It turns out, just as we always suspected, that Bill Clinton really is human, after all. He has appeared vaguely inhuman, of course, to friend and foe alike, through much of his career. For his dazzled admirers, he has been a comic-book hero made real, a public figure of para-normal steel and skill, able to make unfathomably complicated political calculations faster than a speeding bullet — and thereby to leap tall obstacles of fact and logic in a single bound. For his most horrified detractors, this very same quality has made Clinton something dark as night, but every bit as awe-inspiring: an unstoppable engine of deceit, a force more potent than Truth itself.
Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, needless to say, we have consistently been inclined to the view that Bill Clinton is an uncommon liar. But we have never been prepared to concede that there was anything supernatural, unconquerable, about the lies themselves. There are some things in life, in certain circumstances, that no man can talk his way out of. And for the president, we have always thought, Monica Lewinsky would prove such a case. There would come a time when the size and scope of this particular lie exhausted even Clinton’s considerable powers of deception. He would make a choice that led inexorably to the place he most feared to go: exposure.
That process began last week. The president agreed to submit to detailed questioning about Lewinsky by Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors. From the perspective of standard Clinton mythology — which requires him always to land on his feet — it was a decision that made little sense at all.
For most of this year, following his initial, sweeping denial, the president has pursued a remarkably successful strategy of silence and delay. He has dared the country at large to disbelieve him. And he has employed an arsenal of aides and attorneys — armed with lurid smears and ludicrous legal arguments — to deter the independent counsel from collecting “proof” that he should be disbelieved. In their bones, it seems fairly clear, most Americans stopped believing Bill Clinton some time ago. But so long as his innocence has remained theoretically possible, so long as apparently serious people in suits and ties have battled on his behalf, most Americans have also been prepared to submerge their suspicions and hope for the best. No rational person pleasurably contemplates the chaos of a crippled presidency.
Faced with Ken Starr’s July 17 subpoena, Clinton might well have persisted in such a plan and continued to benefit from national discomfort with the scandal. He might, in ostentatious “good faith,” have bargained over his testimony with Starr — only in the end to resist the demands of an “out of control” prosecutor. He might have ignored, as constitutionally unenforceable, any resulting contempt-of-court citation. He might, for that matter, have preemptively litigated Starr’s subpoena. The only purpose of such compelled testimony, the Justice Department would presumably have contended, is to support an indictment of the president, in advance of impeachment. Which the Constitution, again, may not allow.
True, Clinton might ultimately have lost all these arguments. But each would have touched on a genuinely unresolved and serious question of law. Much stupider and more cynical stuff has worked well for the president before — in the polls and, at least where stalling is concerned, in the courts.
And yet he did not take this obvious chance. He acquiesced instead. Clinton will finally speak, “voluntarily” but under oath, two weeks from now on August 17. Why? Is near-term testimony, on penalty of (renewed) perjury, his safest bet for long-term legal and political security? It most definitely is not. Our guess is that this bargain with Starr was driven not so much by the president’s allegedly infallible instinct for public survival, but by more immediate, almost pitiably personal impulses.
For all his surface bravado and calm, Clinton is actually a weak and desperate fellow. He is a narcissist; “The Big He,” Monica Lewinsky called him, indelibly. The narcissist must issue even the grossest boasts, even the pettiest chicaneries, on a round-the-clock basis. (I know more about farming than any other president in history. I didn’t inhale.) The narcissist must lie this way to protect his heart’s true object: the fiction of his own perfection. He must see that perfection reflected in the fantasy-enabling eyes of those around him. And if he sees grave doubt in those eyes, instead, the bubble is burst and his identity collapses. Last week, Bill Clinton could not help but see doubt.
When Monica Lewinsky made a deal to provide her own grand-jury testimony last week, the conclusion of this scandal came at last into view. Yes, indeed, the few remaining investigative leads would soon be tied down. Yes, indeed, an authoritative account of the investigation, Starr’s long-awaited report to Congress, would soon be delivered. And how did Clinton’s loyalists always assume he would handle this inevitable end game? What did Hillary and his lawyers — and Sid Blumenthal and Geraldo Rivera and all the other assorted dupes and doofuses — expect the president to do in the exciting final reel?
They expected him to perform his legendary verbal magic tricks once more, and explain it all away. The Starr subpoena was Clinton’s cue for such an act. Had he missed it, he would have tacitly confirmed that the whole thing was a giant, hideous fib. That there was no exculpatory “alternative theory” for Monica Lewinsky. That he really is just a middle-aged man who committed in-the-office adultery with a 21-year-old intern. And who broke one or more laws — and manipulated the country’s government — to conceal the sin.
This our president cannot admit. Ever. If he does, he will reveal his wife and friends for the fools he has made of them, and thus lose the most important thing in life: their weirdly automatic esteem. He was losing it, for a moment already, early last week. “People are growing increasingly concerned,” one Clinton “adviser” told the Washington Post, “about the mound of evidence” against him. That evidence seemed, to these people, nearly “overwhelming.”
So to forestall their defection and thus preserve his self-regard for a few more weeks or months, the president has now promised yet another Houdini routine. When he testifies August 17, his handlers vehemently — and convincingly — proclaim, he will stick with his story. But he cannot possibly pull it off.
Monica Lewinsky, after all, risking jail if she doesn’t tell the truth, will swear that she did have sex with the president. That she did discuss with him the construction of a falsified account of their relationship. That she did, at his suggestion, evade a subpoena for material evidence of the affair. That one such piece of evidence did include a stained and incriminating dress. That he did leave otherwise inexplicable answering-machine messages at her home.
This, on top of the already accumulated, corroborating evidence of several dozen grand-jury witnesses and thousands of pieces of paper. It is a circle that cannot be squared. Fresh perjuries by the president can only add more stink.
And when the nation finally — this year, most likely — gets a full-breath whiff of the whole thing? When the Starr report is finally available for inspection, what then? We are still unwilling to predict the practical effect on American politics. Bill Clinton may or may not serve out his term. But, either way, this much we have never been more sure of: The president’s Monica Lewinsky lie is doomed. And so therefore, where it matters most to him, is he.
David Tell, for the Editors
