The Hunting of a President

Thanks to a rather odd confluence of events, Bill Clinton has become this week’s Michael Moore, who was the previous week’s Ronald Reagan, who was the week-before-that’s Scott Peterson, who last month’s Michael Jackson, who was … oh, well, you get the picture. On the All Me All The Time studio commissary, there’s never a scarcity of new flavors of the week from which to choose.

Everywhere one turns these days, it seems as if there’s ol’ Bill, staring back. But, then, that’s the point, isn’t it? His memoirs hit the shelves of the nation’s book stores on Tuesday, and suddenly it’s “Showtime!”

There are very few real coincidences in life anymore, so it’s likely that the limited release of Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry’s documentary, The Hunting of the President,was timed to benefit from the publicity surrounding Clinton’s “My Life.” After all, it’s impossible for an independent or documentary film to afford the kind of publicity surrounding the autobiography of a controversial figure, especially one involved in a sex scandal.

All that’s missing from the current Clinton campaign is a souvenir tour jacket and all-access passes at the “Oprah“ taping. After admitting to being on a “variation of the South Beach Diet,” acknowledging that his favorite nasty nickname is “Slick Willy,” sitting on the front porch with a softball-hurling Dan Rather and shedding real tears, and, then conceding he accepted the offer of a blow job from Monica Lewinsky, “because he could,” what possibly could be left to say by the time next Monday rolls around?

None of the attention being paid to Clinton this week is likely to hurt the box-office chances for The Hunting of the President, which also is benefiting from the overflow of hype attached to Fahrenheit 9/11. Minus 15 pounds or so, the former President appeared to be his old groovy self at last Wednesday’s star-studded premiere in New York, as was the woman who paid most for his sins, Susan McDougal. (Hillary seems to have bounced back nicely from her initial shock and horror at her husband’s indiscretions.)

Although there’s a temptation right now to lump the book and movie together as a conjoined twin, they aren’t. For one thing, at 90 minutes, watching the movie requires far less time and energy than tackling the 950-page book, which already has been savaged in the New York Times.

The Hunting of the President can stand alone both as a cautionary political thriller and as an indictment of the media pawns who allowed themselves to be played like a fiddle, first by a handful of anti-Clinton good ol’ boys with too much time on their hands and, then, by a cabal of rich and powerful right-wing thugs. The President, of course, didn’t do himself any favors by succumbing to his basest instincts with a chubby intern in the anteroom of the Oval Office, or, for that, matter lying about it to his wife and constituency.

Feel free to count me among the millions of Americans not likely to be impressed enough by his mea culpa to actually lay down the $35 ($21 on the Internet, amazingly enough) to read his side of the story. I retain the suspicion that the lie he told about the most famous BJ in history (with apologies to the late Linda Lovelace) was only the tip of a very large iceberg. Still, it’s probably far more productive an exercise to focus our collective attentions on the even-more-dangerous lies being told to us, right now, by Clinton’s successor.

Although hardly without serious flaws, The Hunting of the President requires only a very small investment in time, and it tells a story that is at once extremely disturbing and compelling. Thomason may be one of the most famous of all FOBs (Friends of Bill) -- one of the creators of Clinton’s public image, after all -- and, as such, one of the people who the President turned to in the dark hours. He’s partisan, too be sure, but his documentary tells a story that should be required viewing in every university-level journalism-ethics and political-science course.

While the documentary clearly is friendly toward its protagonist, the filmmakers make no apologies for Clinton’s sexual antics. They’re most concerned with outlining the trajectory of "the 10-year campaign to destroy Bill Clinton," which started with a motley crew of Arkansas-based Clinton haters, known collectively as ARIA (Alliance for the Rebirth of an Independent America). Their allegations would provide the raw material for a far greater -- if not precisely, “vast” -- conspiracy of right-wing demagogues, who spoon-fed their rumors and gossip to a compliant media. Neither do the filmmakers ignore that probability that Clinton’s unchained libido added the fuel necessary to turn a brushfire into a raging inferno.

“The Republicans had owned the White House for 12 years, and thought they’d have it forever, while the Democrats would control one or both of the houses,” Thomason said. “So, they were stunned when Clinton actually won. The extreme right-wing faction of the Republicans wanted to make sure they’d get the White House back in four years.

“Hillary was on the right track when she said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, but it wasn’t really all that vast. By the end, it was vast, but not a conspiracy … everything was out in the open.”

The far right in this country has a lot of money riding on who’s living in the White House, and Thomason believes it has an inordinate amount of power within the Republican Party.

“I admire the right wing’s discipline,” he adds. “They’ll sacrifice their own. If Starr hadn’t been talked out of taking that job at Pepperdine, he’d probably be on the Supreme Court by now, and that’s what he really aspired to.

“Trying to get Democrats to band together to do something is like herding cats. You can’t get them organized long enough to do anything.”

Neither were Washington insiders pleased when Clinton suggested in a post-election speech that people who lived and worked in the nation’s capital should be there to serve the people, not themselves.

“It was a perfectly normal thing to say, but the ruling group took it personally,” Thomason recalled. “Then, he didn’t invite the right people to his first party. Little things built up, and they simply decided they didn’t want him there.

“He was not a part of the Washington in-crowd, and they weren’t ever going to accept him.”

The head of the company distributing The Hunting of the President has a slightly different opinion about the film’s primary message.

“It’s hardly a surprise to learn about a right-wing group advancing its cause or that powerful people have political agendas,” observed Paul Colichman, chairman of Regent Entertainment. “What’s shocking is that the media took hollow accusations, half-truths and outright lies, and vomited them into the living rooms of America, without checking a thing. Even when their own reporters were coming back from Little Rock, saying there was nothing to it, they were ignored by the news directors because it meant there was nothing there to put on their networks.

“Every time I watch the news now, I’m seeing it with a different eye.”

As is made abundantly clear in the documentary and Joe Conason and Gene Lyons’ book of the same title, aside from Clinton’s admission of infidelity, no criminal activity on his or his wife’s part has ever been proven. Yet, immense harm was done to their character and party, his administration, and the White House aspirations of his vice president. Again, there was plenty of blame to go around.

The thing that impressed Colichman about the story -- as pitched to him in mid-production by Thomason -- was McDougal’s willingness to go to jail, rather than agree to fabricate a connection between the Clintons, Whitewater and her crooked and increasingly demented ex-husband, James McDougal.

“Here was this very simple gal from Arkansas, who wasn’t a player on any level, but married a guy who was much older (by 15 years) than she was … not realizing he was mentally ill,” Colichman said “This sweet girl was the only person who behaved with any integrity throughout this entire process. That was heroic and invigorating to me.”

Instead, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and his cronies took out their pique on McDougal, by allowing the press to think she had clammed up because of some imaginary liaison with Clinton. Starr, who had his own reasons for going after the President, was able to convince a jury that she was just as culpable in the Whitewater scandal-in-a-teapot as her husband and Arkansas’ then-governor, Jim Guy Tucker. The whole case, at least until the infamous BJ was based on a fraudulent loan of $300,000, which is less than some studio executives spend on cigars each year.

Meanwhile, Starr and his billionaire benefactor, Richard Mellon Scaife, conspired to hold America hostage with their interminable and hugely expensive legal maneuvers.

Thomason, himself implicated in the White House “Travelgate” mini-scandal, had his own axes to grind on Starr’s head. Time wouldn’t allow for the story of his and Hillary Clintons’ exoneration to be told (“the movie would have been eight hours long,” he argues), but a concise report on how the press behaved can be found in the Columbia Journalism Review archives. Here, too, though, the White House fed the frenzy, by playing hardball with the investigators and, apparently, spying on its own staff.

That’s what makes The Hunting of the President such an odd duck, though. Almost everyone mentioned in the documentary -- from the White House on down to the honky-tonks of Little Rock -- seems to have been perfectly willing to play the political game as if it were a contact sport, and the public be damned.

Maybe it was forever thus in Washington. Ultimately, though, everyone in this crop of politicians came off looking like crooks, religious nuts and self-serving dorks, none of whom enjoyed a close familiarity with the truth.

Even the heroine of this story couldn’t avoid looking less than honest early on. After leaving her husband behind in Dogpatch, McDougal moved to Los Angeles and became personal assistant to Nancy Mehta, wife of the conductor Zubin Mehta and, from all accounts, something of Beverly Hills ditzoid. Mehta famously accused McDougal embezzling tens of thousands of dollars from the couple, but the case had more holes than Whitewater and was a big waste of time.

Still, the attention given the charges -- if not the acquittal -- painted McDougal as little more than a cheap hustler.

Ironically, long before she jumped in bed with Hollywood’s limousine liberals, on-line columnist Arianna Huffington ridiculed McDougal’s defense strategy by pointing to a connection she then considered to be laughably tenuous. Today, of course, it makes perfect sense:

“On June 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan created the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities and appointed both Scaife and Nancy Mehta to it. (Of course, he also appointed another 33 people, from opera singer Beverly Sills to the director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell. But why spoil the fun?)

“Indeed, (defense attorney Mark) Geragos is using Starr's name to play the conspiracy card as obsessively as Johnnie Cochran once played the race card to get O.J. Simpson off. Early in the trial, Judge Leslie Light ruled out all references to Starr and Whitewater in his courtroom, pungently adding that Whitewater was as relevant to this fraud case as a discussion on ‘whether giraffes have more of an odor than rhinoceroses.’ "

Some, now, probably would disagree with that analogy.

In Thomason’s opinion, the media haven’t been the same since Watergate, when investigative reporting became all the rage, and journalists suddenly started to make the kind of money necessary to send their kids to private schools. The success of Siskel & Ebert and The McLaughlin Group would further demonstrate that a journalist didn’t need to bear a passing resemblance to Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman to cash in on their knowledge, insight and well-honed crustiness, and, of course, most bore a closer resemblance to Elmer Fudd. The dam finally broke in the mid-’80s, when all-news channels began popping up like dandelions, and pundits were hired by the bucketful to fill the dead air between reports of kids falling in wells and celebrity trials. When the New York Times started quoting the National Inquirer, during the O.J. Simpson trial, all hell broke loose.

“You have to understand how naïve I was at the time of the first inauguration, and everyone else was, too,” allowed Thomason, who was coming off the success of his and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s Southern-based sitcoms, Evening Shade and Designing Women. “We thought we’d be welcomed with open arms, then, on Inauguration Day, the Washington Post ran an article titled, ‘Would all Arkansans please go home.’ The editors had decided they were tired of all the people from Arkansas, with their smiles and weepy eyes and (Clinton’s mother) Virginia Kelley, who’s always crying.

“It was at this point that my wife said, ‘This isn’t going to be any fun.’”

Clearly, no one had recalled the reception Jimmy Carter received from official Washington, when he arrived in 1977, and tried to bypass Congress by taking his message straight to the people.

Thomason has been pleasantly surprised by the reception he’s gotten on talk shows hosted by conservative commentators. Instead of the kind of belligerent debates that usually take place when unabashed liberals agree to appear on such shows, “they have been very nice to me … not nasty at all. Now, we’ve sparred a bit, but in a good-natured way, which is the way it ought to be.

“If Americans could just lower and soften their voices when discussing politics, we’d all be better off. If the film accomplishes anything, that would be really great.”

Thomason also thinks that, perhaps, with all the attention being paid to Michael Moore in the last two weeks, his documentary might getting something of a pass.

The Hunting of the President already is playing New York and Little Rock, and will open Friday in Washington D.C. It will roll out gradually from there, with stops in San Francisco on July 16, Los Angeles and Boston on July 23, and Chicago on August 13.

Thomason says he can’t wait to get back to the poodle-eat-poodle world of Hollywood.

“Washington is probably the nastiest town on Earth,” he observed. “If they could just get rid of some of the nasty people, and keep the monuments, it would be a very nice place.”

- by Leonard Klady