Spotlight on Bill Clinton

(image credit)

The date was September 16th 1998. It was before the much heralded decade of iWhatevers and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It was also the day Karen and I welcomed our daughter, Eva, to our world. We saved the Chicago Tribune as a memento of that day. Two copies, in fact.

The thing was, that time was when then-US President Bill Clinton was in a political and personal row over White House intern Monica Lewinsky. That sex scandal and impeachment efforts dominated the front page of the Tribune (sigh). What were we welcoming our daughter to?

Our news consumption was mainly through traditional media: print, TV and radio. It was on TV, for example, that we heard Clinton deny having any sexual relations with ‘that woman’ and insisting on privacy for his family. It was in the Tribune, also, that we read about florid details of the very things he denied. What privacy he called for, he himself indelibly breached with his shenanigans. He was the butt of jokes on radio talk shows, deservedly so.

Now I hardly ever pick up a (print) newspaper anymore.  Instead, it’s Google News where I find out that Lewinsky is back in the spotlight, in a title crafted deliberately by the Los Angeles Times to draw clicks to its article and pages.  It is about a documentary on Clinton, and I watch the trailer on YouTube.

Here’s the lengthy description of the documentary, accompanying this trailer. So, you see, the Los Angeles Times’ trite ploy notwithstanding, Lewinsky occupies only a bit part of the spotlight. Thankfully.

Coming to PBS beginning Monday, Feb. 20. From draft dodging to the Dayton Accords, from Monica Lewinsky to a balanced budget, the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton veered between sordid scandal and grand achievement. In CLINTON, the latest installment in the critically acclaimed and successful series of presidential biographies, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE explores the fascinating story of an American president who rose from a broken childhood in Arkansas to become one of the most successful politicians in modern American history and one of the most complex and conflicted characters to ever stride across the public stage. It recounts a career full of accomplishment and rife with scandal, a marriage that would make history and create controversy and a presidency that would define the crucial and transformative period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. It follows Clinton across his two terms as he confronted some of the key forces that would shape the future, including partisan political warfare and domestic and international terrorism, and struggled, with uneven success, to define the role of American power in a post-Cold War world. Most memorably, it explores how Clinton’s conflicted character made history, even as it enraged his enemies and confounded his friends. The program features unprecedented access to scores of Clinton insiders including White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, as well as interviews with foreign leaders, members of the Republican opposition, childhood friends, staffers from Clinton’s years as governor of Arkansas, biographers and journalists.

Our daughter is 13 years old now, and our world has been radically changed in her young lifetime. Clinton is quite the elder statesman now, is apparently in high demand for keynote speeches, and travels globally for his philanthropy.  Maybe for ongoing philandering, too.  (Apologies, I couldn't resist the pun.)

Eva is very much a child of the golden decade of media and technology. But it’s no small irony, I suppose, that this documentary, so parsimoniously titled ‘Clinton,’ will be aired on traditional (PBS) TV. I will have to unplug, and watch it on plain old traditional media!

Thank your for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD