This week, the American people, acting through their senators in Washington, will formally choose to retain Bill Clinton as president for the remainder of his elected term. What this decision might imply for our nation’s culture and politics is no doubt an almost endless question. The White House scandal of 1998-99 will hang over us — whether or not we realize it, or want it to — for years to come.
In at least one no less ominous respect, however, the meaning of Clinton’s acquittal is already clear. We are speaking here of the de minimis standards of integrity imposed on the federal government’s executive branch. We would not have thought this a matter of dispute between competing philosophies of conservatism and liberalism. We would not have thought it possible. But it is now a great deal more than possible. It is an inescapable fact: There are certain circumstances, it turns out, in which public opinion — sustained by a nearly unanimous Democratic party — is prepared to accept obvious felony crimes by the president of the United States.
This seems to us a rather important point. The president’s crimes are obvious. They are obvious even where the Washington press and political establishment — despite their self-professed and much-bemoaned “obsession” with the controversy — have so far failed to discern them. Consider, for example, what is widely considered the less persuasive of the two impeachment articles against the president: grand jury perjury. Consider, for that matter, what is widely considered the least persuasive element of this less persuasive charge: the suggestion that Bill Clinton perjured himself by postdating the inception of his “inappropriate intimate contact” with Monica Lewinsky.
Lewinsky has always been unequivocal on this point, and she reconfirmed it during her Senate deposition last Monday. The affair began on November 15, 1995, during the week-long “government shutdown” fight with Congress. At around 8 p.m., on a trip to the ladies’ room, Lewinsky passed by George Stephanopoulos’s West Wing office and noticed Clinton inside. Though the two had barely ever spoken before — she had done little more than introduce herself or wish him a “nice trip” at South Lawn departure ceremonies — the president beckoned her to join him. In a matter of minutes, she flashed him her famous thong panties and they drifted over to Clinton’s private Oval Office hallway for a kiss.
Sometime over the course of the next two hours, thinking ahead, Lewinsky removed her thong. At around 10 p.m., the president again invited her to meet him in Stephanopoulos’s office, from which they again walked to the hallway complex near the Oval Office. This time, as Paula Jones’s attorneys would say, Clinton touched Lewinsky “with the intent to gratify.” She was gratified, she later reported to the FBI, and she gratified the president in return — while he had an extended phone conversation with a member of the House of Representatives. At the end of which, the president said good-bye to his intern and went upstairs for dinner with his wife.
Why would Clinton behave this way with Monica Lewinsky? Perhaps, Lewinsky later mused to FBI investigators, “the president’s regular girlfriend had been furloughed” by the budget battle and was temporarily stuck at home, unable to do her duty.
The president, for his part, says he did not behave this way. Not, at least, with so much desperate speed, and not so early as November 15, 1995. In a prepared statement read at the start of his grand jury appearance last August, Clinton acknowledged past personal wrongdoing with the young lady and expressed regret that “what began as a friendship” eventually — in “early 1996,” no sooner — “came to include this conduct.”
Now, nobody believes him about this, not even, we suspect, his own attorneys. But the question has only ever been: Does it matter? And the White House has always insisted, to great effect with congressional and media observers alike, that it does not. It is “an utterly meaningless disparity in testimony about dates that are of absolutely no consequence whatsoever,” special counsel to the president Gregory Craig told the Senate on January 20. At worst, Clinton’s defenders contend, the president fudged the chronology of his sexual relationship with an intern simply to avoid admitting one final, humiliating truth: that “what began as a friendship,” based on their mutual interest in Lewinsky’s g-string underwear, “came to include” some quickie sex acts — in the space of an hour and a half.
Petty vanity like this, all seem to be agreed, is not a criminal, much less impeachable, offense.
And everyone is wrong about that. Because petty vanity has almost nothing to do with the Clinton-Lewinsky disagreement over what happened on November 15, 1995.
Remember the immutable laws of physics by which this president’s habit of mendacity is maintained. A Clinton lie typically expands to encompass all creation: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” The gasball of dishonesty only contracts, if ever, when challenged by overwhelming contradictory evidence: “The chance that the semen is not the president’s,” in the immortal words of the Starr impeachment referral, “is one in 7.87 trillion.” And under such rare pressure, a Clinton falsehood does something sadly predictable: It atomizes into a whole series of brand-new falsehoods, each designed to defend the proposition that the president wasn’t really lying in the first place.
This is the man’s essential character. And when he is under investigation for perjury, the imperatives of his character and the requirements of his criminal defense merge neatly into a single impulse. He lies because he absolutely has to. As he has had to lie about what he did with Monica Lewinsky, and when.
In his Jones litigation deposition in January 1998, when he was first asked whether he’d ever met with Lewinsky in the White House, Clinton said yes and volunteered that he’d seen her “two or three” times “when the Republican Congress shut the government down” — that is, during the third week of November 1995. The president clearly intended this to be taken as an innocent explanation: “The whole White House was being run by interns,” he elaborated, “and she was assigned to work back in the chief of staff’s office.”
Were you and Lewinsky ever together in the hall-way adjacent to the Oval Office, Clinton was asked a few moments later? They were never alone, he suggested in reply, but she had once been “back there with a pizza that she brought to me and to others.” The president was not questioned about when this pizza delivery might have taken place. Again, he volunteered that information, and again, he placed the event in the third week of November 1995. It had been “during the government shutdown,” Clinton offered, “when Ms. Lewinsky was still an intern but working the chief of staff’s office because all the employees had to go home.”
If Monica Lewinsky “told someone that she had a sexual affair with you beginning in November 1995, would that be a lie?” Clinton was finally asked, as this portion of his Jones deposition wound to a close. “It’s certainly not the truth,” he responded. “It would not be the truth.”
This last assertion was a bald-faced lie, of course. And it was one lie the president could not possibly amend or expand before the grand jury last August. His sworn January denial of a “sexual affair” with Lewinsky had been open-ended; the infamous, tortuously restricted definition of “sexual relations” had been introduced only later in the Jones deposition. Nor could Clinton now claim to have had a memory failure about sexual activity in November 1995. Without prompting by the Jones lawyers, he had freely recalled the nature of his contact with Lewinsky in that period, almost to the day. No man remembers pepperoni but forgets the oral sex that came with it.
This, then, was the pickle that confronted Bill Clinton in August 1998. He would be forced — by Lewinsky’s blue dress — to admit that he had had some sort of “sexual affair” with her. But he could not concede a further truth — that it had indeed been sex “beginning in November 1995” — without implicating himself in a prior perjury. So what did he do? He told the grand jury that the relationship had not turned intimate until two months later, in January 1996.
Motive, means, opportunity, materiality, falsehood: grand jury perjury. Here again, even here, Clinton is guilty as charged.
And yet he will be acquitted on what seems certain to be a near-party-line Senate vote. A majority of Americans will tell pollsters that they are pleased at this result, but distressed at the “partisan” process by which it was achieved. This magazine will continue to take an almost opposite view. It is a matter of considerable honor that the Republican party, alone among major American institutions, has proved stubbornly unwilling to acquiesce in a president’s felonies. The Democratic party’s performance, by contrast, is a disgrace of stunning magnitude. As a consequence of this sharp partisan divide, the question whether a president really is obliged to obey the law remains open to future political debate. That is the only small note of hope, it seems to us, in the outcome of this entire ugly mess.
David Tell, for the Editors
