From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Love Tour
When you hear Bill Clinton tell it, you almost want to weep over his story.
Bill Clinton's wife may have forced him to sleep on the couch in the White House, but the publicists surrounding his new autobiography are considerably more indulgent. Booksellers, TV and Internet interviewers have fashioned a big, comfortable recliner to accommodate the former president.
In its weekly e-mail letter, Washington's Politics & Prose bookstore gushed like a breathless adolescent. "Who are these people that will wait in a midnight ticket line?" it asked. "The good-natured line was comprised of people of all ages, and they 'looked like America'. . . .Our conclusion: President Clinton is as popular as Harry Potter."
It is understandable that a retailer would think kindly of someone who moves 1,000 copies of a 957-page book ($35) in three-quarters of an hour. And no one expects a veteran huckster, such as Knopf's Sonny Mehta, to be anything other than upbeat. But what about the legion of media inquisitors? Most reviewers have found "My Life" to be fatuous, disorganized, poorly written and boring--"sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull" in the famous formulation of the New York Times--but the reception in TV land has been strikingly different.
It begins, and to some degree ends, with Dan Rather. One evening last week the veteran CBS news reader and co-author of "The Camera Never Blinks" sat down with Bill Clinton for some prime-time conversation about his memoir. Whereupon Mr. Rather, who famously challenged Richard Nixon at press conferences and thinks of himself not as an anchorman but a reporter, proceeded to lob a series of empathetic questions in Mr. Clinton's direction. The former president, no slouch in the business of hitting softballs out of the stadium, responded accordingly. There were no hostile inquiries, no skeptical asides, no follow-up questions, not even polite sarcasm.
What happened? Interviewed a few days later by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Mr. Rather, with evident pride, recounted the fact that he had not only enjoyed some uncommon luck in garnering Mr. Clinton's first televised interview but had the pleasure of his company for "about four hours, maybe more than four hours, on videotape." From Mr. Rather's standpoint, this was not an opportunity to examine Mr. Clinton on behalf of the viewing public but a therapeutic session with a troubled ex-president.
To be sure, Mr. Rather was "uncomfortable" discussing Monica Lewinsky with her onetime admirer, and "I think he was uncomfortable" as well. But--and here is the point--"he seemed relaxed....It's clear that Bill Clinton is much more relaxed in general now than he ever was as president, for understandable reasons. The burden of the presidency is a burden."
I, too, am relieved that Bill Clinton is relaxed. But are TV interviews designed to illuminate or to assist their subjects in achieving tranquility? The answer is obvious. Some may believe that there was once a golden age of broadcast journalism when intrepid reporters asked searching questions and demanded cogent answers; but like most golden ages, this one is mostly mythology. Edward R. Murrow was considerably more adept at trading pleasantries with Marilyn Monroe in her living room than at confronting Joe McCarthy on camera, and Walter Cronkite's famous seaside interview with John F. Kennedy is largely a showcase for Kennedy's good looks and Mr. Cronkite's flattery.
Dan Rather's awkward, herky-jerky manner is particularly ill-suited to the therapeutic style, but no different in substance from the work of distinguished colleagues. CNN's Larry King, who traded compliments with Bill Clinton last evening, is famously averse to interrogating eminent guests, and "Today"'s Katie Couric ("Do you feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky?") is similarly disinclined when seated beside a fellow progressive.
Charles Gibson, of ABC's "Good Morning America," looked suitably distressed when raising the painful subject of Mr. Clinton's "mistakes" but swiftly transformed Mr. Clinton's straight-backed chair into an analyst's couch. Discussing the "parallel life" that a "wigged-out" president pursued with Miss Lewinsky--and Miss Flowers and Mrs. Willey and Miss Jones, etc.--Mr. Gibson reached skyward for a literary metaphor: Is that parallel life, he inquired, "in any way a fatal flaw of Shakespearean dimensions?"
Of course not, replied Mr. Clinton, since "all Shakespearean tragedies lead to death, and in many cases, the king, because of his personal flaws, abuses his power. The one problem I didn't have was abuse of power." Mr. Gibson nodded thoughtfully, leaning gently toward the king, no doubt wondering what the response might have been if he had asked about a flaw of Orwellian dimensions or (more appropriate to his guest) of Rabelaisian dimensions.
Which leads us, with the inescapable certainty of Greek comedy, to Oprah Winfrey. You read a lot about the Oprahfication of American culture--the exaltation of victimhood, the no-fault moral universe, the abuse of public discourse for private therapy--and it pays to witness the phenomenon at Ground Zero. No one in American political life has claimed that mantle of victimhood, or reaped the benefits of fake sincerity, with as much success as Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey is the national laureate of pop therapy.
Sitting before a rapt audience of thirtysomethings, the former president recounted the childhood horrors of a negative body image and a drunken stepfather and the grown-up challenges of brutal Republicans and journalists who live to hurt politicians' feelings. Oprah was, at all times, duly sympathetic and handled the subject of adultery with considerable skill: Scolding her guest with affectionate concern, she drew from her audience laughter and applause simultaneously. This enabled Mr. Clinton to smile in his trademark boyish fashion and pledge that marathon counseling had made him a better man, better husband, better father, better president and better guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
Observing the spectacle, I was struck by a vision of, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt, poised in his wheelchair beside Oprah, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, sitting ramrod-straight, opening up about their difficult childhoods, the deaths of their children and their complicated marriages, eliciting warmhearted sighs from the studio audience. Then I imagined, say, George W. Bush, publishing his memoirs for $10 million, swapping friendly sentences with Katie and Charlie, comforting Dan Rather by appearing relaxed, and hypnotizing Oprah with stories of drinking, 9/11 and redemption.
And then I woke up.
Mr. Terzian is a Washington-based columnist for the Providence Journal.
