Can we agree that former President Bill Clinton, during his eight-year tenure, did not realize how a military retreat from Somalia and a statutory response to bombing attacks would invite Near East terrorists to broaden their catastrophic enterprise? No, Mr. Clinton protests, and was last heard condemning the decision of Disney chief Robert Iger to air The Path to 9/11, a miniseries deprecative of his efforts as federal steward, after a phone exchange could not foreclose. What about the failure of those under Clinton to follow the commander-in-chief's implicit orders — secretaries, professionals, careerists? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has been joined by Clinton's advisors on national security and counterterrorism, Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke, to insist that they have been defamed.
At the very least, is it OK for ABC to broadcast historical fiction, even if the historical figures are contemporary and they don't care for the fiction? In fact, signatures from a Democratic senatorial quintet were at the bottom of a letter to the network expressing the opinion that the public interest as defined by the Communications Act of 1934 involves limiting editorial content to that which no one can factually dispute; which means, one guesses, that Peter Jennings ought to check his mail, too.
With free expression there is the expectation and the allowance for one public personality to tell another to stop, or shut up. This becomes unseemly and unconstitutional when the first party ignores the second's right to do what the first doesn't like. That is where some on the left appear to be going, and the general public may well find the miniseries not nearly as fissiparous. For the right, advice: first, sit back and marvel; second, do not fault the former president for not having done the impossible, to prevent an attack like that on September 11th or halt the growth of terrorism simply by curtailing the leadership of al Qaeda with a button-push. Bill Clinton's goose is George W. Bush's gander.