We now know three things for sure that we did not know two weeks ago when the president of the United States categorically denied both a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and an attempt to dissuade her from contradicting him.
First of all, we know he was lying.
When a political job came open at the Pentagon’s public-affairs office in April 1996, six months after she first made personal contact with Clinton, Lewinsky was the only candidate the White House proposed. The West Wing was eager to get rid of her for what its spokesman has officially termed ” inappropriate and immature behavior,” a judgment that other aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, have since clarified: She was lingering around the president way too much, in a swoon, and making everybody nervous.
Eighteen months later, in October 1997, attorneys for Paula Jones caught wind of this young woman’s existence and issued a subpoena to Linda Tripp, the friend with whom Lewinsky had shared details of a dalliance with Clinton. It suddenly became very important to lots of people that Monica Lewinsky get out of town. Clinton deputy chief of staff John Podesta — who, according to last week’s New Yorker, is known at the White House, for his clean-up work on the president’s personal scandals, as the “Secretary of Sh-t” — arranged a job interview for Lewinsky with Bill Richardson, the American U.N. ambassador in New York. Richardson claims to have been impressed by her ” qualifications, initiative, and reputation as a hard worker.”
But the position he offered Lewinsky paid only $ 24,000 and she was already making $ 32,736 at the Defense Department, so she turned it down. And now the situation got desperate. During the first week of December, the Paula Jones legal team notified their Clinton counterparts that they intended to call Monica Lewinsky as a witness at trial.
At this point, the president’s best friend, Washington super-fixer Vernon Jordan, took charge of the Lewinsky portfolio. He arranged a series of contacts for her at New York-based corporations on whose boards he sits. When she was served her Paula Jones subpoena, on December 17, he got her a lawyer. And when Lewinsky got wobbly — jobless and panicky on December 28, she met privately with the president in the White House, where the New York Times has them discussing how she might describe all her past visits to the West Wing — Jordan redoubled his efforts.
Last month, in short order, the deed was done. On January 7, Lewinsky swore to an affdavit that said she had never had sex with the president. On January 8, Vernon Jordan got her a second interview with the Revlon corporation. On January 13, Revlon offered her a $ 40,000 salary. On January 14, Lewinsky gave Linda Tripp a set of written “talking points” on the Paula Jones case, which urged Tripp to be a “team player” and to consult with “Bennett’s people” — the president’s lawyers — before submitting an affidavit of her own. On January 16, Robert Bennett, on Clinton’s behalf, filed Monica Lewinsky’s affidavit with the court.
And on January 17, during a formal deposition by Paula Jones’s attorneys, the president himself, under oath, insisted that his contact with Lewinsky was innocent. While, at almost the exact same instant, Lewinsky was being tape-recorded by the FBI, confirming that innocence had nothing to do with it.
In her chillingly audacious interviews with the NBC and ABC morning news shows last week, Hillary Clinton essentially rejected the material reality of all this evidence. “We know very few facts right now,” she said, though she presumably knows everything and refuses to divulge any of it. All there is to go on, Mrs. Clinton suggested, are “false allegations” and “hypotheticals” cooked up by Kenneth Starr, a “politically motivated prosecutor” in league with a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” And what right-wing conspiracy might that be, exactly? It has something to do with Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell, the mere mention of whom the First Lady believes should end the matter for good. “If you find a turtle on a fence post,” as her husband likes to say, ” it didn’t get there by accident.”
No, indeed. By a clear preponderance of the turtles, and beyond a reasonable doubt, Bill Clinton is lying about Monica Lewinsky.
The second thing we’ve lately learned is that the people closest to the president know he’s lying, too. They have to know it. They have all the facts that we do, and more. “Everyone who knows Clinton knows that he has an Achilles’ heel and it’s located in his groin,” one White House aide told the New Yorker. “The problem is that what we’re hearing sounds true, it smells true.”
And the third thing we’ve learned is the most depressing. We know he’s lying. They know he’s lying. They know we know he’s lying. But the president’s men have nevertheless decided to sign up for the deception. They don’t care that we know they’re lying. In fact, they want to, implicate us in their deception.
They do not, it’s important to note, seek to persuade us. No real exculpatory theory is offered to explain the president’s attention to Lewinsky. He gave her a dress? He’s just a friendly guy. Vernon Jordan’s extraordinary assistance to this young nobody? Vernon Jordan, who is, according to a White House aide quoted by the New Yorker, John Podesta’s private-sector doppelganger, “the off-the-books Secretary of Sh-t”? Vernon Jordan, who last month, at a party, told someone that he and Clinton do little more than “talk p-ssy” while they’re playing golf?. Well, Jordan, too, is just a friendly guy. A very friendly guy.
This is preposterous, and the White House does not really expect anyone to believe it. They expect instead, as they openly admit, that they can maintain the president’s denial by stonewalling all future public questions about it. They expect, as a legal matter, that the president can never be indicted. They expect, as a political matter, that the president can never be impeached. They expect, in short, that they can ultimately survive, that they can pretend away the truth. And they expect that public opinion will join them in the pretending.
They may be right about this. Ordinary Americans, in their good-natured, admirable way, wish always to think the best of their president. They shrink to the point of self-delusion from the conclusion that he is, as Monica Lewinsky put it, a “creep.” Before they get mad at the presidential creep himself, voters will get mad at the people who report on his creepiness. The polls are fairly clear about this: It is happening already.
But it is deeply unhealthy, and it is Bill Clinton’s fault. Other presidents have lied to protect secrets. Lies about secrets corrupt only the liar. This is something different. This president is lying, lying boldly and fabulously, about something everybody already knows. He has extended this corruption to his colleagues, by asking them to lie with him and securing their cooperation. And all of them together are attempting something unprecedented, almost unimaginable. They are attempting to corrupt the entire country — to make it complicit, by acquiescence, in a glaring, disgusting falsehood.
President Clinton has been searching for a legacy. This will be it.
David Tell, for the Editors
