She appears, in happier times, to have called him “Schmucko,” with a vulgar sort of familiar affection. Later on, after things got complicated between them, she renamed him “the Creep.” And in those surreptitiously tape-recorded conversations with her confidante, Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky also referred to the president of the United States, indelibly, as “the Big He.” Not for nothing did this young lady complete a college major in psychology before assuming her position in the White House. That “Big He” locution reflects an unusually acute understanding of where Bill Clinton sees himself with respect to the rest of the universe.
Since 1992, a controlling plurality of American public opinion has at least pretended to hold that Clinton is merely a harmless “rogue.” Sure, every once in a while someone charges him with violating established norms of personal morality. Sure, even more often, it becomes clear that he has manipulated language and gesture so thoroughly — and from such a commanding position in our public life — as to challenge the very idea of an independent, generally agreed upon political reality. But, gosh, you just have to admire the skill and daring with which he pulls it all off. And, anyhow: peace and prosperity, peace and prosperity. So on balance, if not at heart, Bill Clinton must be judged a good boy.
Except that most Americans, whether they are aware of it or not, have never really believed this, else they would not have shown such repeated, consuming interest in the Big He’s scandals. Especially the sex stuff. There are semi- official explanations for this phenomenon, of course. But they don’t add up.
Clinton loyalists — Hillary Clinton, for instance — regularly insist that the controversies are manufactured, top to bottom, by a passel of fanatical right-wingers who mean to destroy her husband, whatever it takes. Acknowledged, there do exist people whose hatred for this president appears always to precede the actual facts in question. But they are known for what they are and they are consequently unable to arrange and sustain a nationwide news story. The “murders” of Vincent Foster and Ron Brown are not on our front pages this morning. Young Monica Lewinsky is. Monica Lewinsky of Brentwood, by way of Park Avenue, the Watergate Apartments, and a Democratic White House. Monica Lewinsky, who has most likely never met a fanatical right- winger in her entire, brief life.
Nor can the Clinton bimbo-eruptions be explained, pop-sociology-wise, purely by reference to a tabloidized modern media. Or to a culture of desensitized voyeurism that now demands soap-opera entertainment even from its constitutional government. Or to other fancy theories. Most American politicians, let’s face it, are never N subjected to lurid speculation about their private lives. Because most American voters simply couldn’t give a damn: They figure they already know all they need to about these elected representatives.
But they do not know, they cannot know, enough about their current president. He is deliberately unknowable. Clinton’s is a character of infinite deception and self-deception. He shades and evades on the large issues (abortion, affirmative action, you name it), just as ordinary politicians sometimes do. But he shades and evades — and automatically — on the small issues, too. Clinton is a man who cannot bring himself candidly to answer a lighthearted, impromptu query about when he last ate a McDonald’s cheeseburger.
There is something alarmingly off about it all. This president is, indeed, a “Big He”: a narcissist who cannot bear to allow even the tiniest piece of information about himself to float around the world uncontrolled — where it might threaten to unveil his perfect self-love as a lie. Bill Clinton is terrified of detection. What might the source of this terror be?
Assume, just for the sake of argument, that things actually did take place in that Little Rock hotel in 1991, just as Paula Jones has always claimed. A few weeks after he has decided to run for president, a sitting governor summons a state employee, whom he has never met, to a private room, where he drops his pants and demands unreciprocal satisfaction. What does this mean?
It means the governor is an unbalanced, irrational, compulsive person — both because such behavior is per se unbalanced (and, almost certainly, chronic), and because that behavior, if ever publicly revealed, would devastate his ambitions and inflict pain on his wife and child. To protect himself from such exposure, the governor has developed an elaborate and comprehensive habit of concealment. To put the whole thing over, he has enlisted help from a group of peculiarly willing lieutenants. Together, he and they are on constant, hair-trigger alert for the slightest hint of embarrassment, any kind of embarrassment. And when they catch wind of such a peril, they move quickly and brutally to smother it, with a giant cloud of clever lawyer’s talk, preemptive smears, and subject-changing.
It all makes perfect sense: This is Bill Clinton and his presidency in a nutshell. And this, it turns out, is precisely how, at some deeply suppressed level, most Americans always fearfully suspected the Clinton puzzle was put together. Because comes now Monica Lewinsky, with what is apparently the most detailed and corroborated sexual allegation yet leveled against the president. And suddenly, palpably, everything has changed. No one any longer describes Bill Clinton as merely a “rogue.” The nation’s self-deception about him has finally ended. Few people are inclined to believe his denials. Few people expect him fully to recover from the blow. Few people, in fact, seem to believe he should be allowed fully to recover.
This is a grave situation. And because it promises also to be one of unprecedented tawdriness, well-meaning voices are already being raised with the suggestion that we isolate the scandal’s elements and concentrate our attention and fury on what is “worst” (and, conveniently, cleanest) about it. The sex business is relatively unimportant, the argument goes, and it would be unfair to subject a president to higher personal standards and scrutiny than is usually applied to private citizens. Ignore the sex, in other words. What matters is the possibility that the president and his men have attempted to deceive the law through perjury and the subornation of witnesses.
There are two problems here. The first is that ours is not some ” sophisticated” European society where it is expected that people will rut like animals on a constant basis — and where it is considered poor form to notice. A 50-year-old president of the United States is credibly accused of having inherently exploitative and adulterous sexual relations, inside the White House, with a 21-year-old office intern. How, exactly, is anyone supposed to ignore that? It is appalling. Such behavior is appalling in every other walk of American life, and when it involves the CEO of a corporation or a tenured professor it justly gets him fired. It is just as appalling . . . no it is vastly more appalling when the perpetrator is our elected head of state.
The second problem is more fundamental. When the Monica Lewinsky affair first broke into view, Hillary Clinton told reporters that it was her husband’s practice to put such unpleasantness “in a box” — and go on about the business of his presidency as if nothing had happened. This, Bill Clinton will now surely try to do again. But this time he will most likely fail.
He is president in the first place, after all, only because, in January 1992, just before the New Hampshire primary, he categorically denied — or seemed to be categorically denying — that he had ever slept with Gennifer Flowers. According to the Washington Post, two weeks ago, in a sworn deposition to Paula Jones’s attorneys, Clinton acknowledged that this crucial, six-year-old claim was false.
It is rapidly dawning on the nation that there are not, in fact, two discrete halves of Bill Clinton. The sex is the political deception, and the political deception is the sex. And the whole thing is pathological. And it has dominated our collective business for much too long. But not, perhaps, for too much longer.
David Tell, for the Editors
