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"Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977"
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"Hitler's Niece"
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[08/25/99]

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[08/25/99]

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Is it true? Is it fiction? It doesn't seem to matter, not to William Morrow & Co. or, for that matter, to us: "Bill and Hillary: The Marriage" just hit No. 4 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

After all, the Clintons' marriage -- the longest, slowest, most painful car crash in marital history -- is still careening off the road, its victims still coughing up blood on the shoulder. And we can't help but rubberneck.

And how gruesome the carnage! President Clinton, according to Andersen, is a voracious, disturbed sexual predator whose appetites make Hugh Hefner look like a castrato. Hillary, his enabler, comes across as a shrew whose capacity for denial is equaled only by the pain she's suffered as a result of the fine print in her Faustian marriage contract.

Accurately or not, Andersen presents himself as the guy holding a glass to the wall of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. "'You stupid, stupid, stupid bastard,'" he has Hillary saying to Bill after he finally confesses that the splatter on Monica's Gap dress might possibly contain his deoxyribonucleic acid:

Her words, delivered at the shrill, ear-splitting level that had become familiar to White House personnel over the years, ricocheted down the corridor. "My God, Bill, how could you risk everything for that?"

But it was not in the nature of Bill Clinton to remain silent in the face of his wife's fury. He fought back, loudly arguing, as he would to the grand jury, that he had not slept with Monica Lewinsky and therefore had not committed adultery. What he did with Monica Lewinsky -- including fellatio, fondling, and phone sex -- was not, by Clinton's narrow definition, sexual activity. "I did not lie to you about that!" he could be heard shouting through the door. "I said I didn't have sex with that woman, and I didn't!"

The screaming continued for a few moments, and then seemed to end as abruptly as it had begun. Spent emotionally and physically, Hillary sank back onto the bed. "How," she asked numbly, "are we going to tell Chelsea?"

This passage, a particularly juicy one, is good, solid cheese, ripe for a miniseries starring Tim Matheson and Judith Light. But as historical fact, of course, it's highly dubious. Andersen, who had the help of such Kennedy insiders as Ted Sorenson and Pierre Salinger for his "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage" and the tacit participation of Katharine Hepburn for his two books on her, enjoyed no such luxuries this time around. He had to take "a completely different approach," he admitted in an interview with Salon Books, since he "had to protect the confidentiality of the people who are still in the Clintons' inner circle."

But let's say Andersen was able to get eavesdropping Secret Service agents to drop a dime on their employers -- a questionable, though by no means impossible, scenario. How can he know when Hillary "sank back onto the bed"? And how does he know that she was "spent emotionally and physically"?

He doesn't. He's pushing along the narrative using fabricated details that the much-maligned Bob Woodward -- the ultimate bestselling, fly-on-the-D.C.-wall author -- would never resort to. And when he's recounting the president's 52nd birthday wish, Jackie O.'s phone conversations with Hillary or the fact that while an 8-year-old Bill Clinton marched off to get himself baptized, his mom and stepfather "were sleeping off their hangovers," Andersen is doing so without the cooperation of the very people he puts on the couch. Thus, the tales he presents as "facts" have to be greeted with a degree of doubt.

Ironically -- speaking of the Washington Post's fair-haired boy -- Woodward's recent tome, "Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate," actually enhances the credibility of Andersen's lurid exposé. In Woodward's analysis of the Jerry Springer-comes-to-the-White House scandal, he describes Clinton attorney Bob Bennett vetting a list of "15 to 20 women who might be suspected Clinton girlfriends." Woodward even names a few of them, adding even more partners to our president's jam-packed dance card. He describes Bennett as having "smoked out the real liability on the list -- Marilyn Jo Jenkins, a beautiful marketing executive whom Clinton had known for more than a decade."

Next page | Woman named as former Clinton squeeze cries foul