’s claim was literally a footnote in the Starr Report and although she was interviewed by the FBI, nothing ever came of it. Even if you agree that victims should be heard (and I do), the contradictions in her story, her association with right-wing activists (not to mention Donald Trump in 2016), and her own attempts to enrich herself cast far more doubt on the validity of her story than, to take a contemporary example, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. 

And in elevating a rape allegation into the centerpiece of that final episode, Neyfakh reorients the entire story away from the consensual affair Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in to one that has a far more sinister tone without the evidence to back it up. Because of this, the story as we understand it becomes secondary, almost illusory. Lewinsky, the only character for whom sympathy is owed, is an after thought even though she became a national joke who spent the next 20 years carrying the burden of shame. 

Not only is Neyfakh’s decision to air Broaddrick’s claims a significant editorial decision, it had the side effect of exposing another shortcoming. Although the second season’s episodes were roughly a third longer than the first season’s, I do not know that the extra time was used judiciously. There was a bigger story to tell, one that began, and was traced well by Matt Bai in his spectacular book All The Truth Is Out about the tabloidization of political reporting that began with Gary Hart in 1988 and reached its apotheosis ten years later during the Lewinsky scandal. The shirking of journalistic standards in service of scoops and the rise of right-wing media outlets willing to air both fact and fiction is as much this story as whether Clinton’s actions, before or during his time in office, warranted his removal therefrom. 

Because of this, what also remains elusive is the true motivation of Clinton’s enemies. It cannot simply be his supposedly “liberal” policies, because Clinton was not a particularly liberal President. He modestly raised taxes on the wealthy, but he was also fiscally prudent and grew the federal government far less than the Republicans’ patron saint, Ronald Reagan. If, in the end, it was as those of us who lived through this time suspect, that the right deemed him morally unfit to hold that office, their blind allegiance to the current occupant is all the more curious.

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