The full-figured lady has sung — and retired to her mother’s Watergate apartment — but Washington’s epic opera of presidential pathology is not quite over yet. The title character must now belt out his showstopper aria, which calls for him at last to tell the truth about his own behavior. It will be an improvised scene; this is jazzy, modern music. Until just moments before his cue, Bill Clinton has been huddled offstage with his coaches, struggling to refine a tiny little nuance in the libretto. I didn’t have sex with the intern. Then again, of course, depending on your definition, I sort of did. Which “truth” will his audience prefer?
It shouldn’t matter.
Last Friday’s New York Times reported what looked to be an authoritative White House leak: Clinton and his lawyers have prepared for his grandjury appearance this week by “designing answers that allow him to acknowledge a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky without going into graphic detail.” Needless to say, there would be no reason for Clinton seriously to plan for such an acknowledgment if it were false. It still remains possible, the Times cautioned, that the president will persist in his Monica denials when questioned by Ken Starr’s prosecutors. If he does, though, by the inescapable logic of his own Oval Office “practice sessions,” he will be prejuring himself. Period. The sex is finally beyond dispute.
And should Clinton concede the sex as the Times suggests is likely — what then? Will he not be thereby admitting to an earlier perjury in his Paula Jones deposition? No, the president will apparently contend: When he swore in January, among other things, that “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky,” he was testifying honestly — because Jones’s attorneys didn’t pose their queries the right way. This new claim by Clinton will itself be deceitful. He knew perfectly well what he was being asked in January, and he knew perfectly well what his answers were intended to convey. The evidence in our courts and the honor of our president are not supposed to turn on microscopic wordplay.
Come what may this week, in short, Bill Clinton will lie about the intern — again. The only meaningful question remains, as always: What’s to be done about it?
And here the national conversation remains, as always, terribly confused. When the Lewinsky story broke, American reaction was instinctive and nearuniversal. Some people even gave it voice. On January 25, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the Oval Office sex qua Oval Office sex — forget the law — could well prove fatal to Clinton’s presidency because “If it’s so, it represents a disorder.” Two days later, even Hillary Clinton seemed inclined to agree, at least in theory. If a president commits adultery in the White House and dissembles to cover it up, she was asked, should Americans demand his resignation? “Well, they should certainly be concerned about it,” Mrs. Clinton responded. “I think that would be a very serious offense.”
Almost nobody talks this way any longer. The passage of time — as the president obviously hoped it would — has dulled public opinion to the scandal’s lurid details. We have spent most of this year, instead, obsessed with the narrower, safely antiseptic question whether Bill Clinton is guilty of a crime. And now that it seems clear he is guilty — Starr will shortly forward an impeachment report to Congress based exclusively on the Monica Lewinsky controversy — gray-bearded wise men everywhere, Republicans and Democrats alike, are mumbling that even these suspected felonies do not warrant formal public action. If the president offers Starr a pro formal white-lie “confession” this week, the controlling view in Washington lately has it, we should all be prepared to let bygones be bygones. And pretend the scandal never happened.
No can do, we say. This magazine consistently rejected the long-advanced White House line that critics of the president must entirely ignore his “allegedly” repellent private life and either convict him of a crime or shut up. We now reject, in turn, the newly emerging White House line that Clinton must be held practically harmless for the crime — because that crime is, at worst, a lie about his undeniably repellent private life. Yes, the crime is about the lie is about the sex. But there should be no crime for which the president, of all people, is exempt from discipline. And there is a broader principle that must be sustained as well. After all, the particular crime that now rivets the nation’s attention — Clinton’s perjury in the January 17 Paula Jones deposition and whatever obstruction of justice might be associated with it — is just the first and least of the president’s public sins in the Lewinsky scandal.
An on-the-job philanderer lives both his private and public lives in a suffocating vacuum of dishonesty. When the job in question is the presidency, and the lies are maintained even after the philandering is exposed, national politics as a whole is victimized — not just the president’s wife and mistress. In our constitutional order, the president must keep faith with the people who have elected him. In this respect, he is always under oath.
Bill Clinton was under oath this way when, in the Monica eruption’s early hours, he was questioned by reporters about his denial of an “improper relationship” with the intern. Was this lawyer language, they wondered? Was the relationship “in any way sexual,” one of them asked him? “The relationship was not sexual,” the president responded. “And I know what you mean, and the answer is no.”
Bill Clinton was similarly under oath a few days later, when he directed the same denial at a national television audience — in that famous, clenched-jaw, finger-wagging act. He was under oath for months thereafter, as he sent his deputies to attack Ken Starr as a maniac and to clog the courts with spurious assertions of testimonial privilege. It was all a lie. And so all the while, the American presidency was a lie.
Early in Mozart’s opera about another seducer, Don Giovanni makes a solemn promise — “I swear it on my honor” — and almost immediately breaks it. What about your vow, he’s asked by his servant, Leporello? Non so di giuramenti, the Don replies; I know no oath. In the realm of Art, such chronic betrayal is fascinating. But in real life, in the Oval Office, it is intolerable.
Or at least it should be. For his Lewinsky dalliance, and for the brutality with which he has manipulated American politics to conceal that dalliance, Clinton must somehow, in some form, receive official sanction. Don Giovanni was dragged to Hell in the end; we might settle for something less as Clinton’s punishment. But punishment there should be. New and improved lies from the president will not be enough.
David Tell, for the Editors
