Buried in last Thursday’s Washington Post, in a story on how the president and virtually everyone else in Washington are “Looking Past Scandal, Focusing on Future,” were these extraordinary paragraphs:
Asked about Juanita Broaddrick’s recent allegations that Clinton assaulted her 21 years ago in an Arkansas hotel room, [Donna] Shalala said she has reached no conclusion about whether she believes Broaddrick or the terse denial issued by Clinton’s lawyer — and said she doesn’t need to in order to do her job.
“I take all of this very seriously,” Shalala said of Broaddrick’s allegations, adding that “I do not compartmentalize” by making separate judgments about personal conduct and public performance. At the same time, Shalala said, “I’m both a patriot and a professional; I serve the nation and the president.”
This conviction, she said, allows her to pursue what she considers important issues on Clinton’s behalf without knowing for sure what to believe about his past.
So: A cabinet secretary is agnostic as to whether or not the president she works for is a rapist. At least Donna Shalala has the courage to admit her uncertainty. No other Clinton administration official with whom the Post spoke was willing to be quoted on the record about the Broaddrick allegation. One unnamed aide did admit, “I think you have to be troubled by it; she seems very credible.”
And so she does. Mrs. Broaddrick seems credible to administration officials; she seems credible to most of the political and media elite; she seems credible to much of the country. But everyone seems willing to drift through the next two years remaining unsure over whether our president is a rapist — and not particularly eager to find out the truth.
“Come on,” the answer goes, “we’ll never be able to find out the truth.” Perhaps. But we already know more than most people realize. We know the date and place of the alleged assault — April 25, 1978, at the Camelot Hotel (now the Doubletree) in Little Rock. We know the names of five people who were told about the incident by Mrs. Broaddrick at the time — Norma Rogers Kelsay, who saw her that day and helped ice her lip; three other friends, Jean Darden (Norma’s sister), Louise Ma, and Susan Lewis; and her future husband David Broaddrick, who also saw the injuries. We know that Bill Clinton added a handwritten note to an official letter in 1984 congratulating Mrs. Broaddrick after her nursing home was judged the best in the state, saying, “I admire you very much.” We know that Jean Darden saw Bill Clinton talking to Juanita Broaddrick in a hotel hallway — probably in the Riverfront Hilton — in 1991, after Gov. Clinton had had Mrs. Broaddrick pulled from a meeting to speak with him.
We also know that Mrs. Broaddrick had no incentive — financial, political, or legal — to correct her false affidavit in the Jones case; unlike Monica Lewinsky, for example, Juanita Broaddrick could have simply stuck to her story without risking a perjury charge or even adverse publicity. (Mrs. Broaddrick told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that Ken Starr’s investigators “never threatened me. They were nothing but courteous. . . . The only thing that made me tell the truth at this time was my son and my husband.”) We know that Mrs. Broaddrick has been honest throughout with reporters, volunteering evidence not particularly flattering to her (for example, that she was having an affair with David Broaddrick, now her husband, at the time of the incident). We know that she was extremely reluctant to go public with her story. And we know that the president has been unwilling to defend himself, or to give any account of his contacts with Mrs. Broaddrick.
Instead, the president has tried to hide behind his lawyer’s statement that “any allegation that the president assaulted Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false.” How can the president’s lawyer, David Kendall, know this to be true? Either the president said this to Mr. Kendall, or Mr. Kendall had investigators independently research the matter. If the first, surely the president can tell us, not just Mr. Kendall, what did or did not happen in 1978; what he meant by his 1984 postscript; what he said at the 1991 meeting. If the second, Mr. Kendall should make public whatever evidence he has, and the president should make available any records he might have of his whereabouts for the relevant dates in 1978 and 1991.
Instead, the president is stonewalling, and Clinton allies are spreading the word that the April 25, 1978, encounter was one of consensual sex. Last week THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked Mrs. Broaddrick about consensual sex rumors. She responded: “It’s completely untrue. There was nothing consensual about what went on in that room. . . . I adamantly deny it was consensual.”
Will the press continue to allow the president simply to avoid responding to Mrs. Broaddrick? A few years ago records surfaced suggesting that Hillary Rodham Clinton had engaged in questionable commodity speculation in 1978-79. Mrs. Clinton is not the president of the United States. But no one thought it inappropriate when the media insisted that she give an account of her behavior. And she did. Why is it inappropriate that the president be asked to respond to a much more serious charge of wrongdoing from the same era?
The sophisticated answer to this, expressed in a Washington Post editorial last week, is that you couldn’t believe the president anyway: “Mr. Clinton’s word in this realm by now has no value.” But this is simply a fancy excuse for avoiding the responsibility to discover as much as we can about the president’s behavior, and for insisting that the president address the charge and the evidence.
The press, it is often said, is the fourth branch of government, whose duty it is to hold public officials accountable for their actions and to discover and publicize the truth. But there are first, second, and third branches of government, as well. There are, for instance, prosecutors, whose duty it is to investigate possible crimes. They do not usually fail even to begin such an investigation just because it may turn out there will be insufficient evidence to go to trial. If a charge of sexual assault were made against someone else, accompanied by this degree of corroborating evidence, there would at least be some attempt by relevant authorities to investigate — to question witnesses, to secure evidence, and the like. One might respond that the statute of limitations has run on this incident. But the statute of limitations is an “affirmative defense,” that is, it is not self-executing. A defendant must invoke it to avoid prosecution for a crime. A man wishing to establish his innocence can waive the protection of the statute. Shouldn’t Bill Clinton be invited to do this by the district attorney in Little Rock or the U.S. attorney for Arkansas?
And there is a branch of government called the Congress. It is a sign of how much Bill Clinton has corrupted us all that to suggest congressional action now is practically to invite ridicule. Well, ridicule us if you will, but we happen to think that last month’s Senate vote did not relieve Congress of any responsibility for the next two years to fulfill its constitutional role.
After all, if hearings on Whitewater were legitimate — as surely they were, as even Democrats conceded (though they disliked the way they were conducted) — why would a brief investigation into these charges be out of the question? Committee staff would seek out whatever records they were able to obtain with their subpoena powers; the president would produce any evidence he wished; Mrs. Broaddrick would testify under oath; the five contemporaneous witnesses would testify under oath. We would then have a full airing of what we know and what we don’t know. Citizens could make up their minds. Congress could choose to act, or not. Then, perhaps, we could “move on.”
But as things now stand — a stonewalling president, an incurious press, and a passive Congress and law enforcement officials — the only honorable answer to the question, Can’t we just move on? is no.
William Kristol, for the Editors
