BILL CLINTON’S QUIZ SHOW

In the late 1950s, Goodwin himself played Kenneth Starr, to the William J. Clinton of Charles Van Doren, the tousled-haired scion of an intellectual dynasty who was even more winsome than Clinton himself. The case was a government investigation of Twenty-One, a rigged quiz show that Van Doren appeared on, in which, to keep audience interest high, attractive contestants were fed answers to questions, and others, less lovable, were told to miss questions when the sponsors though it was time to let them go.

In the film Quiz Show, Goodwin (played by Rob Morrow) is the white knight, conscience personified, the legitimate voice of the wrath of the nation, the counterpoint to the pervasive corruption around him. The only problem is that, by Goodwin’s current standards, there was no reason at all for the state to go after the show, as the deceit revealed in Van Doren and others was rather less sinister than that of which Goodwin wants Clinton absolved. The Twenty-One scandal fell far short of the events that should interest the voters or the government (according to this view). No evil intent was expressed toward the audience — merely a wish to give it a more intense and dramatically scripted viewing experience than chance alone would provide. Some people got money they didn’t deserve, but the ones handing it out were the sponsors, who appeared happy to spend it.

And the motives of the rigged contestants were no worse than Clinton’s: He wanted sex, they wanted money — two understandable human objectives, and the giving of both was largely consensual. No outside parties seem to have been damaged. No one died on foreign shores; no government policies were changed. So why then did Goodwin harass all those people 40 years ago? What was all the fuss about?

Seen today, Quiz Show appears as a template, a model for deceit and exposure. As in Watergate and Whitewater and this current scandal, there is a crime and a cover-up; then a stonewall; then a break-through; then a deluge. There are defectors and turn-coats; tapes made; accusations of lunacy. An ex-contestant, kicked off the program for terminal nerdiness, threatens to expose the producers; his rantings are taped, and then edited to make him sound crazy and discredit his tale in advance. This works for a time, but more proof emerges: Another contestant mails himself a registered letter, containing the questions to be asked of him, and the answers to them, two days before the (live) program is aired. Threats are made, but there is soon yet more evidence: A John Dean defects. A Linda Tripp gets scared, and starts taping. A Monica Lewinsky shows up with a dress. As the pressure rises, Van Doren stonewalls with charm, the same charm that has made him a national cover boy.

But the real parallels are with the kinescope tapes (not yet videotapes). Mesmerized, Goodwin/Morrow sits through hours of reels, observing the performance of cheats on the hot seat, watching their displays of scripted sincerity as they pretend they are genuine. They furrow their brows. They pat their brows (not wipe them — that would look wrong, they are told). They stumble and hesitate, as instructed. They — yes — bite their lips. In time, when Hollywood makes the real Clinton movie — think Quiz Show plus Nixon plus Primary Colors — there will doubtless by many canned shots such as these, as the star is taken through many screenings, hair changing somewhat in color and contour, but with never a change in tone of voice: “I didn’t inhale”; “I was never drafted”; “I never slept with that woman” (or that woman or that woman); “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and “I never told anybody to lie, not a single time.” And Richard Goodwin may have a part in this flick, too — not a star turn, like his role in Quiz Show, but a bit part, a walk-on; a Rabbi Korff reprise from the Watergate saga, helping the lead limp off stage.

Goodwin, alas, isn’t the only Camelot relic to miss the point. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., too, has been weighing in, clucking that not only were Clinton’s tiny white lies unimportant but that even thinking about them is in the poorest taste. “If Mr. Clinton is not being truthful, his deceptions have to do with his sex life,” he informs us. “Most people have lied about their sex lives at one time or another. You lie to protect yourself, your spouse, your lover, your children. Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives. Only a cad would tell the truth about his sexual affairs.”

Well. Gentlemen may lie, and perhaps have done so, but the definition hardly applies in this case. This, after all, is no gentleman. This is our President, the man who sics his henchmen on women who threaten his power. Do gentlemen trash ladies, who both accept and reject his advances? Do gentlemen deny ladies their rights to fair trials? Do gentlemen lie under oath? How about trying to mislead the public, defaming the names of many dead people who are blameless of crime, if not of sin? Gallantly, Dick Goodwin names other adulterers (including some about who nothing has ever been proven), but he, like Schlesinger, must know that this isn’t the point. How many times were John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Franklin Roosevelt sued for harassment? How many women were they accused of assaulting? How many were they accused of trying to threaten or blackmail? When did they lie under oath?

Goodwin and Schlesinger — those relentless critics of Nixon and Watergate — are now quick to defend lies and liars. What made them so? Could it be that the liar in question is the first Democrat to be elected president since 1976, and the first one to be reelected since 1944? Goodwin and Schlesinger were Kennedy hangers-on, who spent the years after 1963 in search of successors, none of whom seemed to pan out. Camelot II died in 1968 with Robert F. Kennedy. Camelot III drove off Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Schlesinger tried to spin this last episode into a growth experience for Edward M. Kennedy, but no one was buying, and in 1980 it became clear that this horse had been sidelined.

There followed 12 years of heirlessness (and Republican presidents) until 1992, when the charisma gap was made up by Bill Clinton, assisted by Hillary, a badly dressed Jacqueline Kennedy who vowed to run rings around Mrs. Roosevelt. But the closest Clinton could come to FDR (or to JFK, for that matter) was a few weeks on crutches. The Clintons lost health care through their own misjudgments and since then have been forced to play defense. After much tawdriness, it has become clear that the Clinton White House is Dogpatch, not Camelot IV, and that 35 years of liberal preening have given us only a smoother, glad-handing Richard Nixon, with merely the very worst traits of John Kennedy.

So how do you admit that things turned out this badly, when your whole stock in trade is your morals and prescience? You don’t. You pretend (a) that nothing is wrong or (b) that whatever is wrong doesn’t matter. At this stage, Plan A is impossible, so Plan B has been wheeled into action. When the stench from the Rose Garden is too strong to ignore, you try to describe it as attract of roses, and not the manure it really is. If there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, there are also damned lies and lies that don’t matter. Damned lies are lies told by your enemies. Lies that don’t matter are told by your friends.

And when your friends don’t like laws, laws too don’t matter and can be skirted with impunity. Clinton is a man who enforces laws for other people that he feels no obligation to follow; a man who lies and breaks laws with no remorse or compunction; who utters the truth only when cornered; who believes in one law for himself and another for others; who breaks codes that he himself signs into law. This is a lawless executive, the prime threat to civil and orderly government. And in this, Arthur Schlesinger sees merely a pretext to muck about in the seamy affairs of Our Leader, and he calls Clinton’s defenses the acts of a “gentleman.”

“Many people seem to feel that questions no one has a right to ask do not call for truthful answers,” Schlesinger says. Oh? What a pity those in the dock during the Watergate hearings never knew that they could decide for themselves what their tormentors had a right to ask, and could tailor their answers accordingly.

This strikes at the heart of the law. Politics is above all the great confrontation between law and power; the battle to save law from the transgressions of power; to make sure power stays on law’s side. This is our central political drama. It is transnational, it is bipartisan, and it is eternal. It is what politics is. It was the issue in 1215, in 1640, in 1688, in 1776, in 1974, and it still is the issue. It is the struggle to make sure that the great field is level, for otherwise all resolutions formed on it are questionable, corrupt, illegitimate.

The case against Clinton is not that his interests are prurient, but that he is suspected of breaking the law, of tilting the playing field unfairly in his own direction, of violating campaign-finance laws in the 1996 election, of looting a savings and loan back in Arkansas, of witness-tampering. True, he is the first president whose genitals and bodily fluids have become objects of public discourse, but this is a tangential matter. Sex is merely one of the forms that his law-breaking takes. The problem is breaking the law.

And law used to matter to liberal moralists — including to Quiz Show scourges. Apparently not anymore.

Noemie Emery, a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, lives in Alexandria, Va.