Work Text:
On invoking the name of ex-President Henry Clinton, certain terms immediately follow: quitter, chicaner, and crook. Considering the extensive investigative work I conducted on the man in my youth, I am certainly no exception. However, left to ruminate alone on the sunlit porch of my Green Mountains cabin, I find that I am, in the end, an old man chasing the nostalgia of his halcyon days. Perhaps a part of me will always ache for the buzz of our Capitol city.
Between the scandal which mars his later presidency and the obstinate passage of time, a dwindling number of people recall the first years of Clinton’s service in office. Views then, too, were conflicting. But I remember a naive, golden tranquility. I was just a kid, marveling at a shiny and new position with the Washington Post. I was drunk with optimism, dancing too close to the moon, proud of America’s youth, and faithful in its authorities. I was entranced by the distorted song of an electric guitar, but Vietnam was to me another hallucination as well.
I know now, a result of decades of reflection, that those recollections are not to be trusted—indulged in, perhaps, but never acted upon. The equation of personal wistfulness to political perfection is a poisonous, treacherous trick of the mind.
Still, there is one thing I do know for certain. One thing that we all knew for certain, amidst the boiling tensions, within and overseas, in a world of divided politics: we were all in love with John André.
It pains me that his name has been stained and then forgotten since the turn of the century. Others who lived in those years, too, would reminisce on what a personality he was. It’s easy to say that he was the youngest White House Press Secretary, conventionally attractive, and a national treasure. It’s harder to convey just what it meant.
Republicans, Democrats, or otherwise, we all watched the way he spoke and smiled and always, always laughed. On the television, he was a star: eloquent, competent, and so brilliantly animated in a way that fostered desire and envy in both women and men. Rolls and rolls of tape exist of him, at press conferences, at parties, parades, parks, music stores, libraries, museums. One could watch every second of those and never blink and still not truly understand the glow which illuminated his every grin and glance, the energy which radiated from his being, the simple effect of his sunlike presence in a room.
He was never quite born to be in the world of politics. He was a poet, an artist, some romantic knight-errant of yore. Each breath, each action, was a gift from the divine—with the microphone, he could elude and he could frustrate, but it was always, always the Clinton Administration or the press who bowed and took the fall. It was never this pan-beloved angel.
A reader now, I realize with anguish, might assume this to be hyperbolic or theatrical. In reality, my words capture only the most taunting fraction of White House Press Secretary André’s luster. It was a little corner of a different world, dangerous, intoxicating, uniting, which I don’t suppose America will see again.
It was in this atmosphere that I entered the world of politics, and with this breeding that I first probed the Watergate scandal. Since then, Clinton’s name has been desecrated, bringing down with it generations of trust in government. Press Secretary André’s name has fared little better. Like many in history, a singular, overpowering cloud tarnishes the once vibrant multitudes of his fleeting life.
Many recollect that he is the unfortunate victim of a failed assassination attempt on Clinton, two years after his resignation. An especially attentive reader might know of his elaborate funeral, adorned with tens of thousands of roses and paid for out of the ex-President’s personal pocket. The country wept at his death.
But most remember him as the mole in the White House, the link which communicated with the Washington Post back in the height of scandal, ultimately enabling the President’s impeachment.
That autumn morning of 1976, no one wanted to believe the story.
That is, besides myself, as I was the journalist with whom Press Secretary André shared those alleged secrets and tips. And I suppose I will eternally be known, along with my esteemed partner Benjamin Tallmadge, as one of the two journalists who through that unveiled the Watergate scandal.
As the years passed, disbelief at his perceived duplicity faded into anger, then resentment, until André became some American Judas to be profaned by certain future administrations. Then that too waned away, leaving a nation ignorant of the man who since birth to after death had always inspired some form of the people’s passions. I watched this all with inexpressible distress and fury and a stifled, paralyzing silence.
This book, nearly forty years later, is a vindication of White House Press Secretary John André. This book is a labor fueled by a synergistic, panoramic lens of pain and love and naivety and reflection. With this book, I bring to light a story never told about the Washington Post’s investigation of ex-President Clinton’s Watergate scandal, because John André and I harbored a secret once viewed as more disgraceful, more abhorrent than even the blackest political venality.
So, let me just say this. Looking back with the clarity of time, John André was no saint. He was foolish, flamboyant, overeager, and in both soul and body the youngest White House Press Secretary. But he was no Judas either. He was no snake, no profiteer. He did not earn a single cent from his communication with the Washington Post. He perpetually attempted to befriend all, indiscriminate of their politics, and he toyed with codes of professional etiquette like a coquette, but he never conceived a single thought of corruption.
I dictate this book nearly blind, swathed in the silence of a secluded woodland retreat and awaiting my timely death. I acknowledge it is possible that, even now, this is a story published too soon for widespread public acceptance—but the John André I knew didn’t diminish himself to suit the opinions of others. I tell this story with the hope that some day in the future, the nation will see John André in the nuanced light of who he truly was, rather than the current convenient, one-dimensional lie. I tell this story now, too soon rather than never, because the full truth of the Watergate investigation, of which I have a nonpareil perspective, must not vanish from the nation’s history.
John André exposed the White House not out of the accused avarice and abuse but out of an inescapably human love.