It Was the Sex, Stupid

But no such evidence was forthcoming from Starr, until spring became summer became fall. And in the endless meanwhile, a majority of the electorate lost its appetite for the controversy and pronounced the judgment from which it never subsequently swerved: Clinton should serve out his term. Echoed in this verdict were bits of argument long advanced by the president’s professional defenders: His accusers’ motives were suspect, and their allegations did not warrant a major interruption in the cycle of American politics. The largest reason the public stuck with Clinton, however, was the understanding, developed over many months, that his had been merely a private error, a “lie about sex.” Something of far less consequence, in other words, than his fulfillment of official responsibilities. Something, therefore, properly of little concern to us.

This is how the polls suggest America changed its mind about the scandal. This is how most of the chief combatants on both sides remember it. And so this is how we can assume the history books will someday read.

But there is a fundamental sense in which the history books will be wrong — for those memories are unreliable and those polling numbers deceptive. There is a sense in which America never changed its mind, slowly or otherwise. There is a sense in which the entire country operated from the start according to a single unconscious but central assumption: The president may sometimes be a felon and keep his job — if his politics are otherwise convenient to us or his felony somehow fails to spark our anger.

David Schippers, chief counsel to the House Republicans who led the Clinton impeachment, does not believe a presidential felon should ever keep his job. And he does not believe the American people disagree with him. His memoir Sellout, written with Alan P. Henry, is nominally an “inside” account of congressional activity following delivery of the Starr impeachment referral in early September 1998.

The book does contain some fresh detail. It turns out that right up to the point of her not unfriendly Senate deposition about the president, Lewinsky’s lawyers withheld from her the fact that it was Clinton himself who had first and most persistently slandered her as an obsessional, threatening stalker. When Schippers attempted to clue her in, Lewinsky began to weep — and her lawyers quickly ended the interview. It also turns out that Juanita Broaddrick told House investigators Clinton raped her twice in 1978. As Schippers retells it: “Finally, the ordeal appeared to be completed. Clinton rose up slightly as though he were about to withdraw. Then he said, ‘My God, I can do it again!’ And he did.”

These tales are news enough. And it is no serious criticism to report that Sellout hasn’t too much other news to make. For Schippers is not primarily concerned to complete the documentary record. He is concerned instead to tell us what he thinks it means.

In a roundabout but eloquent manner, he tells us he thinks the particular genius of our constitutional design is the restraint it erects between momentary popular sentiment and ultimate collective action. He tells us that it is this republican character that we are mean most to love in our national government — not so much what things the government does, but how it does them: the elaborate traditions and rules by which it is ordered, and the willingness of its officers to subordinate themselves to those traditions and rules.

So when the president has perjured himself in the government’s courts — even in civil litigation, and even about sex — he has not made a discretely “private” mistake we may leniently weigh in the balance against his “official” performance. Obeying the law is the office — which means a law-breaking president must no longer be tolerated, not for a minute. Schippers says all this and more, and gets quite worked up about it, too, as well he should, for it is the one true faith of American civil religion.

Trouble is, that seems to be a very lonely faith these days — an impression Schippers winds up inadvertently confirming by the very desperation with which he attempts to deny it. It cannot be that the Senate acquitted the president because it did not see the scandal his way, Schippers prays, for that would make the senators infidels and heathens — non-believers in America’s civil religion. No, he decides, they must be sinners: men and women who knew full well what they should have done, and didn’t do it. The Senate must have deliberately “betrayed” itself by denying House prosecutors a full opportunity to present evidence that would “prove the charges.”

The logic is elusive. Prove the charges to whom? To Democratic senators who already knew the charges were true, as Sellout elsewhere makes plain, but who were determined to acquit the president anyway? That can’t be right.

Nor can it be reasonable for Schippers to suppose that a full-scale trial would have produced a public outcry intense enough to turn the tide. Few crimes in history have been so widely and meticulously inspected as Bill Clinton’s misdeeds with Monica Lewinsky. By the time Henry Hyde arrived in the Senate, any American who wished to know already knew. Another day or week or month of argument would have only made things worse. For what the polls missed, they missed. But what they caught was undeniable: Most people thought the president was guilty. Most people wanted him retained in the White House just the same. Most people were irritated with men like Schippers.

“I don’t believe that,” Sellout’s author announces defiantly on the book’s penultimate page. “I believe,” instead, that “the great unpolled American people knew” all along that he and his allies “were honorably performing their constitutional duty.” Yes, well. Perhaps it’s best we just draw the curtain on this good man, David Schippers, and wish him pleasant dreams.

In Peter Baker’s fine new book The Breach, there is a scene one evening at the White House a few days after Monica Lewinsky has become a household name. President Clinton has invited some friends over for a private movie screening. But he is not there to greet them at the appointed hour; he has been delayed. Unperturbed, they use the wait to trade loud excitements about their host’s spectacular new scandal. When the president finally does appear, all who notice fall awkwardly silent. But one oblivious woman gibbers on an extra, fatal moment, her words now audible to the entire room. “I would,” she is heard to say to her companion. “Wouldn’t you?”

Note this lady well, for while Baker makes very little of her, she may be the most important person in his book. The Breach is a serious first-draft history of the Lewinsky scandal’s last six months or so, from the institutional perspective of major-party politics, and focusing largely, of course, on Capitol Hill. Baker’s reporting is a helpful reminder of the cynicism with which leading Democrats responded to the president’s Ken Starr problem. No Democrat featured in The Breach seems ever to have conceived the president’s crimes as an intrinsic crisis of government. To his own party, Clinton’s “unacceptable behavior” was unacceptable only insofar as it was a public relations threat to legislative plans and electoral fortunes.

But the Republicans, in Baker’s reconstruction, made little better showing. The vast majority of them did of course vote to impeach or convict the president. But only a minority of that majority did so for the civil-religious reasons advanced by David Schippers. A fair number seem never to have been able to explain their votes at all. And their leaders seem to have analyzed Clinton’s illegalities with one eye locked on electoral politics. Trent Lott, for example, settled Senate impeachment strategy with regular input from Frank Luntz, that noted constitutional scholar. Luntz, a pollster, thought impeachment was a “loser.”

Both our parties, then, employed the same calculus in the Lewinsky scandal. Neither party thought the fact of a president’s felonies alone was enough to determine that his useful service was at an end. Neither party remembered the purpose of American government.

Could ordinary Americans have remembered it for them? If not at the end, during the Senate trial, then maybe back in the first days, when the nation was still in shock and any result still seemed possible?

The answer, actually, is no. Look back at Baker’s faux pas lady. She is a private guest in the White House, so she’s no Republican. But neither is she any kind of Democratic foot soldier. Here it is, the very first week — while Clinton’s party line remains that he scarcely even knew Lewinsky — and this woman already believes he’s lying. She is an independent-thinking American Everywoman. And the crimes alleged against the president seem hardly to have penetrated her consciousness at all. She views the scandal as nothing more than a piece of unusually excellent gossip — about sex. Vox populi: “I would. Wouldn’t you?”

David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.