A couple of weeks ago, Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press read his audience choice bits of U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright’s latest and perhaps final decision in the Paula Jones litigation. Bill Clinton, Wright had written on July 29, has “violated this Court’s discovery orders by giving false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Then Russert asked his guest, White House chief of staff John Podesta, whether the president would “now accept the judge’s words as true.”
Well, Podesta replied, “he will pay the fine.” And “he has accepted responsibility.” And he is returning to his “work for the American people.” And “I don’t really have much more to say.”
Russert smiled politely and pressed on: “But does the president accept the judge’s decision that he lied under oath?” The chief of staff was undeterred: “The president has said that he would pay the fine that she’s imposed, and I don’t have anything to add to that.” Back and forth the two men went, neither budging. Until Podesta, exasperated, at last gave the nation’s whipped and bored-sick majority its voice: “I hope we’re not going to spend an awful lot of time on this this year.”
He need not worry. America has clearly “moved on.” Judge Wright herself says that she “grows weary of this matter.” Her July 29 ruling chastises Clinton in language noticeably milder than that she employed on April 12, when she first found him in contempt of court. The penalty she now imposes on the president for his lies — an assessment of some $ 90,000 in lawyer’s fees and expenses — represents a tiny fraction of the $ 5.5 million he proved willing to spend last year on the private attorneys who advanced those lies. They are advancing them still, incidentally, which is why Podesta was so slippery on Meet the Press: Robert Bennett’s most recent formal submissions to Judge Wright announce that Clinton “does not concur with the findings of the Court.”
Not that it seems to matter all that much. The president commits perjury and obstruction of justice and is given what amounts to a parking ticket. He is tried in the court of politics on those same charges — impeached — and is acquitted. He devotes an entire year of his administration to a brazen official defense of his undeniable private crimes, and the Gallup Poll likes him better for it. Is public dishonesty no longer to be discouraged? The tax we impose on it would seem never to have been lower.
When taxes go down, economists teach us, a burst of entrepreneurial activity inevitably follows. It is happening already; innovative mendacity is in full flower. And the pioneers are just who you’d expect them to be: those same folks who slashed the price of duplicity in the first place, Lewinsky-scandal principals and their lawyers.
Remember Julie Hiatt Steele, for example? She’s the woman who told Michael Isikoff of Newsweek that her then-friend Kathleen Willey had contemporaneously informed her of an unwanted advance by the president in 1993. Next, she told Isikoff that Willey had actually waited some weeks to speak about the incident — and that Clinton’s moves had not necessarily been unwelcome. Both versions of which story Isikoff published, citing Steele by name, in August 1997. In February 1998, at the behest of Clinton’s lawyers, Steele signed an affidavit swearing that she’d heard nothing at all about any groping episode until the spring of 1997, when Willey asked her to lie about it to Newsweek.
Now Steele is suing Isikoff. She admits she lied to him at first. She does not pretend that he misreported the lies. Steele contends, instead, that Isikoff is guilty of “breach of contract” for disclosing the substance of her admittedly bogus but allegedly off-the-record confidences to him. We have only Steel’s word that these interviews were conducted off the record. And as with most such claims, this one is almost impossible to believe; testimony at Steele’s recent perjury and obstruction trial — by her own best friend of 18 years standing — would seem to have destroyed it.
But forget about that, and consider Steele’s legal argument against Isikoff on its own terms. Her lawyers assert that to expect truth from a reporter’s confidential source is to impose “new, never-before-stated contractual obligations” on this most basic of journalistic relationships. A news organization must “explicitly bargain and contract for only truthful information” from its interview subjects. Failing that, those interviewees are authorized to deceive. And if a news organization then reveals such deception — and embarrasses the deceiver in the process — it is liable for damages. Got that? You have a legally enforceable right to whisper lies, penalty free, to the press. A federal judge, we are sorry to report, is still pondering this preposterous theory after more than a year, without conclusion.
Now let’s consider late developments in what might be called the mystery of Clara Bow.
In Bob Woodward’s recent book, Shadow, there is recounted the work of Sydney Hoffmann, one of the Washington attorneys Monica Lewinsky retained last summer after she fired William Ginsburg. According to Woodward, Hoffmann consulted a series of psychiatrists who persuaded her that it was “highly possible that Lewinsky had a form of Clara Bow syndrome, named after the famous silent film actress who couldn’t say no.” Shadow does not explicitly identify Woodward’s source for this tidbit, but the obvious inference of his text and footnotes is that it came from Hoffmann herself — to the detriment, if any further such detriment is possible, of her own client’s reputation.
That, at least, was the inference drawn, in passing, by an editorial in this magazine’s June 28 issue. To which Hoffmann and her colleague, lead Lewinsky lawyer Plato Cacheris, strongly objected in letters to the editor that we subsequently printed. Hoffmann wrote to insist, “I both respect and like Ms. Lewinsky,” and, “I have never acted unethically in carrying out my responsibilities as an attorney.” And while Hoffmann did not specifically deny having told Bob Woodward about “Clara Bow syndrome,” Cacheris denied it for her. “Ms. Hoffmann . . . did not discuss with the author the ‘Clara Bow syndrome,’ since no such syndrome exists,” he wrote. “We invite you to confer with a reputable psychiatrist who we expect will confirm the non-existence of such a syndrome.”
Hmmm. In its entry for “erotomania,” Oxford’s standard Psychiatric Dictionary describes a “delusional belief” held by certain females “that a man, usually older and of higher social status, is deeply in love with the patient.”
In its classic, mildest, and most common form, “erotomania proper” occurs among “healthier, sexually active, aggressive women who develop intense but short-lived delusions about a man whom they admire for his wealth, power, or position.” In 1922, the French physician who first reported such erotomania as a distinct condition called it “psychose passionelle.” But the medical literature has henceforth named the syndrome after him: G. G. de Clerambault.
In flat, unaccented American English — but for the barely vocalized “m” between its second and third syllables — “Clerambault’s Syndrome” is, phonically, “Clara Bow Syndrome.”
Credit William Safire of the New York Times for first explaining — in a brief item appended to his Sunday “On Language” column a couple of weeks ago — that Bob Woodward, when told about the erotomanic affliction in question, must simply have written it down wrong. To Safire, this was a fascinating example of the “mishearing, or passed-along garble, of another’s spoken communication.”
Fascinating, yes. And all the more so for what it suggests about the complaints THE WEEKLY STANDARD received following our original mention of this whole business. For who was it who privately tipped off Safire about how Woodward had come to slip on the Clerambault/Clara Bow banana peel? Plato Cacheris, we are reliably informed, whose public insistence that “no such syndrome exists” now appears in an entirely different light.
Where disorders of the truth-telling organ are concerned, record this, please, as an episode of “Cacheris’s Syndrome”: the delusion that a man, usually older and of higher social status, is entitled misleadingly to dismiss a news account and its logical corollaries as wholly false, so long as — how clever! — the reporter has mistranscribed a proper name. Reality in Washington already depended on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Now, apparently, it also depends on how you spell it.
Agreed, there is no longer much point in bela-boring the Lewinsky matter per se. Again, “we have moved on.” But that begs the question: To where, and to what effect, and at what cost? And here we would hazard a guess. President Clinton’s behavior and its aftermath have established a brand new calculus in public life, one that more and more public men and women are likely to find irresistible. Untruthfulness now carries a historically low risk. It promises dividends — capture and retention of the White House, for example — of the very highest value. Lying remains a sin, of course. But just the same, if dishonesty were sold on the stock exchange, we should not be surprised to see Washington go on a buying binge.
David Tell, for the Editors
