Politics

Clinton's Greatest Seduction?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 21, 1999 / 5:09 PM EST / CBS

The Clinton White House is using everything and everybody to influence - to spin - historians who'll have the final say about the Clinton presidency, reports CBS News Correspondent Phil Jones.

Vice President Al Gore has been used to denounce President Clinton's impeachment.

"...this does a great disservice to a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents," Gore said.

Other White House lobbying of historians has been more subtle. Two have slept in the Lincoln bedroom.

Historians were recruited by the White House to testify against impeachment before the House Judiciary Committee.

And four historians have been honored at the White House, including Stephen Ambrose.

"I would say the Clinton White House has been more aggressive and more sustained in the impression that it wants to leave reporters with - and historians - than those that went before," Ambrose said.

But is the spin working?

"He's not going to go down as a great president," Ambrose said.

Ambrose, who has written about presidents since Harry Truman, argues that Bill Clinton cannot be a "great president" because he has not been faced with big events.

"Wars are big. Depressions are big. Bill Clinton's stuck at a time when the presidency doesn't really matter that much. The Congress is more important than the presidency, and even Congress doesn't matter all that much," he said.

Douglas Brinkley, another respected presidential historian, predicts Bill Clinton will spend the rest of his life seeking political vindication.

"I think Bill Clinton's final seduction is going to be history and historians," Brinkley said, "and to try and somehow say that, 'I had a great administration. I had to ward off this sexual McCarthyism, the attack on the lunatic right' - try to somehow start spinning his accomplishments to get above the mediocre."

Brinkley noted that a strong economic factor separates the Clinton presidency from the fate suffered by Richard Nixon.

"From the beginning of the Watergate scandal to the time Nixon resigned, the Dow Jones went down 20 percent," he said. "From the beginning of the Lewinsky scandal to today, the Dow Jones has gone up 20 percent."

The opening paragraphs on the Clinton presidency are already written: It's how a sex scandal led to the president's impeachment. Nothing can change this. It's the rest of the history that Bill Clinton wants to spin.