Bill Clinton has often been compared to Warren C. Harding, and considering that president’s scandals and adulterous affair within the White House, the parallel seems valid. The better comparison, however, may be with Harding’s predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. At least that is the impression one gets reading James Bovard’s book. Under Wilson, the country witnessed a huge growth in government through such things as the income-tax amendment, the Federal Reserve, and the Espionage Act. The century’s teen years also witnessed the Great War, the Creel Commission, and the Palmer raids. The 1990’s gave us the bombing of Yugoslavia, Barry McCaffrey’s insertion of drug-war propaganda into network TV, and Janet Reno. While Clinton’s record is modest compared to Wilson’s, Bovard—a libertarian journalist—has still assumed a formidable burden in documenting eight years of lies and abuse of power.

The more benign aspects of Clinton’s legacy are found in those few remaining government agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose calling cards aren’t submachine guns, tanks, and no-knock warrants. FEMA was created in the Carter years to cope with natural disasters or nuclear war; President Clinton has turned it into an open spigot, freely dispensing cash. After an earthquake in California in 1994, FEMA sent checks to many residents on the basis of their ZIP codes, including many who had made no damage claim; the agency has performed similar acts across the country, even in less electoral-vote-rich states.

The AmeriCorps “service” program, one of Clinton’s proudest accomplishments, is a massive boondoggle on which Bovard has shone a penetrating light. AmeriCorps would be a waste of money if it consisted of earnest, ponytailed youths collecting aluminum cans in the name of public service. It is, however, far more insidious, much of its purpose being to serve as a backdrop for Clinton propaganda rallies and to engage in illegal political agitation. “Some AmeriCorps projects seem to be largely federally paid rabble-rousing,” Bovard writes.

AmeriCorps is paying four members to work with the Political Asylum Project of Austin, Texas. Program director Nidia Salamanca declared: “There are a lot of immigrants who are in detention right now—we see how their rights are being violated by police officers and by detention officers—we document INS encounters with immigrants —if they are respecting their rights.” AmeriCorps support for the Whatcom [Washington State] Human Rights Task Force is paying for AmeriCorps members to “organize the Hispanic population . . . to develop a program of monitoring, reporting and stopping INS . . . abuses of the Hispanic population.”

When not serving as the Clinton Youth or aiding illegal immigrants, AmeriCorps members recruit people to sign up as food-stamp recipients, engage in toy-gym buy-back programs, agitate for housing subsidies and rent control, and encourage child sex-abuse witch-hunts in Janet Reno’s old South Florida stomping grounds. Americorps has also taken up the cause of child literacy, despite the fact that the

largest single item that AmeriCorps spends for training its own members is for General Equivalency Degree (GED) preparation—helping AmeriCorps members get their high school degree.

The meat of “Feeling Your Pain” lies in its dozens of examples of federal assaults on the liberty and property of average Americans in the last eight years. Much of what Bovard recounts is old hat, but it is useful—and terrifying—to see it gathered in one place. The Waco assault was a defining moment in the Clinton years: In this single episode, the administration displayed its dishonesty, contempt for human life, and deadly desire to help “the children.” Bovard covers territory familiar to anyone who has studied the raid, but his account still makes for chilling reading as he quotes Democrats, terrified by the prospect of any examination of the government’s actions at Mount Carmel, attempting to cover up the disaster. According to then-congressman Charles Schumer, attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice were “an attack on the ATE. This planned hearing was simply some red meat to some of those extreme right forces.” Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin perversely explained that the Waco raid could not be understood “outside of the context of [the] Oklahoma City [bombing]” that occurred two years later, the implication being that only some sort of Nazi terrorist would question the raid. When, in 1999, the cover was stripped from some of the government’s lies, Janet Reno attempted to preserve a few shreds of credibility; the investigation she called for, however, had problems. “Reno could have recused herself from any role in choosing a new person to reinvestigate Waco,” Bovard suggests. “Instead, she personally chose John Danforth, a former senator and a golfing buddy of Clinton’s, to be in charge of the reinvestigation.”

As Bovard observes. Bill Clinton has been the most anti-gun president in U.S. history: He signed the Brady Bill into law in 1993 and the “assault weapons” ban in 1994. Truth, however, has been the biggest casualty in Clinton’s war on guns. The President, who has enjoyed pandering to the police, made a special show of appearing with the widows of police officers killed by “cop-killer bullets,” which can penetrate police body armor. Memorializing Daniel Doffyn, a Chicago cop killed in 1995, Clinton proclaimed that, “if a bullet can rip through a bulletproof vest like knife through hot butter, then it ought to be history. We should ban it.” But Bovard reveals a minor detail that the leader of the free world left out: “Doffyn died after being shot in the head as well as being shot in the chest by a bullet that passed through an opening in his vest: no bullet penetrated his body armor.” And in October 1996, the President used the death of Louisiana’s Jerome Harrison Seaberry to further his anti-gun agenda, “In Lake Charles,” he intoned:

I met with that officer’s widow and two beautiful, beautiful young sons. And I thought to myself, “You know, if people like these folks here are going to put their lives on the line for us, the least we can do is tell them if they put on a bulletproof vest, it will protect them from being killed.” That’s the least we can do for them.

It turns out that the late Mr. Seaberry died in an automobile accident, thus inadvertently contributing to the President’s—and his Vice President’s—penchant for creative fictions.

“Feeling Your Pain” is not a comprehensive history of the Clinton years, so you don’t have to hide it from your children. It does not delve into areas (such as health care) where Clinton failed to get what he wanted, or the numerous scandals that have dogged his administration. What it does demonstrate is that Bovard has the strong stomach required of a pathologist: Think of him as a journalistic Quincy, examining the mangled corpse of the U.S. Constitution.

 

[“Feeling Your Pain”: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years, by James Bovard (New York: St. Martin’s Press) 426 pp., $26.95]