Leon Neyfakh (1:27)

Again, go to eatiqbar.com and Enter code BAR20.

Elise Hu (1:34)

A big chunk of Clinton hatred and a big chunk of Clinton's downfall. To the extent there was a downfall had to do with his near compulsive need to just trim the truth a little bit.

Rick Perlstein (1:51)

The mention of Bill Clinton his face showing up in the TV would send my father into an apoplectic rage.

Leon Neyfakh (2:02)

Hey, Slow Burn listeners. A few weeks ago, our podcast team wrapped up season two with a series of live events. We traveled to five cities New York, D.C. san Francisco, Portland and Chicago. And in each location I explored some lingering questions about the Clinton administration with reporters, historians and cultural critics. In this special episode of Slow Burn, as well as one more that you'll hear next week, we're going to share some highlights from those conversations. Now. A few seconds ago, you heard the voices of Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who covered the Clinton White House, and Rick Perlstein, author of the Invisible Bridge and a scholar of the conservative movement. Marcus and Perlstein talked to me about how the Clinton administration infuriated journalists, fed into the hands of their enemies, and galvanized the Political right. We'll also talk about whether the conflicts they found themselves in were inevitable. But first, before we get into those, I wanted to play you the opening act of the show we put on in every city we traveled to this fall. It's a story from the Clinton saga that did not make it into season two of Slow Burn. But it gets into some of the big questions we hoped to leave people with at the end of the season. Hey everybody. So slow burn 2 is over. And I've been thinking about how if we had known what we know now back when we started, we would have definitely made the season longer. At least 10 episodes, maybe 12. Definitely not eight because there's just so much plot. So many things happened. Travelgate, Prom night at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Federal prosecutors taking a blood sample from the President at the White House, always wearing a tuxedo. I never knew about any of that stuff. And I'm wondering if anyone here knew about the blood sample thing, for example. Anyone? What about Prom Night? All right. Perfect audience. There are a bunch of little subplots along those lines that we would have loved to include in our account of the Clinton impeachment. The cutting room floor is thick with material. So tonight I wanted to tell you all a story that I find particularly beguiling. It's about a guy named Webster Hubbell, one of the Clintons closest friends from Little Rock, Arkansas. Though we barely mention him during the season of Slow Burn, there's a way in which Webster Hubble was responsible for creating the conditions for Bill Clinton's impeachment. The reason I like this story so much is that on the one hand it's pretty insignificant. It involves a guy most people haven't heard of and relatively speaking, the stakes aren't that high. It's definitely a minor. And yet one could make the argument that a lot of the stuff I did talk about during the season of Slow Burn would never have happened were it not for him. How did Webster Hubbell end up in the middle of the Clintons scandal ridden first year in office? How did he fall from his perch as a prominent friend of Bill to a cell in federal prison? And what was his role in precipitating Ken Starr's investigation into Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky? This is Slow Burn Live. I'm your host Leon Naifak. Thank you for being here tonight. So in college, Webster Hubble played on the offensive line for the Arkansas Razorbacks. Good chin, right. He got picked in the NFL draft in 1969, the same year as O.J. simpson. But Hubbell hurt his knee before the season even started, and he never ended up getting to play pro football. Instead, he ended up going to law school. And pretty soon he had a thriving career at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. And there he became close with his fellow law partner, Hillary Rodham, and in turn, her husband, Bill. Here is a Newsweek reporter describing the friendship between Hubble and Bill Clinton in the early 90s. Although Webb met Bill Clinton through Mrs. Clinton, Hubbell and Clinton are really best friends. They're golfing partners. They like to hang out together. When Bill Clinton wants to watch a basketball game or watch a football game or drive to Memphis for ribs, he seeks out Webb. Hubble. They just get along well, you know that friend you have who you drives to Memphis with ribs. Some of you may remember from episode two of Slow Burn that when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, he brought a whole caravan of Arkansas friends to Washington with him. He appointed his old friend to the number three position in the Department of Justice. Associate Attorney General. Hubble's role was to oversee the Civil Rights Division, the Civil Division, the Antitrust Division, and ironically, the Tax Division. And the reason I say ironically is that it did not take long for Hubble's career in Washington to sputter, and his approach to money and taxes was part of the reason why. It was in March of 1994 that Hubble learned that his former partners at the Rose Law Firm, the ones who stayed back in Arkansas while Hubble and Hillary and Vince Foster all went to D.C. they were investigating Hubble for over billing his clients. The alleged behavior amounted to stealing about $400,000. And that accusation made Hubbell's continued service as Associate Attorney General untenable. One of Hillary's old law partners was forced to resign as the number three official in the Justice Department, Webster Hubble. The scandal around Hubble immediately collided with an unrelated headache that the White House had been dealing with since the campaign. More fallout over Whitewater.

Elise Hu (7:38)

You know, when this is all over, it's going to be the same story we've been telling for two years. We made a bad investment, we lost money, and there's really not much more to add to it.

Leon Neyfakh (7:46)

In January of 1994, the escalating Whitewater scandal had led Bill Clinton to request the appointment of an independent counsel. The hope was that doing so would bring down the temperature on Whitewater. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that was never really going to work out that way. But the embezzlement accusation Against Web. Hubble definitely did not help.

Rick Perlstein (8:06)

The top House Republican says the resignation offers another reason to hold hearings on Whitewater. Mr. Hubbell says his departure has nothing.

Leon Neyfakh (8:13)

To do with Whitewater, but it couldn't.

Rick Perlstein (8:15)

Come at a worse time for an administration trying to get past the issue.

Leon Neyfakh (8:19)

Under Ken Starr's leadership, the independent counsel's office was ready to bring a slam dunk case against Hubble, one that would potentially send him to prison for many years. But the prosecutors were willing to make a deal if Hubble was willing to cooperate with them. Hubble agreed to the deal. More unwelcome news tonight for the Clintons. NBC News has confirmed that close friend Webb Hubbell, the former third ranking official in the Justice Department, will plead guilty to felony tax charges. Starr and his team would come to regret their decision to make that deal with Hubble. More specifically, they would come to regret that they did not get a preview of his testimony, what's known as a proffer, before they gave him credit for his cooperation. Because as it turned out, when the prosecutors started asking questions, Hubble didn't really have any answers for them. Hubble would later say that the independent counsel was clearly wanting something on the President or the First Lady. They asked everything from who was having affairs with whom to what was Hillary's involvement in Whitewater? What was Bill's involvement? They even asked me, did I have an affair with Hillary? Faced with all these questions, Hubbell held firm. He did not have anything to say. And this made the Star team furious. They suspected that Hubble was holding out on them out of loyalty to the Clintons. Do you remember Bruce Udolph from episode one of the season? The prosecutor on Starr's team who was so torn up about how the independent counsel treated Monica Lewinsky? Here's what he had to say about Hubble When I interviewed him, it was a reasonable assumption that Hubble might be protecting the Clintons. And if he were put in a position where he were motivated to help himself, then we would be able to find out one way or the other if he did have any such information. All these years later, do you feel like he was just a good soldier or do you think he sincerely just didn't have what Star was looking for? I don't know. That's the most honest answer I can give you. I never get tired of that guy's voice. In June of 1995, Webster Hubble was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. His fellow inmates called him the Big Easy because he was so good natured and easy to get along with, and also because he was big. Hubble got out of prison in early 1997, but instead of everything going back to normal, his troubles only got worse. Hubble's troubles aren't over. Federal investigators and congressional Republicans want to know if he's now protecting the president on other matters. Starr's prosecutors had discovered that after Hubble became ensnared in their investigation, he started making a lot of money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was coming from a bunch of different sources, including the parent company of Revlon, where Clinton's good friend Vernon Jordan sat on the board of directors. The Star team concluded that Jordan and other Clinton associates were funneling no work payments to Hubble in exchange for his silence on Whitewater. And that theory quickly made its way into the media. After Hubble resigned from the Justice Department in disgrace, Ken Starr was pressuring him to provide damaging information on the clinical Clintons. Jordan came to the rescue, Getting Hubble a $25,000 a month job at Revlon, allegedly to do public relations.

Rick Perlstein (11:40)

But prosecutors suspect this was Hushman.

Leon Neyfakh (11:43)

It got to the point where the Clintons themselves had to personally address the allegations against Hubble. Mrs. Clinton said she didn't know about the pending charges, then ridiculed administration critics, comparing them to cult followers.

Rick Perlstein (11:56)

You know, the never ending fictional conspiracy.

Elise Hu (11:59)

That, honest to goodness, reminds me of.

Leon Neyfakh (12:01)

Some people's obsession with UFOs and the Hale Bob Comet.

Rick Perlstein (12:05)

Some days at the White House, President.

Leon Neyfakh (12:07)

Clinton found it all very amusing.

Rick Perlstein (12:11)

Did she say that?

Leon Neyfakh (12:13)

That's pretty good. It was pretty good. Things got worse when Starr's team indicted Hubbell for not paying taxes on the alleged hush money. But even then, Hubbell did not budge.

Rick Perlstein (12:26)

I want you to know that the Office of Independent Counsel can indict my dog, they can indict my cat.

Elise Hu (12:35)

But I'm not going to lie about the President. I'm not going to lie about the.

Rick Perlstein (12:40)

First lady or anyone else.

Leon Neyfakh (12:45)

Before I go on, I want to ask the audience real quick, how many people here knew who Webster Hubble was before hearing his name on Slow Burn? Some, but definitely not even most. Right. And typically that would be a pretty good basis from which to surmise that he probably wasn't that important, right? Or at least that he wasn't as pivotal a figure in the Clinton saga as, say, Linda Tripp or Ken Starr or Paula Jones. But if working on Slow Burn has taught me anything, it's that even the most consequential players in a story can fall out of the narrative that gets passed down to us through our collective memory. Webster Hubble is one such player because, as I said earlier, it's possible that without him, Ken Starr would have never even been able to investigate the Lewinsky matter. Do you guys want to know? I think that. Okay. When Linda Tripp called Starr and his team and told them about Monica Lewinsky, the detail they latched onto, of all things, was the apparent involvement of Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan. Starting in the fall of 1997, Lewinsky had been pressuring Clinton to help her find work in the private sector, and Clinton delegated the task to Jordan, who got Lewinsky an interview at Revlon and separately set her up with a lawyer to deal with a subpoena from the Paula Jones team. The reason the Vernon Jordan angle caught the attention of Starr's prosecutors was that it reminded them of Webster Hubble. In both cases, the prosecutors thought Clinton was using his powerful friends, Vernon Jordan in particular, to buy people's silence. And that overlap was critical. And it was what Starr and his people pointed to In January of 1998, when they made the case to justice department officials that they should be allowed to expand the Whitewater investigation to include the Lewinsky angle. Attorney general Janet Reno was apparently convinced by the argument that even though it involved a lot more sexual and a lot fewer billing issues, the Monica Lewinsky situation resembled the Webster Hubble situation closely enough that Starr could incorporate it into his probe. And then prom night happened not long after that. So it's clear why I find this story so attractive. Right here you have this guy, Webster Hubble over here, who happens to become friends with the Clintons. And over here is this completely unrelated situation with Monica Lewinsky. But together, they became part of a chain reaction, this sort of Rube Goldberg machine that set history into motion. And this gets at a big, overarching question that I kept asking myself as I worked on Slow burn, season two. Why did all this happen? To phrase that a little more grandiosely, how does history work? What propels it? What determines the plot? The Webster Hubble story brings to mind a few possible answers. One of them is that Rube Goldberg theory that basically, history is the series of arbitrary events that crash into each other and mix together in unpredictable ways that are as consequential as they are meaningless. But from a different angle, what happened with Webster Hubble was not arbitrary at all. It was the result of specific decisions made by specific individuals with specific personalities and specific goals and specific flaws. And in this light, this sequence of events looks less like a chain reaction. And more like a series of choices. The Clintons chose to be friends with Webster Hubble. Webster Hubble chose to be a person who overbuild his clients and then chose to take a job in the Department of Justice. Vernon Jordan then chose to help out when Hubble was being jammed up by Ken Starr. And there's a third way to look at this as well, I think, and that's through an institutional lens, one that suggests a kind of immutable logic to political scandal from this point of view. The independent counsel's office was always going to find some way to connect Lewinsky to Whitewater, because the purpose of an independent council investigation, whether it's Ken Starr running it or Bob Fisk or Bob Mueller, is to be as aggressive and voracious as possible and in relation to its target. So as you know, if you've heard our first two seasons, there are all these parallels right, between then and now. And while I've been very happy to see that listeners are delighted by these parallels and I'm delighted by them as well, part of me also thinks, well, it's not exactly surprising, right, that when you arrange a set of chess pieces on a board with the president over here and Congress over here, the Supreme Court over here and the Independent Council over there, they're going to interact in certain predictable ways. There will be fights over access to evidence, there will be weaponized leaks to the media, and there will be a politicization of the proceedings that will ultimately, if indirectly, leave the outcome up to voters. So why was Clinton impeached? Why did all this happen? Was it really because of Webster Hubble and that perfectly shaped keyhole that he unwittingly provided to star by accepting help from Vernon Jordan? Obviously, it wasn't just that, but thinking about it that way makes me look forward to the day when we'll be able to spot today's keyholes, the ones we're not yet able to see. And maybe then in 10 or 20 or 30 years, we'll be able to say, oh, that's why that happened, and we'll be able to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong. What you just heard was my performance of that monologue in Portland. If you're wondering about that photo of upstair Hubble that I mentioned when I complimented his chin, we'll post that on the slate plus Facebook page. In Washington, D.C. i sat down with Ruth Marcus, the Washington Post editor and columnist. You may remember Ruth from this past season in episode two, she was a White House correspondent during the early Missteps of the Clinton administration from Travelgate to Harrigate to Whitewater. I began by asking her about those scandals. How inevitable do you think all of this was? I mean, you know, especially the first couple of years. How could it have been avoided, this horrible opening act of the Clinton administration where they were just bumping into one wall, into another.

Elise Hu (19:08)

Do fallible men make history or does history make fallible men? I guess is the question. And who knows? We do know that, first of all, there are the seeds for everything that happened that in retrospect, were very evident. The planting of them was very evident. And people's fundamental characters don't really change. They just emerge and cause them the same version of grief time after time and year after year. And also people have, and this really goes to the Webster Hubble story, an amazing capacity to delude themselves into thinking that they're going to get away with it. So say, for example, you're Paul Manafort and you have extracted. This is going to connect up, trust me. And you've extracted, extracted millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs that you have managed not to pay taxes on. And then you've engaged in massive bank fraud. It's so nice to not have to say alleged anymore. Then you've engaged in this massive fraud in order to extract additional money because somehow you've run out of those millions. I don't understand that, but I don't have the kinds of taste in Jackson, not alligator seeds. And so. But you could have gotten away with all of this if only you hadn't been so greedy for more money and more power that you put yourself into the position of going to work for the guy who was clearly never going to be elected president, candidate Donald Trump. And so you open the door to all of this. And so it's really the same story with Webster Hubble. He could have said to his friends Bill and Hillary, no, you know, I have this really nice life in Little Rock, and let me tell you, I spent so, so much time in Little Rock. They had this wonderful, wonderful life. They had the country club, and they all went to the same restaurants, and it was beautiful. And if he hadn't gone to Washington, he wouldn't have turned into Webster Hubbell felon.

Leon Neyfakh (21:13)

So one thing that I felt enlightened by when I was working on this show was seeing the roots of Clinton hatred. I lived through the 2016 election. I saw how much people hated Hillary Clinton. And learning about these early years made me feel like I understood that better. I wonder if you could Tell us a little about what you think was the source of that hate and what was it that people hated about them.

Elise Hu (21:35)

So I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I never got to write this column, and I'll never get to write it because it's now irrelevant. So I'll just inflict it on you guys about the distinction between Clinton hatred on the one hand and Obama hatred on the other hand, and of course, Trump hatred, which is obviously completely justified. It's of a different character. But Obama hatred was not about Obama's character, really. It was about the essence of his being. And who did he think he was being there in the White House? But Clinton hatred was very, very focused on first, Bill Clinton's particular constellation of personality issues. And they emerged very clearly early in the campaign with the Slick Willie and the. I didn't inhale. And I wrote this letter to get out of the draft, but I wanted to maintain my political viability. So a big chunk of Clinton hatred and a big chunk of Clinton's ultimate downfall, to the extent there was a downfall, had to do with his near compulsive need to just trim the truth a little bit or never tell you the entire truth. And it created this culture of distrust. And I want to say, and I think I hope I kind of insulated myself a little bit by expressing Trump hatred. I don't hate the president. Secret Service don't interview me. But I'm going to say a lot of things, things that sound critical of the Clintons as I go on here. But I want to just make my baseline clear. I would do anything to have Bill Clinton back as president or to have Hillary Clinton back as president. But I'll give you a sense of kind of how that frustration with Clinton's slickness manifested itself. This is from a column that I wrote before I was a columnist. I was covering the White House. And why I thought I could actually getting away with writing an op ed column without telling my editors, I don't know. But they didn't fire me. I still work there. This is from August of 94. So it's about as long into the little bit less long into the Clinton administration as we are now into the Trump administration. 19 months of refeated falsehoods this columnist not yet columnist wrote and half truths have corroded the relationship between the White House and the reporters who cover it. The corrosion breeds cynicism among reporters, which in turn contributes to a siege mentality inside the White House. To judge from the public opinion polls, that is hurting the administration, at least as much as it is annoying the White House press corps. So that just was sort of one set of people, me and my colleagues who came in, you know, the White House press corps is reported to have certain liberal leanings. I recall feeling some private moments of quite joy in Little Rock on election night. And yet 19 months later, 20 months later, there I was.

Leon Neyfakh (24:48)

Are you saying that the media, you and the rest of your colleagues, did you guys come to hate them in the way that their enemies did?

Elise Hu (24:56)

No. I mean, I believe if you googled like my name, Clinton and own worst enemy, you'd probably come up with a bunch of different clips. I think the media, including Slow Burn, I think. Yeah. It seems so naive in retrospect that I was frustrated by a few facts they got wrong when I was asking them questions.

Leon Neyfakh (25:18)

Tell the access door story. Isn't there. There's a story about the access door that they blocked.

Elise Hu (25:22)

Oh, yeah. So this, you know, the West Wing is a very small place and there's very close quarters between the briefing room and the press secretary, but there's a lower press office and an upper press office. The upper press office is where the actual press secretary sits. But George Stephanopoulos, who called me after this column ran and said, you're not talking about me, are you? And actually I wasn't, but George and I had dinner. Then he said, so we're thinking about.

Leon Neyfakh (25:51)

He was the communications director.

Elise Hu (25:52)

He was about to be the communications director. He was the wunderkind communications director. And they all. He is very smart. And he was actually very smart then, but possibly not quite as smart or experienced as he thought he was. And George said, so we're thinking about closing the access to the upper press office. And I was like, I've just started covering this place. But that seems to me like a really bad idea. And, and, you know, but they were smarter than everybody else and they went ahead and did it. And it did not engender goodwill. Let us say deeply.

Leon Neyfakh (26:28)

This is like four or five pages in George Stephanopoulos memoir, by the way, about that. Yeah, the access door thing, like it blew up.

Rick Perlstein (26:33)

It blew up.

Elise Hu (26:34)

It blew up. And he had to back down, right?

Leon Neyfakh (26:36)

Yeah.

Elise Hu (26:36)

Eventually he backed down. Eventually everybody back. You know, you don't fight unnecessary wars with the press. But by the time that all had happened, he idiot. Things were blowing up, like this ridiculous dispute that ended up in Benghazi, like hearings over the firing of the White House travel office. I couldn't, when Leon and I talked about it, couldn't even Dredge up the details in my mind, it was so stupid, but it was a huge deal.

Leon Neyfakh (27:01)

Then, such a huge deal. So, I mean, that makes me wonder why weren't they better at sort of containing the damage from stories like that? Why, why does it seem like every single tiny thing, you know, scandals that like today, as you were alluding to earlier, like, wouldn't move the needle in the Trump administration. Like, you wouldn't even hear about them. How did they keep turning into and metastasizing into these massive problems that resulted in congressional hearings every single time?

Elise Hu (27:26)

Well, you have one person who has an instinct to, if not dissemble, dribble out information, let's say. And you know, I didn't inhale. You have another person who is scarred by the, not just her experience in Little Rock, but her experience having to talk about her marriage on 60 Minutes and just wants to create this zone of privacy that she talked about. And so. And who sees the world and continues to see the world, I think in very us against them terms. And she, Hillary Clinton famously talked about the vast right wing conspiracy. It was interesting to hear that phrase come back in the left wing terms recently. And it wasn't that she was wrong. It was that she wasn't gaining anything tactically or strategically by talking about it in those terms. And then you layer on Arkansans who don't have Washington experience and young whippersnappers like George, others who think they're smarter than everybody else, and they probably are, but they still haven't been in a White House before. And then you layer on a vast right wing conspiracy, and that's all fine as long as you behave perfectly. But they didn't behave perfectly.

Leon Neyfakh (28:49)

When you say that they're their own worst enemies. Like what's like the best example of an unforced error?

Elise Hu (28:55)

Monica Lewinsky. I mean, you.

Leon Neyfakh (28:59)

Fair enough.

Elise Hu (29:00)

You nailed it, right? The President of the United States is facing this lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment. Correct me if I have my timeline wrong, but I don't think I do. And in the middle of this lawsuit accusing him of sexually harassing somebody when he had a different chief executive job, he starts an affair. We can call it a consensual affair. So maybe he thought about it differently, but it was a very bad idea to do A, in general, B, as the president, C, with an intern, d, with a 22 year old, and E, in the middle of being sued by.

Leon Neyfakh (29:46)

Another subordinate of sexual harassment. Yeah.

Elise Hu (29:48)

Yeah. So that seems pretty unforced to me.

Leon Neyfakh (29:51)

Yeah, there was one story Actually, I was going to reference it in my little monologue. There's a point at which Lewinsky came to him and said, look, I've been subpoenaed by the Paula Jones lawyers and they know about gifts. They know that we've given each other gifts and they want them. We don't know exactly what he said in response, but he gave her more gifts that same day. More gifts.

Elise Hu (30:10)

He is so generous.

Leon Neyfakh (30:13)

And that's what makes me think it is about personality. You know, it's like he would have done this with someone if not her. Like somehow or other he would have ended up in the same place because of who he is. And I don't know who knows.

Elise Hu (30:24)

I really like and respect Bill Clinton.

Leon Neyfakh (30:27)

For the record, and this may be a good place to close. Like, one thing I've noticed that we haven't brought up at all in these questions about why Clinton's enemies hated him so much, why they got in so much political trouble, is that it wasn't about his hyper liberal policies. Right. There were a couple of things early on with the, you know, gays in the military and stuff like that. But later on, I mean, he was as centrist as it gets. I mean, I had no idea actually like how far to the right he was willing to go.

Elise Hu (30:51)

That was how he got elected.

Leon Neyfakh (30:52)

LEON Right. No, I know that now. But like, it's striking having lived through Obama, who as you say, was being criticized for being for his socialist policies. Clinton's policies are not what people hated about him.

Elise Hu (31:02)

No, I mean, and in fact, you talk about gays in the military. That was actually not an unforced error. That was kind of a forced, forced error that he kept trying to get out of. It wasn't like he woke up and said, I've just been elected president of the United States. So what I'd like to do is take on a really big fight with the Christian right and also the entire Pentagon. What happened was he had made this promise during the campaign. And Andrea Mitchell, on Veterans Day after the election, Little Rock asked him if he would still stick by his promise. So this is a trick question if you're a politician, right? Because either you say, no, I'm flip flopping, or you say, oh no, I'm actually about to like launch the biggest culture battle in the history of transition politics. I'm sitting, I'm such an idiot. I've just started covering the White House and I'm sitting in D.C. and somebody says, so Clinton's just reaffirmed his pledge on gays in the military. I'm like, well, yeah, so of course he did. That's what he said during the campaign. No big deal. It was a huge deal. It consumed several weeks of the beginning of his new administration, which was, let me tell you, already chaotic. But it was not emblematic of his governing style or intention or really the platform that he got elected on.

Leon Neyfakh (32:19)

It made me think that he was more liberal than he was, that he was hated by the people who were so conservative.

Elise Hu (32:24)

In retrospect, they hated him for who he was, not really so much what he wanted to do.

Leon Neyfakh (32:30)

There you go. All right, let's have a round of applause for Ruth Marcus. Ruth, thank you so much for being here. One of my favorite parts of that interview was Ruth Marcus saying that Bill Clinton's enemies hated him for who he was more than for what he did as president. I wanted to explore that disdain a little bit more. So for our live show in Chicago, I asked historian Rick Perlstein to walk me through what animated the political rights during the Clinton era. So, Rick, you are a historian of the conservative movement, the Republican Party. And so I want to talk to you about or this chapter in history that we covered on Slow Burn Season two fits in to that saga. And I want to first start by asking you sort of where the American right was in 1992 when Clinton became president. What were their sort of animating causes, and how did they react to Clinton's assent?

Rick Perlstein (33:21)

Well, one of the most important animating causes for the right, as long as there's been sort of an organized right in America has been the Soviet Union, right? These Communists who are going to take over and kill us in our beds and overturn God and spread a red tide over all the continents of the earth. But in 1989, in 1990, suddenly, the Berlin Wall falls, and really, conservatives in America are left without an organizing principle, without a uniting principle. It was really interesting to see. This is kind of part of my own biography. I'm 49, and I remember when I was in college here at the University of Chicago in 1990, in 1991, there was this scare that was all over the magazines about political correctness. Political correctness was gonna, you know, take over and steal our daughters from their beds.

Leon Neyfakh (34:20)

Was that when it started?

Rick Perlstein (34:21)

That was pretty much when political correctness, as this idea that was. There was like a Newsweek cover, right? And the Newsweek cover had these kind of metallic letters, thought Police. And then there was like a Reader's Digest cover. I remember these very explicitly. And the Reader's Digest Cover had, you know, the political correctness, you know, scourge or something. And it was in those Nazi letters. Right. And this was kind of, for a while, what the right wing was going to organize themselves around. But it doesn't quite have, you know, the sexiness of an enemy with 3,000 nuclear warheads.

Leon Neyfakh (34:54)

I was gonna say, to be clear, this is sort of what happened in the vacuum that was created by the clock. It was a vacuum.

Rick Perlstein (34:59)

That's right.

Leon Neyfakh (35:00)

Imagining the dog running after the bus and grabbing the tire and suddenly.

Rick Perlstein (35:03)

Right. So given this kind of anemic kind of context or the right wing's political fortunes, Bill Clinton was a godsend. He was someone who could focus their hatreds that they could unite around, that could give them an animating principle.

Leon Neyfakh (35:19)

And.

Rick Perlstein (35:19)

And via the process, you know, I write about in my books, you know, by this point, there are millions of people, maybe even tens of millions of people, who believe that a Democratic president, a liberal president, no matter how right wing a Democratic president might be, and, you know, reforming welfare and doing all the sort of trimming of the sails that Bill Clinton had done, is illegitimate for the Christian right. Literally satanic.

Leon Neyfakh (35:41)

Was it going to be any liberal president or was it something specific about Bill Clinton?

Rick Perlstein (35:45)

I believe it would be any liberal president, but it was also something specific about Bill Clinton. I mean, when John F. Kennedy was president, there were forces trying to destroy him. Right. And it was all around the Cold War. He was too close to the Communists. When Jimmy Carter was president in the 1970s, the right wing was trying to destroy him. William Safire went after him for something called landscape. You know, But Bill Clinton's distinguishing characteristic was he was the first person to reach the Oval Office who was a baby boomer who had not only experienced the 1960s, but really had enjoyed them. He inhaled the 1960s.

Leon Neyfakh (36:30)

Right.

Rick Perlstein (36:32)

Those of you who are old enough to remember, those of you who might have read about it in your musty history books, know that one of the big controversies about Bill Clinton was whether he had smoked marijuana.

Leon Neyfakh (36:43)

Right.

Rick Perlstein (36:44)

And then he, being Bill Clinton, said, well, yes, of course. You know, I was at parties where marijuana was smoked and a joint was passed around, but I never inhaled.

Leon Neyfakh (36:54)

Right.

Rick Perlstein (36:54)

So why is this so important? Right. Why did Bill Clinton arouse a particular kind of outrage when and where he did? And again, this is also kind of part of my biography, too.

Leon Neyfakh (37:07)

I was going to ask, I mean, you mentioned seeing those Newsweek covers and the Reader's Digest cover, what was happening in your sort of political life at the age that you Were then did you have an awareness of Clinton as the enemy of the right? And how did that play out in your own family?

Rick Perlstein (37:21)

Well, I was born back around when Bill Clinton wasn't inhaling in 1969. And my parents were a little older than baby boomers. You know, my dad went to college in the late 50s and the early 1960s. And my dad was conservative, but he wasn't particularly politically certain, certainly wasn't a political activist. And for some reason, the mention of Bill Clinton, his face showing up in the TV would send my father, who was a small businessman from Milwaukee, into an apoplectic rage in a way that I. It was uncharacteristic. I had not seen this happen when he saw any other politician until George W. Bush came around. But that's another story.

Leon Neyfakh (38:08)

So it wasn't just the politics. I mean, that's the thing.

Rick Perlstein (38:09)

It wasn't the politics, and that's the culture. Right. Clearly. You know, I've sort of made this my life's work. You know, all theory is a form of autobiography. You know, it's like my little form of therapy. Right.

Leon Neyfakh (38:19)

We make it explicit here tonight.

Rick Perlstein (38:20)

That's right. So, you know, what was it that made Bill Clinton so offensive to my dad? We all know that on the level of, you know, ideology, he was just about as right wing to imagine a Democratic president could be. I was just reading up on his welfare reform stuff, and it was all about giving millions of dollars to the states to install abstinence only education, tracking down deadbeat dads, you know, ending welfare as a federal entitlement. And this was all about trying to kind of close off avenues of attack.

Leon Neyfakh (38:50)

Right?

Rick Perlstein (38:50)

But they couldn't close down this avenue of attack, that he was a guy who was part of this generation that had usurped America's founding order of the bourgeois family and the white picket fences and marriage and rectitude and all this stuff. And I think that for a lot of people, he represented this very, very psychologically potent mix in which the people who were insurgents against the normal order of things in the 1960s were having so much fun. They were breaking all the rules, they were smoking drugs, they're having sex. And I think it's a resentment. You know, the French call it a resentment. It's an envy that produces rage. He has this thing that we can't have. And Bill Clinton's roguish demeanor, his charm, I think, really kind of triggered a lot of people, reminded them of all the roguish, charming people in their lives who got Away with everything, you know, didn't really play by the rules, you know, took shortcuts.

Leon Neyfakh (39:47)

You're making me think of a guy who we featured in, in the season, Cliff Jackson, who was Clinton's. I called him his frenemy at Oxford, who maybe frenemy is not quite actors. I think Cliff Jackson's mind, they were friends and then they fell out. In Clinton's mind, I think he was like an acquaintance at best.

Rick Perlstein (40:03)

He was one of those guys who was kind of feeding information to the media. And in Cliff Jackson's case, it was a very potent again, theme having to do with what I'm talking about, which was that how Bill Clinton managed to not serve in the Vietnam War, how he slick willied his way out of it. Right. And Cliff Jackson is interesting because in this book I wrote about Richard Nixon called Nixon Land, I write about Richard Nixon, who is this kind of kid who was kind of grew up in this kind of hardscrabble poor area and always worked three times harder than everyone else. He was always well scrubbed and he just had to scrape for everything he got. And when he got to college, they wouldn't let him into the one fraternity because he wasn't cool enough. It was almost like, you know, he wore the wrong clothes. You know, he wasn't on the right football teams and all that stuff. And so what he did was he started his own fraternity. So the one fraternity was called the Franklins. And think of them as. It's almost like Revenge of the Nerds or, you know, or Animal House. You know, they're the kind of the swells. But his fraternity was called the Orthogonians, and Orthogonian meant right angles. You know, they were literally proud of how they were squares. Yeah, he structured his whole political appeal around this idea that liberals were looking down their noses at you. They thought they were so much better than you. They thought they were so much moral than you. They were so much cooler than you. You who just worked hard, played by the rules, settled down behind your picket fence, raised your family. And in 1969, two months after I was born, he gives this very famous speech and he gives that group of Americans a name. He calls them the great silent majority. The people who don't protest. Right. The people who don't want America to lose in Vietnam. Cliff Jackson is at Oxford University. He's on a Fulbright. Bill Clinton is there on a.

Leon Neyfakh (41:49)

The other one.

Rick Perlstein (41:50)

The other one. And Clinton is the guy who is friends with everyone. He's getting all the girls. He's a charmer. And Cliff, poor Cliff from Arkansas is just kind of grinding away. He has no friends.

Leon Neyfakh (42:02)

There's an amazing line, I think, in the James B. Stewart book that covers this area, talks about Cliff Jackson sitting in his room eating cold soup as if this was what he was doing while Clinton was out having fun.

Rick Perlstein (42:14)

It's funny. Richard Nixon, after he lost the presidential race, in my book I mentioned this, he went back to California and he would eat soup out of Campbell's soup cans. So that's a kind of tribal mark of an Orthogonian, I guess. But so for my dad and for a lot of people, I think Bill Clinton really represented the Franklins and they were the Orthogonians. And you see that over and over again in this story. Yeah, Ken Starr, you can see, is an Oregonian too. This guy went to Bible college. He's super nerdy. So that's, you know, you know, it doesn't matter how many welfare bills Bill Clinton, you know, passes. You know, he's, he's never going to be seen as someone who can be trusted with the highest office in the land.

Leon Neyfakh (42:54)

So how did the right wing in the 90s sort of adapt to this new. I don't just mean Clinton, but like political correctness as sort of the replacement for the Soviet Union.

Rick Perlstein (43:04)

They put that away. I mean, they traded in that for Bill Clinton. It was a better model.

Leon Neyfakh (43:08)

Okay, okay. So how did they adapt and what were their sort of the tactics that emerged from this period that we might still perhaps recognize today?

Rick Perlstein (43:15)

Well, I think right wing politics, as I've come to understand it from studying it for almost 25 years, really does see public life as a fight for civilizational stakes. You know, it really is politics as blood sport because it divides the world into good and evil. And, you know, and it's again, in its Christian right version, it's eschatology. You're literally fighting for the fate of the earth itself, you know, good guys versus bad guys. And, you know, so if you look at the history of right wing politics all through the period I studied 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and today, I think that a big part of the story of, as I've tried to explain it from the 50s to the present is people who have this radically conspiratorial, extremist view of the world and a very violent imagination about what should be permitted in politics have gone from the fringe to the center. And with Bill Clinton, with the first Democratic president in 12 years, following Ronald Reagan, following George Bush, following the maturation of the institutions of conservatism. Because a lot of these institutions that are involved with Bill Clinton kind of have their roots way back, but they really are kind of having their national kind of coming out party through Clinton. You see that process of the extreme moving closer and closer to the center kind of 60% of the way there.

Leon Neyfakh (44:48)

Right. I mean, I remember like in college seeing like LaRouche supporters in the street, and I saw them as being separate from the mainstream. You see this guy today with his van and his stickers that are have no distance between them and official, and.

Rick Perlstein (45:08)

Suddenly you have public officials trying to figure out a way to minimize him. So, like, from my experience, also coming from my biography, I've always been kind of fascinated with this other tribe in America, you know, the right. And one of the ways that manifested in my own intellectual biography is starting in the late 80s, when Rush Limbaugh became a national figure and I was driving around a truck for the family business. I would listen to him with rapt fascination, the same way I get up early on Sunday mornings when I was a kid and watch Jimmy Swaggart at Norial Roberts. I was just riveted, you know, and by the time it's, you know, the Clinton administration, 92, 93, 93, 94, 94, I moved to New York, get involved in journalism and become a magazine editor. And I'm beginning to listen to Rush Limbaugh again and checking in on this culture. And it became very palpable to me that the imaginations on the right were becoming very, very violent, very, very angry. And I remember specifically that in 1994, New Gingrich takes over Congress. He is probably the most vituperous of the Republican kind of leaders. And so they take over Congress in the 1994 election. And the rhetoric I'm hearing from him, which is about bureaucrats being evil, and the rhetoric I'm hearing about on talk radio, which is bureaucrats, government bureaucrats being jackbooted thugs, really had a family resemblance, right? And then you have someone like G. Gordon Liddy, the famous Watergate fellow, who was a right wing talk radio hero. And by the way, G. Gordon Liddy is this guy who literally brags about breaking the law for Richard Nixon, literally embraces Nazi aesthetics, and is becoming this talk radio hero by 1995. He says on the radio, if you shoot an ATF agent, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, be sure to use headshots because they're wearing body armor. And that became like a story for one or two days. I remember in April 19, 1995, which was the two year anniversary of April 19, 1993, which was the siege of the Branch Davidian compound led by Janet Rideau. The Oklahoma City bombing did not surprise me. I had already seen that sort of right wing maximalism being echoed in the corridors of power. And that sort of idea that we are facing, we meaning conservatives, enemies that are existential to our way of life, is central to, you know, you're saying, why does history happen? Right. It could not have happened. There's all these strange coincidences and these Rube Goldbergs and you have Clinton's character and you have Ken Starr's character, but it could not have happened unless you had a very organized substratum of American political culture that was organized around the idea that we cannot have a president like Bill Clinton.

Leon Neyfakh (48:04)

Right. So was it during those eight years of Clinton's presidency that the right wing fringe that was, you know, represented by the. By the G. Gordon Liddy's and the documentary the Clinton Chronicles, like, did that fringe move closer to the center of the right wing movement?

Rick Perlstein (48:20)

Well, this is where you bring another character into the story that I think is very important. It was moved closer to the center. And one of the institutions that moved it closer to the center was mainstream journalism. That's the character mainstream journalists, mainstream journalism. There's this kind of devil's bargain that's formed by this culture of journalists who kind of missed the story with Watergate, wanted to be the guys to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, had kind of accepted the idea, the myth that they're all liberals, so they have to bend over backwards to be fair to the right and who have to show that they are not liberal by taking down a so called liberal president. And some of that stuff was really, really irresponsible. And a lot of these people never would have been able to have become household names in the way they did, you know, had people in the New York Times not decided that they were basically willing to kind of launder Henry Smear, as long as it advanced this preconceived narrative that the Clintons. There's smoke, there must be fire. Right.

Leon Neyfakh (49:28)

And the calculus was sort of like, well, it doesn't matter if the motives of the person bringing me this story are facts are facts. Yeah. If it's true, it's true.

Rick Perlstein (49:37)

Right, right. A lot of it wasn't true. Right.

Leon Neyfakh (49:40)

How did those individuals in the. Well, I was gonna bring up the vast right wing conspiracy that Hillary Clinton is famous for condemning. I think by this point we can all sort of agree that there was, in fact, a right wing conspiracy. Vast. Perhaps it was an overstatement. I always think it's funny to call it a modest right wing conspiracy because.

Rick Perlstein (49:55)

Really only a handful, five or six people with fax machines. Isn't that what Ann Coulter said?

Leon Neyfakh (49:59)

Is that what she said?

Elise Hu (49:59)

Yes.

Leon Neyfakh (50:00)

How did those people sort of realize that the media could be used this way? And how did those two parties kind of combine or rather find each other?

Rick Perlstein (50:09)

This is the tragedy of it. Steve Bannon was able to pull the same scam off in 2015 and 2016. And he explained it best. He said, our strategy was to plant left and pivot right. So the idea is if we could just get something, anything, into the New York Times, then we could sort of like so kind of dominate the conversation that all of our kind of followers on the right would run with it. Right. So it was just like the idea that there must be something out there. And these are the people. These are the people who, you know, are looking for it. And of course, now we know that a lot of these investigations were being bankrolled by literally half a million dollars from Richard Mellon Scaife, this, you know, right wing billionaire who had investigators chasing around everywhere. And, you know, if this is the independent prosecutor problem, you know, if you have a guy whose job it is to find something about someone, they're probably going to find something. Right. And he had people like Ann Coulter on the outside, people like Justice Kavanaugh on the inside, you know, again, the Rube Goldberg contraption.

Leon Neyfakh (51:18)

Right.

Rick Perlstein (51:18)

You bring these people who are absolutely manically obsessed with saving civilization by taking this guy down by any means necessary, fair or foul. You know, you have an independent consul who's kind of like intersects with that attitude in a lot of ways, like.

Leon Neyfakh (51:34)

Formalizes it in a mandate.

Rick Perlstein (51:36)

That's right. And, you know, you put these things together with a guy, Bill Clinton, who cuts a lot of corners, and as I think you quite brilliantly and bravely and courageously and with absolute aplomb established with a pretty close to assertitude, may in fact have been a rapist. And history gets made.

Leon Neyfakh (51:58)

Yeah, that sounds like a good place to end.

Rick Perlstein (52:02)

Rick, thanks.

Leon Neyfakh (52:03)

Thank you so much for being here. All right, that was Rick Perlstein. Thanks for listening. Next week, we'll explore how Americans processed the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky when they learned about it. And separately, we'll talk about Hillary Clinton and the effect this chapter of her husband's presidency had on her political career. I'll be chatting with Emily Bazelon from the New York Times Magazine and Slate's own political gabfest, as well as New York Times critic at large Wesley Morris. We'll also have a conversation with Dan Savage of the Savage Love cast and Andy Zeisler of Bitch Media. Check this feed in one short week for all that this special episode of Slow Burn is produced by Andrew Parsons. It's editorial direction by Josh Levine and Gabriel Roth. Our researcher is Madeline Kaplan. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y. The Slow Burn tour was executive producer, produced and organized by Faith Smith and Kirsten Holtz. Big thanks to them for making it a whole lot of fun and also for making it run extremely smoothly. We'd also like to thank the NBC News archives for the footage you heard in the Web Hubble story. See you next week.

Elise Hu (53:23)

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Rick Perlstein (53:27)

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