Hunting of the President

The film begins with a shot of the United States Capitol with former Senator Dale Bumpers memorably defending Pres. Clinton during his impeachment trial. When he asks how it was that the president was being impeached for lying about what was merely a private wrongdoing the film cuts back to the earliest days of the Clinton administration, and goes through the various trumped up and absurd charges made against Clinton during the nineties, from Whitewater to the ridiculous charge of the murder of Vince Foster to Troopergate to the allegations of Paula Jones (which not even her lawyers believed). Like the book, the movie excells because it shows in great detail the lack of concern with truth that the Right displayed throughout all of this, and the extraorinarily organized and partisan nature of all the opposition to Clinton.

As an Arkansan, I especially appreciated the way in which the film explains the various Arkansas characters involved in the story. As a former student of Ouachita Baptist University, I knew Bob Riley (one of the finest and most fascinating individuals in Arkansas history, as highly decorated war hero, professor, and politician), whose widow is interviewed extensively in the film. I did not know Jim McDougal. His wife, Susan, emerges in the film as one of the great symbols of the affair, as she is crushed by Kenneth Starr's inhuman prosecution machine because she refuses to lie about either Bill Clinton or Hillary. Her dedication to truth is so great that she goes to prison (where she is housed with child murderers instead of the general prison population, by Starr's orders) rather than lie. She emerges as one of the few heroes in the tawdry persecution of Clinton, and one of the most innocent victims.

Like the book, this documentary is essential viewing for anyone wanting the understand the Clinton years. It is also a cautionary tale, because the Right wing machine that mindlessly and irrationally attack a moderate Democratic president in 1993 will unquestionably do the same with a new Democratic president in 2005. All Americans should find such politics of division reprehensible and utterly opposed to the commonweal.