Taking the Hunt to the Hunters
Joe Conason and Gene Lyons discuss their new book, The Hunting of the President, with the editors
Part two of three

Joe Conason & Gene Lyons

Feb. 23, 2000 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- In part one of our interview with the authors of The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Conason (columnist for the New York Observer and Salon) and Gene Lyons (author of Fools for Scandal and free-lance journalist whose columns regularly appear in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) discussed how the book came about.  Our conversation continues.

You can order the book at barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com or borders.com

Editors: Why had Clinton become such an important target in 1992?

Joe Conason: The reason is the same one that originally had brought Clinton to Lee Atwater's attention, which is the first chapter of our book. It goes to who Clinton is and his role in the Democratic party, and what he portended for the Republicans as the leading Democratic presidential contender. Clinton was somebody who was able to draw together a big coalition and was able to convince voters that the Democrats could be trusted on a broad range of issues that the Republicans had dominated for many years. Clinton had some of the very qualities that the Republicans had cherished in Ronald Reagan in that sense -- and that made them fear him tremendously.

Gene Lyons: It was both because of who he was in the demographic sense and what he was as a political talent. My take on it is that ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the "Solid South" was doomed for the Democrats and it turned into a Solid Republican South. By splitting the South, Clinton in his person and his policies put the presidency back in play in a way that it hadn't been before.

Conason: And Atwater anticipated that. As we explain in the beginning of the book, the GOP had decided as early as 1989 that they wanted to either cripple or destroy Clinton because otherwise Bush was in serious jeopardy.

Lyons: And I might add too that in our view some of this is a great deal more visceral than the how-to of politics. People ask me, "Why do they detest Clinton so much? Why do they hate him so much? What is it about him that makes them loathe him so?" My answer is that you need to start with who else they hate, because he became for some of these people, many of whom had ties not only with the Christian right but with the Klan -- literally -- the incarnation of everything that violated the sanctity of their world view.

Editors: You mean people like "Justice" Jim Johnson?

Lyons: Yes. Clinton became the incarnation of everything they though they'd been fighting all their lives.

Conason: There's a chapter in the book that's largely about Justice Jim, who is sort of the purest expression of Clinton hatred. He is somebody who got into this, I believe, strictly for ideological as well as personal motives -- and not for personal profit in the way some of the other characters did. Johnson saw Clinton as the expression of everything that had been taken away from him, the embodiment of the "New South." Clinton's relations with the black community, his ability as a leader in the Arkansas Democratic community to continually beat the forces that Johnson represented at the polls -- that made him a target. And for them, Clinton's election to the Presidency was their worst possible nightmare.

Lyons: It took Arkansas Republicans 25 years to do this arithmetic: in this state, that has roughly an 18% black vote in most Presidential elections, you cannot write off 17 ½ of that 18% and win a statewide election, because you cannot get a majority. To do that, you'd have to win 65% of the white people with a racist campaign -- and it cannot be done. It took them 25 years to figure that out, and the more people like Clinton beat them, the more their hatred mounted. They also felt his very real flaws -- which we discuss pretty bluntly in the book -- sort of played into that. They saw him as the avatar and symbol of everything that--

Conason: --that they hated about the baby boom generation.

Lyons: Degraded and corrupt. We have a terrific discussion with Betsey Wright in the book about exactly what it meant to elect someone that was from his generation, the generation of antiwar protest, so-called free sex -- sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.

Editors: As if that isn't well practiced in Washington! (laughter)

Conason: There's a very heavy element of hypocrisy surrounding this which we get into from the very beginning. In fact, Lee Atwater was sex and rock'n'roll on the Republican side -- I don't know about drugs, but he was well known for his marital infidelity at the same time that he was planning to use that issue to destroy Clinton in the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign.

Editors: That political hypocrisy doesn't bother me as much as that of Henry Hyde sitting as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Lyons: Or Newt Gingrich. You do have to wonder how these guys manage to shave themselves in the morning.

Editors: Did you approach the "who is the chicken, who is the egg" question in the relationship between Hyde and Starr?

Conason: Our book ends on the day that Monica Lewinsky is unveiled. We address the impeachment in the afterward pretty briefly, but our book more or less concludes at the moment that Monica appears in public. So we don't get into the impeachment in detail. That's one of the things that's very different between our book and Toobin's. His book is at least 75% focused on the events after Monica appears.

Lyons: Where ours is about 80 percent --

Conason: 80 to 90% about everything that came way before that.

Lyons: We feel Toobin did a very interesting study of the tip of the iceberg, and our book shows the rest of it.

Editors: Our sense is that Toobin is now busy protecting himself among his sources and colleagues and that the real thrust of the book is diminished because he keeps slamming Clinton at the same time.

Conason: I think he's probably perfectly sincere in those feelings. You can actually feel that Clinton deserves to be harshly criticized and also think that there was a nefarious conspiracy to get him, and I think that's probably how Jeff really feels. My feeling is that Jeff Toobin is born and bred in that journalistic establishment and he was courageous to depart from their consensus as much as he has. He's taken a lot of heat for it. I admire his courage in doing that in this book, and if he sometimes might seem to be backtracking or equivocating now in some people's eyes, the fundamental thing to keep in mind is that he was brave enough to do this in the first place.

Editors: I agree, but I do think that it's not good to be equivocating and backtracking. I wish you had written something after the Lewinsky scandal, because...

Conason: Well we did write a few things. They're just not in our book! (laughter)

Editors: Well, you need another book!

Lyons: We addressed many of the issues pretty pungently in the preface and in the conclusion. We do address the broad issues and we have some strong things to say. We didn't flyspeck the events in the kind of detail Toobin did for one reason. You have to realize what would happen if I called the Office of Independent Counsel and asked them for an interview -- the same thing that happened every time I called them: they never had any comment.

Conason: If we had tried to do that, our book would probably not be ready for another year. Jeff started on his book about the same time that we did, and I think it's actually good that we took a different focus. Also, I think Jeff, as a legal reporter and a lawyer -- and a very good lawyer -- was in a better position to get inside the Office of Independent Counsel. Don't forget, he was a staff member of the earlier Independent Counsel. And he's very well connected in the legal world. I think that allowed him to get inside of Starr's operation in a way that, as Gene points out, we simply could not hope to do.

Tomorrow: setting the jaws of the trap -- and focusing on the role of the press.