IP: From a Friend -- "The best piece on Clinton I have read"

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

A friend sent it to me and others to provoke thinking without necessarily agreeing with what the author said. djf


I think you will find the following thought provoking and a good read. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the greatest of 
the magical novelists of Latin America.

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The first thing you notice about William Jefferson Clinton is his height. The second is his power of seduction: from 
the first handshake he oozes the familiarity of an old friend. The third is his intellectual brilliance. You can tackle 
him on any issue, however thorny, as long as you phrase your question right. I had already been warned by one of his 
lesser admirers that the real danger of Clinton is the way he charms you into thinking that whatever you are saying is 
the most fascinating thing he has ever heard.

I met Clinton in August 1995 at a dinner organised by the writer William Styron at his summer house in Martha's 
Vineyard. During his first presidential campaign, he had said that my novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude was his 
favourite book. I was quoted in the press responding that I thought this was just a bait for the Latino electorate. It 
didn't go unnoticed. Clinton's first comment on meeting me at Martha's Vineyard was that he'd meant everything he'd 
said.

Carlos Fuentes and I have our reasons for believing that we lived a great chapter in our memoirs that night. Clinton 
caught us off guard with his sense of humour, his interest and respect for what we were saying. He hung on our every 
word as if it were gold dust. His mood fitted his appearance. His hair was cut short like a brush, his skin was tanned, 
he had the rude health of a sailor on leave and he wore a childish sweatshirt with a logo stamped on the chest. At 49, 
he was a glorious survivor of the generation of '68, someone who had smoked dope and sung along to the Beatles, someone 
who had taken to the streets in protest at the Vietnam war.

The dinner began at eight and finished at midnight, there were 14 guests at the table, but little by little, the 
conversation turned into an impromptu literary jousting match between the President and the three writers. The first 
topic was the imminent Pan-American summit. Clinton wanted it to be held in Miami, where it eventually did take place.

Fuentes and I thought that New Orleans or Los Angeles had a more historical standing. We defended our thesis valiantly 
until it became clear that Clinton wouldn't budge. He was counting on the Miami vote for his reelection.

'Forget votes, Mr. President,' Fuentes said. 'Florida loses, history wins.' That set the tone for the evening. When 
talk turned to drug trafficking, the President lent me a benevolent ear: 'The 30 million drug addicts in the US are 
proof that the North American Mafia is much more powerful than the Colombians and the US authorities are far more 
corrupt.' When I raised the issue of Cuba, he seemed even more receptive: 'If you and Fidel sat down and discussed this 
face to face I'm sure that it could all be sorted out.' We skimmed over Latin America and it became clear that his 
interest was far greater than we had imagined, even though he lacked a few essential details. When the conversation 
threatened to turn too formal, we asked him to name his favourite film. High Noon, by Fred Zinnemann, whom he had 
honoured in London days before. And when we asked what he was reading, he breathed a sigh of relief and mentioned a 
book about economic wars of the future, whose author and title I didn't recognise.

'You're better off reading Don Quixote,' I told him. 'It's all in there.' The truth is that Don Quixote is not read by 
half the people who mention it in conversation, but very few own up to never having opened it. Clinton proved with two 
or three references that he knew it well.

Enthused, he asked us all to name our favourite books. Styron chose Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, I would have chosen 
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, which has taken pride of place on my bedside table for 20 years, but I decided on the Count 
Of Monte Cristo for reasons hard to explain. Clinton's favourite was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Fuentes didn't 
hesitate on Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner's best work, although some prefer Light In August for personal reasons. 
In homage to Faulkner, Clinton stood up and, taking long strides around the table, recited from memory Benji's 
monologue from The Sound And The Fury - an astonishing but almost impenetrable passage.

Talk of Faulkner led us once more on to the subject of the affinities between Caribbean writers and the authors of the 
American South. It seemed logical to us to view the Caribbean not as a geographical area confined to the Caribbean sea 
but as a vast cultural and historical space stretching down to the north of Brazil and up to the Mississippi basin. 
Thus Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and so many others are just as Caribbean in their own right as Jorge 
Amado or Derek Walcott. Clinton, born and bred in Arkansas, welcomed the idea and happily proclaimed his own Caribbean 
affiliation.

It was approaching midnight when Clinton had to interrupt the conversation to take an urgent call from Gerry Adams, and 
then and there, he authorised Adams to raise funds and campaign for peace in Northern Ireland. That would have been a 
historic ending to an unforgettable evening had Fuentes not gone one step further. He asked Clinton who he considered 
to be his enemies. The answer was instant.

'My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism.' With that, dinner was over. On the other occasions that I have 
met Clinton, in public or in private, my first impressions have been confirmed. He is quite the opposite of what Latin 
Americans imagine a US president to be.

So is it right that this exceptionally human man should have his place in history distorted because he couldn't find a 
secluded spot in which to make love? It's true: the most powerful man on earth was unable to consummate a secret 
passion because of the invisible but ever-present eyes of his security force, a force that serves more to prevent than 
to protect.

There are no curtains at the windows of the Oval Office. There is no lock on the bathroom door behind which Clinton 
carries out his more private matters. The vase of flowers that you see behind him in photographs of the Oval Office is, 
according to the press, host to the bugging device that provided details of his affair.

Sadder still, the President only wanted to do what the common man has done behind his wife's back since the world began.

Puritan stupidity did not only refuse him that, it withheld his right to deny it.

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been 
swallowed by a whale. Shielding himself with a similar trick of story telling, Clinton denied that he had had sexual 
relations with Monica Lewinsky. He denied it with his head held high, as any self-respecting adulterer would. Because 
at the end of the day, his personal drama is a private matter between him and his wife. Hillary was quick to defend him 
to the world with Homeric dignity.

So it should be. It is one thing to lie to deceive, it is something quite different to conceal the truth in order to 
protect one's private life. By right, no one is obliged to denounce themselves publicly. But because Clinton persisted 
in his initial denial, he has been prosecuted in every way possible. Surely it is more dignified to perjure yourself in 
defence of carnal desire, than to condemn love altogether? It was Clinton's misfortune that, with the same 
determination with which he denied he was to blame, he was later to admit it and carry on admitting it in every single 
media -- be it printed, visual or spoken -- to the point of total humiliation. This was the fatal mistake of a lover 
disturbed in foreplay. Clinton will go down in history not for having made love badly, but for having turned the act of 
love on its head. He submitted to oral sex while on the telephone to a senator. He sacrificed himself to a frigid 
cigar. He resorted to every trick and appliance he could in order to make a mockery of nat
ure, but the harder he tried, the more his inquisitors found grounds against him. Because puritanism is an insatiable 
vice that feeds off its own excrement.

The entire impeachment process has been a sinister plot by fanatics for the personal destruction of a political 
adversary whose grandeur they could not bear. The method chosen was the criminal abuse of the justice system by a 
fundamentalist public prosecutor named Kenneth Starr, whose inflamed and salacious examination of witnesses seemed to 
excite him to the point of orgasm.

The Bill Clinton that we met four months ago at a White House gala held for Andres Pastrana was a different man. He was 
no longer the laid-back graduate of Martha's Vineyard, but a condemned man, wizened and shy. His professional smile 
couldn't hide his physical exhaustion; it was like the metal fatigue of an old plane.

Days before, at a dinner with journalists, in the presence of the grande dame of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, 
I heard someone say that judging by the Clinton trial, the US is still the country of Nathaniel Hawthorne. My dinner at 
the White House was the living proof.

Hawthorne, the great American novelist of the last century, denounced the horrors of New England fundamentalism which 
saw the Salem witches burnt alive. His best work, The Scarlet Letter, is the story of Hestor Prynne, a young married 
woman who had an illegitimate child by a man who wasn't her husband. In the novel, a Kenneth Starr figure of the time 
orders that she shall be punished by wearing a penitent's shirt marked with the letter A, the same colour and smell as 
blood. A guard is ordered to follow her everywhere she goes, beating a drum so that passersby will stand aside.

The novel's ending shatters the dreams of our present day Starr, for the father of Prynne's child turns out to be the 
minister of the very cult that martyred her.

The morals and the methods of the persecution of Clinton and Prynne are essentially the same. When Clinton's enemies 
were unable to find a basis for prosecuting him for what they wanted, they hounded him with questions until they caught 
him in a secondary snare. They forced him to denounce himself in public, they forced him to repent for something that 
he hadn't done, live on air. The drums that haunted Hester Prynne were replaced with the latest information technology, 
and through the lusty questions of the prosecutor, children at their mother's breast learned of the lies that their 
parents had told them about how they came to exist.

Beaten by fatigue, Clinton succumbed to the unforgivable madness of an imagined enemy 5,396 sea miles from the White 
House forcefully punishing him just to divert attention from his personal grief.

Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the greatest writers of this dying century, sums it up in one inspired 
flourish. 'They have treated Clinton as if he were a black president.'

Copyright Gabriel Garcia Marquez /Cambio Translation by Angelique Chrisafis.