President Clinton isn’t often asked about his impeachment these days, for many reasons — the main one being, of course, that nobody cares about it. Another reason has to do with the president’s own way of answering questions about unpleasant subjects, on those rare occasions when such questions arise. A little over a year ago, for instance, holding his first press conference in 12 months, the president was asked by Sam Donaldson about Juanita Broaddrick. News junkies and trivia enthusiasts may remember Mrs. Broaddrick. She says the president raped her in a hotel room, and nobody cares much about her, either, since the economy is performing so marvelously, and even to whisper her name nowadays, among journalists as elsewhere, is considered a gross violation of taste.
Taste is no big deal to Donaldson, as we know, and in this press conference, in March 1999, he made a remarkable discovery: The quickest way to get the president to talk about impeachment is to ask him about rape. At least I think that’s what happened.
Q: Mr. President, when Juanita Broaddrick leveled her charges against you of rape in a nationally televised interview, your attorney David Kendall issued a statement denying them. But shouldn’t you speak directly on this matter and reassure the public? And if they are not true, can you tell us what your relationship with Ms. Broaddrick was, if any?
A: Well, five weeks ago today, five weeks ago today, I stood in the Rose Garden after the Senate voted [in the impeachment trial], and I told you that I thought I owed it to the American people to give them 100 percent of my time and to focus on their business, and that I would leave it to others to decide whether they would follow that lead. And that is why I have decided, as soon as that vote was over, that I — would allow all future questions to be answered by my attorneys. And I think I made the right decision. I hope you can understand it. I think the American people do understand it and support it, and I think it was the right decision.
It is a lovely answer, encapsulating all the twists and back-bends and half-steps and evasions and assertions of rectitude that we expect from a genuine, meticulously formulated Clinton response. First of all, and most crucially, it doesn’t answer the question. The question is simply blown back by a blast-furnace of hot air. Second, the ambiguity is impenetrable. “All future questions” about what? About everything? We know he doesn’t want David Kendall answering questions about targeted tax credits and whatnot. About impeachment, then? Surely he isn’t referring to “all future questions” about rape, since Mrs. Broaddrick’s claim hadn’t been publicly made at the time of his Rose Garden statement, when the president says he made this fateful decision. Then again, maybe he means to imply that he’s expecting more rape accusations — there are a lot of women in Arkansas, after all — and that he doesn’t want to answer them. Who knows? We can only hazard a guess. And here’s mine: The president is saying that all future questions about impeachment will be answered by his lawyers.
And to top it off — what really seals this as a museum-quality Clinton answer — is that it turns out not to be true! When the president says he decided a while back to decline to answer “all future questions,” he implies that he had been answering all previous questions up to that moment. But in fact the president had been declining to answer any questions for close to a year, always with the implication that he would be overjoyed to answer the questions at some future date. The untruth, in other words, is both prospective and retrospective, extending through time, comprehending the past and the future and folding over on itself like an M. C. Escher fantasy. One can only marvel. Is it any wonder that so many of Clinton’s opponents have gone insane?
In the end, however, even the pledge not to answer questions was rescinded. After his March 1999 press conference, the president began, when asked, to comment on impeachment. As I say, he hasn’t been asked terribly often. The White House press corps likes to think of itself as a kennel of pit bulls, but really most of the reporters there are quite domesticated, a bunch of pussycats. They much prefer asking questions like — well, like these, from that same press conference in March 1999, when the reporters confronted the president for the first time since the century’s only presidential impeachment, with accusations of rape and Chinese espionage hovering over him and his administration: “Do you think your wife would be a good senator?” “How are the two of you doing in trying to strengthen your relationship, given everything you and she have been through over this past year?” “Do you consider it a betrayal for former aides to write books on the history of your administration while you’re still in office?” “Sir, will you tell us why you think people have been so mean to you?” (This last was from the octogenarian Sarah McClendon. After the laughter died down, the president said: “Let me give you a serious answer,” and then actually did.)
Even so, President Clinton has been asked a sufficient number of impeachment questions over the last year to begin to piece together how he sees this interesting chapter of his public life. Most recently he went before a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, who were permitted, following his address, to ask him three questions. The first two questions touched on impeachment. (That’s how clueless these out-of-town editors are. They haven’t figured out yet that nobody cares anymore.) One editor asked whether the president would “accept” a pardon from the next president. The next question was whether, or how, the Clinton presidential library will treat the subject of impeachment, and this allowed the president to reflect on the episode in all its historical grandeur. For the episode fairly drips with historical grandeur, in the president’s view.
“On impeachment,” the president said, “I am proud of what we did there, because I think we saved the Constitution of the United States.” The transcript of the president’s appearance is sketchy, but I have closely read contemporaneous news accounts, and astonishingly there is no evidence that following this remark any of the editors fell to the floor in a dead faint, clawed the air in a grotesque pantomime of terror, or even ran gasping from the room to the hotel bar. Apparently the president felt sufficiently encouraged by this to continue, which he did, saying, “I’m not ashamed of the fact that they impeached me. That was their decision, not mine, and it was wrong. As a matter of law, Constitution, and history, it was wrong.”
It was, in fact, one in a series of wrongs that the president has had to take it upon himself to right. “I consider impeachment one of the major chapters in my defeat of the revolution Mr. Gingrich led, that would have taken this country in a very different direction than it’s going today,” the president went on. “And it also would have changed the Constitution forever . . . ”
In its grandiosity, in its sheer ostentation, this view seems to have startled some people, but it conforms generally with the president’s other pronouncements about impeachment. The pronouncements follow a format. When asked about the subject — or indeed whenever a questioner ventures into the general neighborhood of Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey (not a high-rent neighborhood) — the president first acknowledges, for the record, a mistake, and notes that he has apologized for it, although when precisely this apology took place is unclear. The mistake, further, is always a “personal mistake,” a “self-inflicted” mistake in “private conduct.” And what was that personal mistake, specifically? Was it the nailing of the intern, or was it the public denial of the nailing? Was it mobilizing his wife, the Office of the President, and several cabinet secretaries in furtherance of that denial for the better part of a year? Was it getting caught? We cannot know, and of course no one has dared to ask. In the president’s account of impeachment there’s just a nameless mistake, stark and naked and alone, unconnected to anything before or after.
The mistake marks a boundary, in other words, the point at which the president’s culpability ends and beyond which the president stands blameless. Why then was there an impeachment? By his own account, as it happens, the impeachment was not a consequence of the president’s misconduct but of his virtue. “In our country’s history,” he told a press conference last June, “the people who are progressive, the people who try to change things, people who keep pushing the envelope, have generally elicited very strong, sometimes personally hostile negative reactions. You read some of the things people said about President Roosevelt.”
The president has discoursed frequently on Franklin Roosevelt since the impeachment, as another man whose greatness shines undimmed by his enemies’ hostility. (“You say people say I parse words too close,” he told Dan Rather last year. “That’s what they said about President Roosevelt, too. And he made a pretty good president.”) In describing his tribulations he has also invoked the experience of several biblical figures as well as Nelson Mandela — although he agrees that Mandela’s 27 years at hard labor make his own year of discomfort seem like “peanuts.” The president has his own kind of modesty.
His impeachment was thus a persecution whose roots lie exclusively in the perfidy of others — Republicans, actually. “They knew that the American people agreed with my ideas,” he said last March, “and the direction in which I was taking the country.” They were driven to extra-constitutional measures by his political success. “They did not agree with what I had done and they were furious that it had worked and that the country was doing well.” Crazed by the unemployment figures, the lowered crime rates, and the soaring Dow Jones Industrial Average, Republicans saw impeachment as their only recourse. “They attempted to use what should have been a constitutional and legal process for political ends.”
Now, this is a pretty serious charge — sedition, when you get right down to it — and you or I might think that the people who were guilty of it should face some kind of penalty. Many on the White House staff feel that way, according to the president. But he is a bigger man than you or I, bigger even than those on his staff. He has encouraged them in the art of forgiveness. “I keep telling everybody that works for me that we have no right to harbor anger,” he said last June. “I have no lingering animosity. . . . I realized that if I wanted forgiveness, I had to extend forgiveness. If I wanted to be free to be the best president and the best husband and father and the best person I could be, I had to free myself of bitterness. And I’ve worked very hard at it.”
No one should be surprised, in light of this, that the president believes his own interests and the interests of the Constitution are essentially the same; the president has an outsized view of impeachment because he has an outsized view of himself. He has always been a master of inversions — of turning the meaning of things inside out to his advantage. But here, as his presidency draws to a close, he has pulled off the grandest inversion of all. By his own telling he has emerged from the ordeal of impeachment not as a perjurer, not as an abuser of power, not even as a cad — but as a molder of character, a forgiver of sins, a saint.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
