The Reckless and the Stupid

Americans trying to get their bearings thought of Richard Nixon and traced his descent from the charge of obstructing justice to the threat of impeachment, and then to the morning of his maudlin-defiant resignation. Or, imagining a precedent for the origins of the current mess, they went back to Bill Clinton's Rose Garden hero of long ago, John Kennedy, the martyred Ur-boomer who may have been Clinton's role model in obdurately reckless sex.

But maybe the third protagonist of the '60s should be conjured up. Until the middle of last week, I had been working on the conceit that Bill Clinton is Lyndon Johnson Without Tears--both Clinton and Johnson being big-hearted, triple-slick Southern boys, and mama's boys, with a genius for politics, and a bardic gift for storytelling, and huge egos and insecurities interbraided, and minds aggressively intelligent, instinctive, fiercely absorptive, and with a love of people, and a general incapacity to tell the truth. Or anyway (let's be nice) a way of thinking of the truth as only one of life's creative possibilities.

Lyndon Without Tears. Up to the great train wreck, Clinton's presidential career had been astonishingly lucky and frictionless. Now, presumably, there are tears enough, and much gnashing of teeth up in the family quarters. Americans try to imagine what Hillary Clinton is saying to her husband; some envision the air full of flying lamps. Or maybe she comforts him?

After Lyndon Johnson's death in 1973, a biographer hesitantly asked Lady Bird Johnson how she reacted to Lyndon's many extramarital love affairs. With that heroically relentless smile of hers, Lady Bird replied that Lyndon loved people and half the people on earth are women, so it seemed natural that he would love them!

Should we explain Bill Clinton that way? Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson were different in this: L.B.J. was unmistakably, with all his faults, a grownup man; his downfall--brought on when his Great Society got lost in the war he would not or could not escape--had a tragic size and weight. Clinton remains a very bright End of History boy-man. There is something trivial and unnecessary in his travails, and even if they lead to his downfall, they will seem sordidly silly.

Is character destiny? The President's character, at least in this compartment of his life, seems a hybrid of the Arkansas horndog and the Runaway Bunny. The horndog part is self-explanatory. The Runaway Bunny, you will remember, tests the limits of his independence by toddling off, as two-year-olds will; his mommy always comes after him and scoops him up in her snuggles. He is testing her. Who is the mommy being tested in this latest envelope-pushing behavior by Virginia Kelley's Boys Nation golden boy? Poor Hillary Clinton? The United States of America? Will America forgive Billy Blythe again and embrace him with those big 60% hugs of approval? The psychiatrist in us suspects that the President of the United States may have a little trouble being a grownup. W.H. Auden wrote: "In front maturity as he ascended/ Retired like a horizon from the child."