LITERARY STARR

I made that last one up. The New York Review has yet to weigh in on the Starr Report, and I’m betting that their reviewer will hate it in any case, although Gore Vidal might enjoy parts of it. Indeed, as the world knows, the notices have been far from unanimously favorable. Reviewers have sniffed at what they consider the report’s dry prose, specious argumentation, and leaden pacing. But such criticisms are unfair. If courtesy to the reader is taken to be the first principle of good writing, as it should be, then Ken Starr and the other lawyerly authors of the Starr Report get high marks.

“Most readers are in trouble half the time,” wrote E. B. White, and Starr takes great care in laying things out as directly as possible for his intended audience of congressmen, who are liable to be in trouble much more than half the time. Many readers will have difficulty following Starr’s labyrinthine story-line and swirling cast. For their sake he has decided to open the report with a dramatis personae, identifying everyone from the president to the White House receptionist, and a two-page chronology of significant events. Its first entry is ominous, carrying in eleven words the grim, premonitory rumbles of danger: “November 1992: William Jefferson Clinton elected president of the United States.” From here the entries proceed, with a kind of stark inevitability, to their logical culmination. “Independent Counsel submits Referral [on impeachment] to Congress.” The last entry seems an unavoidable extension of the first.

In between them lies the story of the Lewinsky affair. Character is plot, say the creative-writing teachers, by which they mean (I think) that stories must unfold organically from the characters who cause them to happen. That is surely the case with the story Starr has to tell. Its outlines are slowly growing familiar: the first sexual encounter in November 1995, then the next, and the next, until, at last, after the sixth bout of oral sex, when Monica is reassured that the president has memorized her name, they settle down to “their first personal conversation.” But all this gab-gab-gab is too much for the president. Shortly afterwards he orchestrates a painful breakup. This is followed by Monica’s banishment to a remote post at the Pentagon — the wilderness months, as Churchill might have described them, relieved only by a half-dozen sessions of phone sex. (Some kinds of gab-gab-gab are more tolerable than others.) Suddenly, without warning, the president resumes the in-person sex, then causes another break-up, and the romance dissolves into the usual ugly stew of recriminations, resentments, jealousies, and more phone sex. Not to mention affidavits, depositions, grand-jury testimony, and — the denouement, still to come — impeachment hearings.

It’s not exactly Romeo and Juliet. It’s too believable. And like all believable stories it is propelled by character — at its heart, the characters of Monica and Bill. Starr presents them, as a skilled storyteller must, through the accretion of exquisite detail and telling incident. Consider, for starters, their first sexual encounter. It is evening. The scene is Leon Panetta’s office, a place not normally charged with sexual electricity. Yet the president and the intern find themselves unexpectedly alone. Wordlessly, Monica turns her back to him and lifts her shirt-tail, to expose the straps of her thong underwear rising above the back of her pants. This is all it takes, and as you read of her offer, and of his acceptance, you know them both instantly. Baboons do the same thing.

What are we to make of Monica? From other sources, we know she graduated from the high school that served as the model for Beverly Hills 90210, and anyone who says the show defamed the school’s students owes its creator Aaron Spelling an apology. Monica bubbles and burbles in the president’s presence, but when the romance sours she can hiss and claw, too. She is gifted in the arts of extortion. It is she who suggests enlisting Vernon Jordan in her job-search pay-off. She says frankly that she “wants a job she doesn’t have to work for.” And when she’s offered one — at the U.N., where no one has to work for anything — she rejects it as beneath her. She repeatedly lies to the president, saying she’s told nobody of their encounters. (“Nobody” at first means an assortment of eleven roommates, college pals, and co-workers; now it means everybody.) She sends him vaguely threatening letters. And of course she does, in the end, rat him out to the cops.

But this dark side of Monica emerges only after she’s been involved with Bill Clinton for many months; she’s learning from the master. Earlier in the story, Monica — though scheming and recklessly ambitious and clumsily manipulative — is merely star-struck and given to crushes. The love notes she sometimes sends are adorned with little bears. She’s eager to please in whatever way possible, chatty and chirpy, a walking exclamation point. She is guileless enough to have assumed at first that her famous dress was stained with “spinach dip.” Most likely this early Monica is closer to the young woman as she really is. And if you want conclusive evidence of her innocence, look no farther: As late as December 1997, she was one of the few remaining human beings who thought Bill Clinton was capable of telling the truth. When he praised her intellect, she believed him. When he told her he missed her, she believed him. And when he hinted he might marry her someday, she believed that too.

Being a college graduate, Monica is only semi-literate, and the long passages Starr reprints from her letters are always footnoted “spelling and punctuation corrected.” (Meow, Ken!) In prose as elsewhere, the style is the man — or in this case the Valley Girl. When she writes to the president about “looking in your eyes while you explored the depth of my sex,” you know she’s at least read Anais Nin. And now she’s read Walt Whitman, too, thanks to the president, who gave her a leather-bound edition of Leaves of Grass. Of all the gifts from the president — the hat pin, the scarf, the signed copy of a reprint of his 1996 State of the Union address — this was the most precious, because, I don’t know, it was just, like, so . . . oh heck, let her tell it:

I have only read excerpts from Leaves of Grass before — never in its entirety or in such a beautifully bound edition. Like Shakespeare, Whitman’s writings are so timeless. I find solace in works from the past that remain profound and some-how always poignant. Whitman is so rich that one must read him like one tastes a fine wine or good cigar — take it in, roll it in your mouth, and savor it!

Ah yes: that damn cigar. Already it’s the stuff of legend, an off-the-shelf gag for the joke writers of Leno and Letterman, a national symbol looming over the Clinton White House like a brown-leaf Washington Monument. So let’s get this over with right now:

January 7: . . . The president “was talking about performing oral sex on me,” according to Ms. Lewinsky. But she stopped him because she was menstruating and he did not. Ms. Lewinsky did perform oral sex on him. Afterward, she and the president moved to Oval Office and talked. According to Ms. Lewinsky: “He was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, sometime.”

And sure enough:

March 31: . . . In the hallway by the study, the president and Ms. Lewinsky kissed. On this occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, “he focused on me pretty exclusively,” kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals. At one point, the president inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina, then put the cigar in his mouth and said: “It tastes good.”

Our president is an interesting man. He is large, he contains multitudes, but in many ways he is curiously restrained. His efforts to tamper with witnesses and otherwise impede the administration of justice, though persuasively established by Starr, have a constipated quality. You can account for this reticence by assuming a fear of getting caught, or a gift for trimming honed to perfection by long experience. But how to account for the nature of the sexual dalliances themselves?

He wants to keep them a secret, for example, yet insists that the doors to the hallway or the bathroom, where the encounters occur, remain open. This is one of the many oddities established as a routine during their first occasion of intimacy. After kisses and minimal small talk, they retire to the shadowy hallway between the Oval Office and the bathroom. She performs oral sex on him, but he pushes her away before she can “bring him to completion,” in Starr’s gentle euphemism. She asks him why. He tells her he doesn’t know her well enough. They’ve just met, after all, and some things are too intimate for strangers to share. So perhaps he masturbates into the bathroom sink.

An interesting man, a complex man. And occasionally Starr’s gift for characterization fails him, for his account of the president often raises more questions than it answers. On Valentine’s Day, for instance, Monica places a classified ad to the president in the personals section of the Washington Post, quoting a passage from Shakespeare, who is timeless. The next time he sees her, two weeks later, he tells he saw it and thanks her for it. We never learn how it came to the president’s attention — the two were incommunicado at that point — but it is no longer unreasonable to imagine the president of the United States lingering over the ISOs in the local paper. When he’s not doing the work the American people sent him here to do.

His vanity is vast. One time when Monica pesters him to allow her to perform oral sex on him, he refuses, caressing her cheek and saying compassionately: “Every day can’t be sunshine.” This is one of the report’s deathless bits of dialogue, destined for a permanent place in the national Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations alongside Watergate’s “But it would be wrong” and “Twist slowly, slowly in the wind.” Another example: He calls her at six o’ clock one morning, waking her up, and suggests they have phone sex; as soon as they are through, the president announces: “Good morning! What a way to start the day!” And finally, near the end of their affair, he grants her request to bring him to completion by saying, “I don’t want to disappoint you.” Then the moron gets spinach dip on her dress.

What are we to make of the president’s habits, particularly his refusal, on eight of their ten encounters, to allow Monica to bring him to completion? It might appear that the president is somehow guided by scruple: I will go this far and no farther. Armchair experts have speculated about his penchant for oral sex — how he perhaps thinks it isn’t really sex, thus not adultery, thus not a sin. The scruple is absurd but at least it’s a scruple. But you can overthink the president’s sex life, rather quickly in fact. After all, this withholding of ejaculation — this refusal to satisfy his intern with intercourse — this furious “self-pleasuring” — this may be what he likes. When he pushes Monica away and hunches over the bathroom sink, “finishing the job himself,” he is finally having sex with someone he loves.

Starr has been chastised for including sexual detail in his report, of course. The criticism is silly, since the president’s perjury turns on whether he had sex, and where and when and how he had it. (The who is stipulated.) But as you read along, you see the sex shade into the lying, and the lying radiate outward until it subsumes his staff and his friends, and then the legal system and eventually the country, and you realize that the story of the president’s various forms of misbehavior is in fact indivisible. The sex is the perjury is the abuse of power. One final example will prove the point: It was the president’s pleasure, on at least two occasions, to expose himself to his intern and instruct her to perform oral sex as he spoke on the phone. One of these calls, we know now, was to congressman Sonny Callahan, and we know further, thanks to reporting by John Kass of the Chicago Tribune, what the subject of that call was: to lobby Callahan’s support for sending troops to Bosnia.

Callahan is chagrined, as you might imagine, and issued a statement to Kass. “I do not have any recollection,” Callahan insists, “of any inappropriate behavior or comments from the president during my conversation.” It’s unclear how the congressman could have sensed that something was amiss. (Maybe if he’d heard a sudden “Good Morning!”) Do we really need to know, as the critics say we do not, that the commander in chief was having oral sex as he considered sending troops to a war zone? Well, yes: It would certainly be nice to know. In some instances, it appears, the president’s famous facility for compartmentalization fails him — as it doubtless has before, and surely will again.

In the interest of critical balance, and in hopes of frustrating the blurbpluckers, I should note that the Starr Report fails as literature in important respects — slow in spots and bloodless throughout, and occasionally disjointed in its storytelling. As a legal document, it may have its shortcomings also. But it must be read. (“It must be read!” — THE WEEKLY STANDARD.) Don’t be deterred by the ponderous prose, the zig-zag organization, and above all don’t be put off by its length. It’s a fat book, yes, but the extent of Clinton’s miscreancy is pretty big, too; if you want a shorter book, find a different president to impeach. The Starr Report, in any case, is intended to be more than literature — more, even, than a legal document. It is meant to be an emetic, to induce at last the great national upchuck of Bill Clinton. And on this count it will succeed beyond its authors’ wildest expectation.

 

Kenneth W. Starr, et al.

The Starr Report

The Independent Counsel’s Complete Report to Congress on the Investigation of President Clinton

Pocket, 512 pp., $ 5.99

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.