Opinion: Coincidence? Vanity Fair line on Bill Clinton an old one about Teddy Roosevelt

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The political world has been all abuzz in recent days, as reported in The Ticket here, over a devastating Vanity Fair article profiling someone named Bill Clinton.

He once was president of these United States but has spent recent months as chief surrogate campaigner and sometime political hitman for his wife, Hillary, who not so long ago thought she would be the Democratic presidential nominee. And probably still thinks she should be.

Monday, campaigning in South Dakota for that primary, the ex-president unloaded on Todd Purdum, a former New York Times reporter who relies on numerous anonymous sources throughout his magazine piece. Clinton called Purdum ‘sleazy,’ ‘dishonest,’ ‘slimy’ and a ‘scumbag.’ Other than that, Clinton didn’t really seem to notice the article much.

Here’s how Purdum’s Vanity Fair article begins:

‘It was a wedding straight out of ‘Sex and the City’: a rehearsal dinner looking out over the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero, a garden ceremony and dancing reception in a grand château outside Paris, topped off by a private fireworks display. The groom was a thirtysomething American lawyer with friends in high places, the bride a dark-eyed designer with social sheen, and the guest list a mix of family and what Noël Coward once called Nescafé Society.

‘But the real cynosure of the occasion last August was the smiling, snowy-haired man who is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends, the 42nd president of the United States, Bill Clinton.’

Now here, thanks to the razor-sharp memory of a loyal Ticket reader named James is a passage from a 5-year-old book, ‘The Presidential Companion: Readings on the First Ladies’ by Robert P. Watson and Anthony J. Eksterowicz:

‘At their 17 March 1905 wedding President Theodore Roosevelt gave away his orphaned niece (Eleanor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt), congratulated the young couple on ‘keeping the name in the family,’ and then proceeded to draw the assembled crowd after him into the next room, leaving the bride and groom momentarily alone and forgotten.

‘As Alice Roosevelt Longworth explained years later, this behavior was Teddy Roosevelt’s way of being ‘the bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening, and the corpse at every funeral.’’

Funny how the same old quote by the eldest child of the 26th president, a man who fundamentally changed the concept of the office of the president, ends up being used again, not as a quote, but as an unattributed way to describe the 42d president, a man whose campaign activities during the last several months have fundamentally changed the concept of what’s proper behavior for an ex-president.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

(UPDATE: Tuesday R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., author of ‘The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House’ and editor of the American Spectator, issued a news release charging Purdum with plagiarizing parts of his book for the magazine article.)

--Andrew Malcolm

Photo Credit: AP