Sunday, December 20, 1998, was a good day for headlines.
The
Boston Sunday Globe bannered “Clinton is Impeached.”
The
New York Times, perhaps moved by the president’s well-known perplexity with the copulative verb, shortened this to “Clinton Impeached,” but added a coast-to-coast subhead:
“He Faces Senate Trial, 2D in History; Vows To Do His Job Till Term’s ‘Last Hour.’”
(He did just that, pardoning a passel of crooks, including the world-class swindler Marc Rich then on the lam in Switzerland, but let me not wander…)
If December 20, 1998, had heart-warming headlines, it had even better photographs.
I am thinking of one photo in particular.
We are in the Oval Office.
The president stands in the center — head bowed, eyes closed (or at least downcast), Hillary with her hand linked on his arm.
She too has her head tilted down and her eyes closed.
If you cropped the picture, you might think they are praying together.
Oddly, that’s exactly what the
New York Times did.
It is an image suggesting a chastened Bill Clinton.
But the
Boston Sunday Globe printed the same picture un-cropped, and the effect is subtly different.
For one thing, in the
Globe’s version we see Al Gore standing just behind Bill’s shoulder.
Gore is looking directly at the camera, tight-lipped with an expression that combines fear and consternation.
Though he is off to the side, it is Gore, not Bill and Hillary, who dominates this image.
He is caught in the moment, and looks like he feels the maddening situation in which he finds himself.
He has to stand (in this case literally) behind the President, though doing so inevitably embeds him further in the tawdriness of all things Clinton.
His look somehow cancels the impression that Bill and Hillary are praying.
Instead they look like they are posing in a dumb show of brave contrition.
Even a staged image can offer unexpected felicities, and this photo offers that too. Bill’s shadow falls on Hillary, bisecting her face with a steep arc of darkness, like a graph of the decline of her idealism from her days as a student radical at Wellesley to this moment of bravely yoking herself to Monica Lewinsky’s playmate.
She is here, half-eclipsed and all grim.
Well, it is just a picture.
I don’t know how many newspapers ran it, but I saved the front pages of the
Times and the
Globe and, in a mad moment, framed them.
Each year about this time I take them out, and each year the story they tell just gets richer and richer.
Who would have thought that the wooden Al Gore, staring out from this picture in sullen apprehension, would re-make himself as the demiurge of an international hysteria? Stiff-necked, slow of speech, but steadfast in his conceits and seething with smothered resentments, he was long a kernel.
When he at last exploded, he turned out to be movie popcorn soon to be drenched with the warm butter of a Nobel Prize.
The press often plays up Gore’s environmental heroism as his towering answer to George W. Bush.
Surely that’s part of it, but the photograph of him in the Oval Office on December 19, 1998 is pretty compelling evidence that Al has an even greater stake in saying of the others in that picture, “I’m not one of them.”
Will environmentalist-cult status and a Nobel Prize release him from the agony of this photograph?
No, there he is, and will be forever, tethered to the smarter, sexier, ruthless immoralist-in-chief, like an ornament on his keychain.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
