I'll be down in Washington this week to talk about my new book, Mirage , about the adventures and misadventures of the French scientists who founded Egyptology. While poking around in the temples and pyramids, these atheist scholar-explorers were participating in another, long-ago failed effort to bring democracy to the Islamic world by violent force. Their experience turns Marx's observation that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, on its head: Napoleon and his "living encyclopedia" in Egypt were much more farcical than the unremitting tragedy of Bush II's Iraq war.
Returning to D.C. always brings back memories of my happy years there during the '90s when I made lots of friends and met the man I ended up marrying. It also reminds me why I don't miss living there now: the self-righteous and supposedly apolitical establishment that rules the nation's capitol.
On this trip across the beltway, I am more aware of these folks than usual because of a fresh encounter. A few weeks back The Washington Post asked me to write an essay about a new book on the Clinton marriage, For Love of Politics. (Note: I had a good feeling about the book right away because that's my husband's photograph of Bill and Hill on the cover, and for that reason alone, it is worth checking out in a Barnes and Noble aisle, if not actually buying.)
You can read the full essay here, but in short, I said I didn't believe the Clintons were married "For Love of Politics" alone, and that, in fact, I believed Hillary Clinton actually loved her faithless man. I based this on having met and interviewed both of them, in person, on various occasions, and having had to watch them in public over a period of years. Women's instinct, in other words.
Not terribly surprised was I to note that before that day's paper had even been opened by the average Washingtonian, (wait, make that the average New Yorker, the average Washingtonian has already jogged around the Mall and donned a uniform before the average New Yorker has smelled a cup of coffee) an apparently insomniac internet goon named Tim Graham had penned a screed dissing The Washington Post for having me review the book. Graham is the lifetime College Republican running "Media Research Center," one of the most persistent groups to express shock and awe over what one of the newsweekly wags called my "quote of the century." Those unfamiliar with my sarcastic remark need only google my name and the word blowjob.
I said it (back in 1998, but a good quote has eternal life) because I thought it was high time for someone to tweak the white, middle-aged beltway gang taking Clinton to task for sexual harassment. These men had neither the personal experience nor the credentials to know sexual harassment when they saw it, nor to give a good goddamn about it if they did. The insidious use of sexual harassment laws to bring down a president for his pro-female politics was the context in which I spoke.
Within days of my review of her book, author Sally Bedell Smith herself had taken up the trolls' cry, smashing one of my naïve assumptions about best-selling authors, which is that they are above ad hominem attacks on reviewers. Before turning to the evergreen (in terms of marketability) subject of the Clinton marital mysteries, Smith, a member in good standing of the Washington establishment, made a handsome living with major books about pop/haute figures like Princess Di and Pam Harriman. In her online Post discussion, she slagged me as "discredited" and "unprofessional" and repeated the absolute lie that I "tried to have sex with" Bill Clinton.
For the record, Ms. Smith, anyone who actually tried to have sex with Bill Clinton probably succeeded.
Besides the sanctimony, what really gets me about Smith and these D.C. establishment women is that they are of the age and experience, being the first females in their fields, to have personally known sexual harassment. They know the difference between being a victim of sexual harassment and flashing a thong at the boss. Yet not a single one of them stood up to explain that during Clinton's impeachment, nor, to my knowledge, since. These profiles in courage have always let Tim Russert and Tucker Carlson control the discourse, while they wait in the green room for their chance to chat on national TV with the boys.
On this visit to Dream City, I'll be happy to debate Sally Bedell Smith or any of the Washington establishment babes on what sexual harassment really is, and what's really "unprofessional" for women of my generation to talk about in a national politics that's been hijacked by extreme conservatives who could care less about women's rights in the workplace -- or anywhere else for that matter.
I'll be speaking at Olssons in DuPont Circle, Thursday. Come on by. To read more about my book, check out the Powells essay here.
Now that's rich. That someone who makes their living off of prurient gossip dressed up as "biography" is laughable at best.
That someone who is supposedly intelligent and clever enough to work their way around the worlds of publishing and politics cannot differentiate between cruel irony and schoolgirl crushes is pathetic.
Sally Bedell Smith ought to be grateful that someone with Burleigh's clear eyed, unobjective judgement would even waste her time reviewing a book that I MIGHT pick up at the sale rack at The Strand. In reality, I have so many more important things to read than someone re hashing for the umpteenth time the Clintons' marriage.
Just for the record, Nina, I tried & though Bill was wonderfully charming, flattered & polite about it, I couldn't even get to first base! Despite accusations of being a sex addict it seems Bill draws the line at guys. Seems kinda picky for an addict to me, but there you have it.
Seriously though, the point you raise about the difference between sexual harrassment & a sexual dalliance with a flirtatious woman, is well made. Those who wilfully blur the distinction between what happened to Anita Hill & Monica Lewinsky do so on the basis of partisanship or personal animus. In doing so they also devalue & trivialise the experience of the countless women who continue to suffer genuine sexual harrassment in the workplace.
(PS Though I DID shake Bill's hand once, I actually restrained myself from hitting on him.)
"In an interview, Burleigh, now a New York freelancer, said she in no way felt harassed or pressured by the president but that it was `not unusual for women' to swoon over him. What is unusual, for a journalist, is Burleigh's sexually charged declaration of support for Clinton. `I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal,' she said."
[According to Burleigh, the unexpurgated quote was: "I'd be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."]
"...When I got up and shook his hand at the end of the game, his eyes wandered over my bike-wrecked, naked legs. And slowly it dawned on me as I walked away: He found me attractive.
No doubt the President's lawyers and spin doctors would say I wishfully imagined that long, appreciative look, just as all those other women have fantasized their more explicitly sexual encounters with Clinton. But we all know when we're being ogled. The weird thing was that I didn't mind. There was a time when the hormones of indignant feminism raged in my veins. An open gaze like that, at least from a man of lesser stature, would have annoyed me. But that evening, I had the opposite reaction. I felt incandescent. It was riveting to know that the President had appreciated my legs, scarred as they were. If he had asked me to continue the game of hearts back in his room at the Jasper Holiday Inn, I would have been happy to go there and see what happened. At the time, it seemed quite possible. It took several hours and a few drinks in the steaming and now somewhat romantic Arkansas night to shake the intoxicated state in whicih I had been quite willing to let myself be ravished by the President, should he have but asked..."
In her review Burleigh didn't even come to grips with the enormous consequences of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. As one close friend of the Clintons' described it to me, "It was the [oral sex] that changed history...It is like a very very bright light you can't look at. There is no doubt that if Bill Clinton had kept his zipper up north instead of down south, Al Gore would have been elected president. That is a big deal."
Burleigh offers no basis for her opinions about Hillary's love for Bill, or for her dismissal of the fact, repeated over and over to me by those close to the Clintons, that a love of politics has been the essential glue keeping their turbulent marriage together. As Senator Pat Moynihan used to say, "you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts." My book is a textured portrait of the Clintons strengthened by the cumulative power of facts.
For the complete Washington Post web chat, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/10/30/DI2007103001122.html
Washington, D.C.: What did you think of the review of your book that ran the Post?
Sally Bedell Smith: I was quite stunned that the Post assigned someone to review my book who had so discredited herself when it comes to the Clintons. Nearly a decade ago Nina Burleigh wrote that while she was a reporter for TIME magazine in the early 90s she had been sexually aroused by what she described as Bill Clinton's ogling of her during a game of cards. She said that if he had asked her to his motel room she would have been "quite willing to let myself be ravished by the President." She followed up that unprofessional confession by telling a reporter that she would be "happy to give [Bill Clinton oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Her comments were the talk of Washington, and one of her sharpest critics was my friend, the late Marjorie Williams, to whom I dedicated my book. As Marjorie wrote in Slate, "It's one thing to use your sex, as female journalists are wise to do in covering the heavily male culture of politics. It's another to try to have sex with your subjects."