Caveat lector

MARGARET’S CHOICE (PART 1)! Margaret Carlson has written an ugly new book. We think it goes back to a choice:

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 2003

MARGARET’S CHOICE: Margaret Carlson’s new “book” really isn’t one. Although you’d never know it from reading the jacket, or from reading the six fawning blurbs-on-the-back, Carlson’s new volume—Anyone Can Grow Up—is really a collection of columns from Time, stitched together with a few short original chapters. The first—“Personal or Family Matters”—is the longest new chapter, at 26 pages. Carlson also offers 18 new pages about George Bush, and ten new pages on Bill, Hill and Al. Most of the book is those tired old columns, held together by these new, scripted thoughts.

And Carlson is brilliantly scripted. Was HRC surprised in August 1998, when her husband fessed up about his affair with Lewinsky? All pundits know the Hard Pundit Law: They are required to mock this fool notion. But Carlson was already spinning the point one month before Living History appeared! The Clintons headed off for a Martha’s Vineyard vacation shortly after the president confessed. Mrs. Clinton seemed angry and upset. But then, as all Clinton-haters must do, Carlson explains just how fake it all was:

CARLSON (page 154): Hillary never touched her husband, even ducking under his arm at the entry to the Marine One helicopter…Wearing sunglasses, she looked like an aggrieved widow, not a betrayed wife. It was a boffo performance.

And a performance it was. Gail Sheehy reported later that Hillary had been faking it. Sheehy talked to an aide who was on Air Force One going to the Vineyard. The aide told Sheehy that Hillary laughed and joked all the way to Massachusetts.

It’s consummate, Grade A Hillary-bashing—but is this pleasing tale truthful? We don’t know when Sheehy “reported” this tale, but it certainly wasn’t in her own well-known book. In December 1999, Sheehy’s new biography, Hillary’s Choice, described this airplane ride in detail—and it didn’t sound like a barrel of laughs. How did Sheehy describe the scene? “The stricken First Family set off for a twelve-day vacation from Hell,” she began. Here is her fuller description:

SHEEHY: On the helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base, the Clintons were frozen in silence. Hillary looked numb and Chelsea inconsolably sad. On the plane to Martha’s Vineyard, Clinton read a mystery novel and Hillary dozed. When they arrived, the President climbed down the steps of his plane and fell into the huge, forgiving hug of Vernon Jordan. Hillary let the President cool his heels, alone, on camera, while she hung back.

Is Margaret Carlson making it up? Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t have a clue. But as we’ll see in the next few days, her book’s Clinton/Gore-bashing is truly clown-like—and there are other occasions when well-known facts give way to create pleasing tales. For example, is President Clinton a Great Big Liar? Carlson is eager to say that he is. So eager, in fact, that she plays Jayson Blair, doctoring a thoroughly well-known quote from the start of the Monica Madness:

CARLSON (page 153): During this period, [President Clinton] was alone in his lie, unless you count Dick Morris, who had some inkling that the worst was true. Clinton asked him to poll the public on how they would feel if it turned out that he had indeed had an affair. When Morris told Clinton that he would be run out of town, Clinton, according to Morris, said, “Well, we’ll just have to lie then.”

But then, Carlson displays a rare ability to rearrange well-known facts. In one of the ugliest parts of her reprehensible “book,” she struggles and strains to help us see how disgraceful those Clintons really are:

CARLSON (page 157): With the Clintons, transactions trump relationships. Forget that and you end up in prison (Hillary’s law partner and deputy attorney general, Webster Hubbell, whom the two never called once he went off to jail), [or] dead (Hillary law partner Vince Foster, who committed suicide because he couldn’t play the “blood sport” of the White House)…

No one in the White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group

The FBI lied in their report to the AG

The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff

The GOP has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigation

The Ushers Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC

The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.

TOMORROW: Comic-book clowning on the Clintons (and Gore) is found all through this strange volume.

GAIL’S JUDGMENT: For the record, in all her writing and TV appearances, Sheehy has said that HRC learned about Monica in August. At one time, of course, that seemed to be Carlson’s judgment too. On August 24, 1998, for example, she wrote this is a Time column:

CARLSON: To many viewers, Hillary’s full-throated defense on the Today show in January, in which she blamed her husband’s enemies for the scandal, was pure spinning for her man. But it was easy for her to believe that the same amalgam of right-wing moneymen, zealots and Clinton haters who had launched investigations into (and made movies about) whether Vince Foster was murdered could be behind a starstruck groupie suddenly in the clutches of both Ken Starr and Paula Jones’ lawyers. Certainly, if she believed the charges against her husband, the lawyer in her would never, ever have conceded to Matt Lauer that an “adulterous liaison” with an intern, “if proven true, would be a very serious offense.”