AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
20 years later, the stain of Clinton’s impeachment remains
DECEMBER marks the 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. There are many recent retrospectives on the scandal that led to it, including former independent counsel Ken Starr’s mildly indignant “Contempt” and Alex Gibney’s superb documentary series “The Clinton Affair.” As I look back 20 years on, I’m more indignant about some aspects, less about others.
I didn’t believe the story when I first heard it — presidents and staffers don’t carry on like that. When I came to see it was true, I was angry. I wrote angrily in these pages.
I see it all now more as a tragedy than a scandal. I am more convinced than ever that Clinton made the epic political miscalculation of the 20th century’s latter half.
He had two choices when news of the affair was uncovered: tell the truth and pay the price or lie and hope to get away with it.
If he’d told the truth, even accompanied by a moving public apology, the toll would have been enormous. He would have taken a hellacious political beating, with a steep slide in public approval and in stature. He would have been an object of loathing and ridicule — the goat in the White House, a laughingstock. Members of his party would have come down on him like a ton of bricks. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans would have gleefully rubbed his face in it every day. There would have been calls for impeachment.
It would have lasted many months. And he would have survived and his presidency continued.
Much more important — here is why it is a tragedy — it wouldn’t have dragged America through the mud. It only would have dragged him through the mud. His full admission of culpability would have averted the false testimony in a criminal investigation that became the basis for the Starr report and the two articles of impeachment the House approved.
The American people would’ve forgiven him for the affair. We know this because they’d already forgiven him when they first elected him. There had been credible allegations of affairs during the 1992 campaign. Voters had never thought highly of him in that area. His nickname the day he was inaugurated was “Slick Willie.”
If he had chosen the path of honesty, Americans wouldn’t have backed impeaching him, because they are adults and have also made mistakes and committed sins. They would have been more like the grand-jury member who spoke comfortingly to Monica Lewinsky as she wept near the end of her testimony: “Monica, none of us in this room are perfect. We all fall and we all fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is I get up faster.” That is the sound of an American looking in the face of remorse.
And we know Clinton would have been forgiven because in September 1998 — after the Starr report was released, amid all the mud and lies and jokes about thongs and cigars — a Gallup poll asked, “Based on what you know at this point, do you think that Bill Clinton should or should not be impeached and removed from office?” Sixty-six percent answered “should not be.”
Bill Clinton, political genius, didn’t understand his country’s heart.
And so he lied: “I want you to listen to me . . . I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” — and the year of hell, the cultural catastrophe, followed. That’s what it was, a year in which 8-year-olds learned about oral sex from the radio on the way home from school, and 10-year-olds came to understand that important adults lie, angrily and consistently, and teenagers knew if the president can do it, I can do it. It marked the end of a certain mystique of leadership, and it damaged the mystique of American democracy. All of America’s airwaves were full of the sludge — phone sex and blue dresses. The scandal lowered everything.
It was a tragedy because in lying and trying to protect himself, Clinton was
deciding not to protect America. And that is the unforgivable sin, that he put America through that, not what happened with Monica.
Clinton’s foes made the catastrophe worse. The independent counsel was obliged by law to “advise the House of Representatives of any substantial and credible information . . . that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” The Starr report ran 452 pages and contained an astonishing level of sexual detail, of prurient, gratuitous specificity. Congress could have withheld it from the public or released an expurgated version. It didn’t have to be so humiliating. But Clinton’s enemies made sure it was.
Almost immediately on receiving the Starr report, Congress voted to release it in full, “so that the fullest details of his sins could be made public,” as Ken Gormley writes in his comprehensive 2010 history of the scandal, “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.” They put it up on the web. Its contents wound up on every screen in America, every newspaper, every television and radio.
Lawmakers released the videotape of Clinton’s grand-jury testimony, so everyone could see the handsome presidential liar squirm.
Starr’s staffers said they needed extremely detailed, concrete specificity to make the American people understand what happened. At the time I assumed that was true in a legal sense. Now I look back and see mere blood lust and misjudgment.
I see the desire to rub Clinton’s face in it just as he’d rubbed America’s face in it.
Top to bottom, left to right, a more dignified government, one that cared more about both America’s children and its international stature, would have shown more self-restraint and forbearance. And there might have been just a little pity for the desperate, cornered liar who’d defiled his office.
It wouldn’t have so ruined the life of a woman who, when her relationship with the president commenced, was only 22. She paid a steeper reputational price than anyone. Charles Rangel, at the time a senior Democratic congressman, said on television that she was a “young tramp.” The White House slimed her as a fantasist. She went into hiding, thought about suicide.
And in the end, 20 years later, she put the Clintons to shame.
Publicly for two decades she has reacted with more style and dignity than they, said less and with less bitterness and aggression, when they were the ones with all the resources, and a press corps eager to maintain good relations with them because Hillary would surely one day be president.
Monica told her side and kept walking, and even refrained from blaming her shaming on the Clintons. Feminists abandoned and derided her. She took it all on her back and bore it away. In my book, after all this time, she deserves respect.
Sometimes America gets fevers. They don’t so much break as dissipate with time. Twenty years ago we were in a fever. Others will come. The thing to do when it happens is know it’s happening, notice when the temperature is high and factor it in as you judge and act, realizing you’re not at your best. Twenty years ago, almost none of our leaders were.