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Can This Marriage Be Saved?
by Gil Troy Over a decade ago, Tom Wolfe complained that it was getting harder and harder to write credible fiction in America - because the truth was becoming wackier and wackier. Although this complaint predated the Clintons’ national campaign debut in 1992, Hillary and Bill Clinton epitomize Wolfe’s lament.
Who would believe a novelist who had a philandering candidate dodge well-documented charges of adultery simply by appearing with his wife on a 60 Minutes type show after the Super Bowl? Who would believe a novelist who had a philandering president’s unconsummated, excruciating, more-talk-than-action dalliance with a young intern paralyze the nation for over a year and result in impeachment? Who would believe a novelist who had the wronged wife parlay that humiliation into an independent bid for the United States Senate from a state where she had never lived? In trying to explain how Bill and Hillary Clinton’s own peculiar psychodrama became a national sociodrama, it is all too easy to get bogged down in the idiosyncrasies of our president and first lady. Both are fascinating and novelistic characters. He is a man of Falstaffian appetites, Machiavellian instincts, and Svengali-like charms. She is a woman of Macbethian ambition, Edith Bunker-like forbearance, and her own, Evita-like appeal. Just what made him tick? Just what was she thinking? Why couldn’t he stop roaming? Why did she put up with it? Questions like these will bewilder historians - and novelists - for decades to come. Yet focusing on the Clintons, as compelling as they are, tells only half the story. We need to understand Americans’ peculiar and longstanding obsession with the presidential couple to understand how Bill Clinton ended up getting elected, reelected, exposed and impeached; how Hillary Clinton ended up getting glorified, demonized, humiliated, and, finally, liberated. The story, then, of Hillary’s Senate run, of Bill’s Lewinsky affair, of much of the goings on of the last eight years, does not begin in Arkansas where the Clintons lived or in Yale where they first met. Rather, the broader phenomenon that swept the Clintons up - and all but consumed them - begins half a century ago, with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. During the Roosevelts’ extraordinary White House tenure, the president and his wife came to dominate national politics as never before. From 1933 to 1945, separately and together, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt challenged Americans’ assumptions about government, marriage, and society. By inserting the federal government into the American home, Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized both. By publicly crusading to make Franklin’s New Deal as progressive as possible, Eleanor Roosevelt made the First Lady a formidable presence in Washington. Critics and fans viewed the Roosevelt marriage as a close partnership. One 1944 handbill attacking both Roosevelts had the president allegedly saying to the missus: "You kiss the Negroes and I’ll kiss the Jews and we’ll stay in the White House as long as we choose." Most Americans did not see just how strained the marriage was, or just how different the two Roosevelts were: he was ebullient, flirtatious, wily, dilettantish, and ruthlessly pragmatic; she was insecure, starchy, awkward, direct, conscientious, and passionately idealistic. Tellingly, perceptions ruled. The Roosevelts shifted the center of American political gravity decisively toward the White House. As a result, the idea of the presidential couple as a construct began to emerge. Politicians, reporters and citizens began looking at the president and his wife as a team. Since that time, with increasing intensity, Americans have treated the president” s private life as public property - and presidents have felt compelled to acquiesce. Americans have become obsessed with both Mr. and Mrs. President, for better and for worse.
Modern American politics has become a family business. It seems that every successful campaign requires brochures picturing the candidate’s happy home. For years politicians have publicized the personal to establish an image and to score political points. The history of the presidential couples shows that in an information age with a bureaucratic government, such political identity-building is essential. With diminished parties, omnipresent media, and a bankrupt government, presidents lead as much through exhortation as legislation, as much through personal example as political action. Presidential couples are cultural leaders weaving together a national fantasy. The American people want to watch a presidential love story. The presidential spouse needs to symbolize the warm, traditional marriage the president has established despite working around-the-clock to get elected, and give a warm-hearted patina to a welfare state that has grown increasingly complex, bureaucratic and impersonal. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the role of the federal government in Americans’ daily lives, the presidency has become ever more powerful and more symbolically significant in American life. With the rise of the national media, the president has become the nation’s celebrity-in-chief as well. As the most famous man in America, his wife, his daughter, even his cat and dog, become role models for the nation. This national obsession with the democratically elected king-and-queen of the moment is peculiarly American. Although the Founding Fathers valued republican simplicity, they expected the president of the United States to be a character "preeminent for ability and virtue." In the 19th century, Henry James noted that the United States was a young country with "no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles." Since then, the country has acquired more nationalizing influences, more anchors, but Americans today still look to the presidential couple for reassurance, for stability, for political inspiration, and, often, for moral instruction. The intellectual, cultural, social, political, and technological revolutions of the twentieth century further shaped this concern. The Freudian revolution turned the American psyche inside out, shifting the spotlight from the politician’s public persona to one’s innermost self. Reporters such as Gail Sheehy made a career out of psychoanalyzing candidates, often ignoring their policies while searching for the one powerful tidbit that illuminated the real man behind the campaigning facade. Traditionalists like George Bush recoiled at all these attempts to put him "down on the couch." The feminist revolution turned the American family and the American marriage model upside down, championing egalitarianism where hierarchy had once reigned. All of a sudden, the family was deemed "dysfunctional" and father did not "know best." Gerald Ford’s four children scored points in the 1970s by appearing "normal," meaning hipper and wilder than "Plastic Pat" Nixon’s goody-two-shoes daughters. Similarly, the middle class revolution upended the traditional class structure, undermining authority with its own brand of egalitarianism and, often, cynicism. Politicians now had to learn how to "relate to" an increasingly unruly, suspicious, independent, disengaged, and world-weary citizenry. Bill Clinton was a master at this, refusing to tax the public with ambitious Great Society type programs, but entertaining Americans shamelessly, performing a sax solo on the late night talk show circuit in 1992, taping a video mocking himself as a lame duck, stay-at-home president eight years later. The New Deal had revolutionized the Founders’ careful scheme in many ways, expanding the federal government at the expense of the states and giving the president the upper hand vis a vis Congress. Ultimately, this phenomenon of the presidential couple is a stepchild of the technological revolution. The rise of mass media, especially television, spawned a new political culture. Without the new image-driven politics of personality and celebrity, the current obsession with presidential couples is unfathomable.
Furthermore, the mass media intensified each of the aforementioned upheavals. The media’s tawdry melodramas spread the Freudian gospel. The media’s vulgar egalitarianism and skeptical anti-establishmentarianism toppled traditional structures at home and on the street. America’s 60 Minutes culture of confrontation and expose invalidated the traditional scripts of parents and presidents. When Hillary Clinton asked for a "zone of privacy," when Bill Clinton condemned the "politics of personal destruction," both were reacting to the media scandal-mongering that fed the many investigations that tortured this First Couple. First radio, then television, embedded the American presidency in the center of the political universe, at least in popular terms. The focus on the president as celebrity-in-chief, and the concentration on his actual and official families is, alas, a double-edged sword. It both aggrandizes and trivializes the president — and his family. On one hand, it exaggerates the significance of America’s chief executive; our cult of the presidency has never been so strong. Today’s president not only dominates American politics, he defines his era socially, culturally, and ideologically. Bill Clinton looms large over America’s political culture, and its popular culture. He is an American icon, imitated by Hollywood actors starring as "the president" in movies and in prime time shows like The West Wing; mimicked by CEOs fighting their own particular battles - Microsoft’s Bill Gates, like Bill Clinton, demonstrated great facility with language, and a rather elusive relationship with the truth, when called to testify before a Court of Law. At the same time, in a culture worshiping the famous, which feeds on the most trivial tidbits about what they eat, where they travel, whether they wear boxers or briefs, presidents have also been diminished, shoved off the pedestal and battered by crusading journalists, partisan legislators, and special prosecutors. Bill Clinton is also a national joke, the cheap and easy punch line for late night comedians and vulgar schoolchildren. The result is a manic depressive presidency, where the presidency is wired into the bipolar hysteria of the modern American media world, and the president is only as good as his latest headline. In this unstable world, the First Lady is supposed to offer some ballast, although Hillary Clinton more often functioned as a fellow target. The state of modern marriage is equally bipolar. Our culture simultaneously denigrates marriage and romanticizes it. Our therapists tells us that marriage is "work"; while Hollywood feeds our wildest fantasies about love at first sight. Our ambivalence feeds both a multi-billion-dollar wedding industry, which turns thousands of American brides each month into fairy tale princesses - as long as they or their grooms cough up the bucks - and an equally thriving divorce industry, which turns thousands of all-American couples each month into vicious attack dogs - as long as they have some bucks to fight over. In the United States today, the presidency and marriage are undergoing similar crises - both are suffering from a loss of authority, of credibility. Modern American culture is hooked on cynicism. We are addicted to debunking, to doubting, to sneering. We need to give ourselves and our leaders a break. Some distance, some secrecy, and some appearances can be constructive. Just as husbands and wives choose to build useful fictions about each other and about their relationships, so too can citizens choose to build useful fictions about their leaders and their government. A nation needs its myths and its icons. A step toward a culture of appearances, away from the culture of the expose, would be a welcome one. Journalists, historians, and citizens need to revel in the good rather than simply wallowing in the bad. The current cynicism is wrong. Not every president "did it" in the White House. Some were committed family men; others were not. Some were great; others were not - the same with our contemporary leaders. We need to "see heroes," as Jackie Kennedy hoped we would when she eulogized her martyred husband. This does not mean the press has to be defanged; rather, reporters simply need to learn some sense of proportion. Not every governmental miscue deserves a headline; not every scandal is Watergate. Imagine how unnerving it will be if the Clintons ever divorce. Even if it is decades after their time in the White House ends, it will mock all their statements of mutual devotion and prove all the cynics right. As author and professor Stephen Carter says in “Integrity,” "The marriage vow is an undertaking to alter the future, to realize one’s humanity by liberating oneself from a variety of possible eventualities." Presidential marriages resonate and can alter many people’s futures. Strong marriages, like successful democracies, require a leap of faith - and an occasional suspension of disbelief, motivated by the confidence that ideals such as love, justice, and virtue, can and will ultimately triumph.
Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of Mr. And Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons and See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate.
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