WASHINGTON D.C., 15 June — “A flotilla of moving vans must be idling over in Tel Aviv now that President Bush has gone the way of Clinton and postponed moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem,” notes the reliable source in yesterday’s Washington Post. “ ‘Something will happen when I’m president,” Bush told a Jewish lobbying group a year ago. ‘As soon as I take office I will begin the process of moving the US ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital.’ The Bush campaign in October slammed Vice President Al Gore for backsliding on the move. But on Monday, Bush, in signing the same six-month waiver that Clinton kept signing, said he ‘remains committed to beginning the process of moving our embassy to Jerusalem.’ Of course, it might be brick-by-brick, one a year...”
Clinton, Gore ‘drove each other nuts’
Bill Clinton and Al Gore, his former vice president, have not spoken to each other since President Bush’s inauguration, according to Vanity Fair. An article in the American magazine speaks of the “irreparable” breakdown of their relationship during eight years in the White House. The two men had a bitter and well-publicized confrontation a few days after Gore conceded last year’s presidential election, but the tensions had been building for years, the magazine said. “Clinton drove Gore nuts,” one of Gore’s former aides said.
Another former White House official said: “If people are shocked now by the way the relationship hit the skids, they shouldn’t be. There was an almost unnatural suppression and denial in the first six years.” Relations between Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore were little better. “Hillary thinks that Tipper is an unintellectual, nice lady who doesn’t have a brain in her head,” a source told the magazine. “Tipper thinks Hillary’s an ambitious, rather uncoordinated, grasping, difficult woman.”
Spinning the Jenna story
“I, for one, really liked Jenna’s choice of pink Capri pants and a toe ring for her May 16 court appearance concerning her first underage drinking rap,” writes Marjorie Williams in the Washington Post. “If you’re going to get your life dragged through the spin cycle of pundits, political enemies, rent-a-shrinks and public scolds, it may be the better part of valor to wear your Bad Girl rags with pride.
The fact that the president’s daughter has been cited twice in less than two months — the second time with her more bookish twin, Barbara — for incidents involving underage drinking is certainly legitimate news.
But it has also been a withering lesson in the tendentious, sometimes nonsensical uses we make of presidential intimates.
....”Jenna Bush seems simply a daughter struggling with an outrageously magnified version of any child’s resistance to a parent’s demand — be it a demand made directly or a demand made by the circumstance of the presidency — that her top priority be to reflect well on him. I like her for making noise about it. When a president’s child breaks the law, we have to report it. But let’s spare her the symbolic freight, the crocodile tears, the knowing psychoanalysis. Free Jenna Bush!”
Watergate dean
“John Dean, barely 30 when he was appointed counsel to Richard Nixon, says he gave his boss ample time ‘to get out in front’ of Watergate, and after the president chose not to, ‘it became clear they were going to make me the scapegoat’,” notes the Washington Times in its Inside the Beltway column.
“I’ve often thought in hindsight that I was brought to the White House because I was young,” Dean says in a rare interview. He says he’s convinced that had he not come forward, Nixon would have succeeded with the cover-up. “I was very uncomfortable when I saw things that I knew were wrong,” says Dean.
“Uncle Sam, in fact, was so concerned with keeping Mr. Dean alive during his Watergate testimony that he was placed in the federal witness-protection program - hidden for 120 days in a government safe house in Baltimore. Today, Dean lives a far more secure life in California, where he’s a private investment banker, writer and lecturer.”
Tennis, anyone?
“Ex-prez Bill Clinton continues to escape abroad and create scenes wherever he goes. On Wednesday, he was in Paris, attending the French Open. Acting as if he were still president, Clinton was more than a half-hour late for the quarterfinal match between American Andre Agassi and Frenchman Sebastien Grosjean.
“Agassi had easily won the first set 6-1 and appeared on his way to an easy victory. But then Clinton arrived. Instead of quietly taking his seat, he entered waving to the crowd and encouraging the cheers from onlookers as Agassi prepared to play the second set.
“Clinton insisted on sitting on Agassi’s side in the first row,” says an American reporter in Paris covering the match. “It was distracting to Agassi. The crowd was getting rowdy with Clinton there waving and smiling and shaking hands during the match.”
After being swept in the final three sets by the unknown Frenchman, Agassi refused to blame his defeat on Clinton’s distracting behavior. But reporters couldn’t help but notice that the American tennis star openly seethed when Clinton entered the players-only area and told reporters he was sad to see Agassi lose, but that Grosjean just appeared to be the better player.
“ ‘I thought when Agassi heard that, he was going to take a racket to Clinton,’ says the reporter. ‘It was the most thoughtless comment Clinton could have uttered’.”
