I9 True Colors

IN 1990, when Bill Clinton was planning his run for president, a Democratic media consultant named Raymond D. Strother asked him how he was planning to handle the question of youthful marijuana use. “I’m thinking of saying I never violated the drug laws of my country,” Clinton replied. Strother, seeing through the ruse immediately, gently informed the one-time Rhodes scholar that such an answer wasn’t likely to fool the national press. By 1992, of course, Clinton had settled on his “I didn’t inhale” line.

Was this a lie? Had he really not inhaled marijuana smoke? No one knows for sure, though several people who were at Oxford with Clinton told presidential biographer David Maraniss that they believed him—thought it was possible that the young Clinton really hadn’t known how to smoke. The larger point, however, is that Bill Clinton believed while in college, believed while in Arkansas, and believes today that the truth is something that he can finesse.

IN 1990, when Bill Clinton was planning his run for president, a Democratic media consultant named Raymond D. Strother asked him how he was planning to handle the question of youthful marijuana use. “I’m thinking of saying I never violated the drug laws of my country,” Clinton replied. Strother, seeing through the ruse immediately, gently informed the one-time Rhodes scholar that such an answer wasn’t likely to fool the national press. By 1992, of course, Clinton had settled on his “I didn’t inhale” line.

Was this a lie? Had he really not inhaled marijuana smoke? No one knows for sure, though several people who were at Oxford with Clinton told presidential biographer David Maraniss that they believed him—thought it was possible that the young Clinton really hadn’t known how to smoke. The larger point, however, is that Bill Clinton believed while in college, believed while in Arkansas, and believes today that the truth is something that he can finesse.