Who can really say if little Billy Clinton was abused, as his wife suggested in her interview published in Talk magazine last week? According to David Maraniss's authoritative biography of Clinton, the president's domineering grandmother "assumed that she was in control," ordering every area of his life to the point of "pushing food in his mouth if necessary." But it's hard to believe the latter ever was necessary.
The factual basis of other Hillary statements in the interview has been less scrutinized. She refers, for instance, to the period in their lives between Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, saying, "We did have a very good stretch. Years and years of nothing." A little later, she says, "I thought this was resolved 10 years ago. I thought he had conquered it . . . but he didn't go deep enough or work hard enough."
Oops. Time to work on that chronology again. It was Hillary who agreed with her husband, during their infamous 1992 60 Minutes interview, that Flowers was nothing more than a "friendly acquaintance." Bill, of course, went on to deny that he'd had an affair with Flowers, who claimed she'd been involved with Clinton from the late '70s until 1989. He later put the lie to his own original defense, by admitting to Paula Jones's lawyers that he'd had a sexual encounter with Flowers -- in 1977. But Hillary's admission to Talk would seem to put the lie to Clinton's amended lie. If it has been ten years since Bill Clinton's last woman-pleasing relapse -- that would put us closer to the end of Flowers's alleged 12-year affair (1989) than Bill's single night of passion (1977).
Even if Hillary confused her time periods, it's hard to see how she could claim, without crossing her fingers, that there were "years and years of nothing." To play fair, we won't even consider the charges of the Arkansas state troopers who claimed to have procured scores of women for Clinton. If, in fact, Hillary intended to stand by her husband's under-oath contention that his tryst with Flowers was limited to 1977, then one should still be wary of Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Connie Hamzy, and Sally Perdue, all of whom claim to have had affairs or to have been propositioned by Clinton in the period between 1977 and 1989. And those are just the consensual cases (Juanita Broaddrick claims Clinton raped her in 1978).
We will not consider the hosts of Susan McDougals and other suspects who've denied having Biblical knowledge of their president. But if Hillary did intend to designate a ten-year age of innocence that came after Flowers and before Lewinsky, she'd first have to disqualify Dolly Kyle Browning (who claims her long affair with Clinton ended in 1992), Kathleen Willey (who claimed she was groped in 1993), and Paula Jones (who says she was asked to "kiss it" in 1991).
It is possible, of course, that the first lady actually believes what she's saying. For if there's one thing Hillary possesses, more than her husband's gift for embroidery or omission, it's a lethal case of naivete. Why else would she ask, as she did in Talk, "Why do I have to talk about things no one else in politics does?"