The President and the Prosecutor: Three Views on Politics and Personal Life
Willis, Ellen
AS BILL CLINTON looked me straight in the eye, tightened his jaw, and denied having sex with "that woman," I had a fantasy: suppose, on that historic 60 Minutes episode in 1992, he had said,...
...Indeed, during most of Clinton's presidency criticism of his personal life has centered less on his alleged affairs than on his refusal to put an uppity wife in her place...
...ELLEN WILLIS directs the cultural journalism program at New York University...
...I guess this is progress of a sort...
...Many people interviewed about the scandal have said they don't care what Clinton may have done with Lewinsky, but do care if he is lying...
...Open homosexuality is still beyond the pale, as is heterosexual cohabiting out of wedlock...
...So Clinton's understandable reflex is to do what reporters would once, in effect, have done for him: lie...
...I've often wondered whether defensiveness about charges of womanizing has fed into his efforts to placate social conservatives by echoing Dan Quayle on single motherhood and ending the entitlement to welfare...
...On the other hand, empathy with the desire for sexual freedom may have influenced his support for abortion rights...
...If anyone has victimized her it would seem to be her "friend" Linda Tripp and Starr himself...
...AS BILL CLINTON looked me straight in the eye, tightened his jaw, and denied having sex with "that woman," I had a fantasy: suppose, on that historic 60 Minutes episode in 1992, he had said, "Yes, I had an affair with Gennifer Flowers...
...I0 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...At least in Clinton's case we can hope the oral sex went both ways...
...At the same time, it's not my impression that Clinton shares either the misogyny or the unquestioned assumption of dominance of a man like John F. Kennedy, who appears to have had a blanket contempt for wife and girlfriends alike...
...From this perspective, open discussion of the realities of people's sex lives—including politicians' sex lives—is much to be preferred...
...Unfortunately, however, the new openness has also encouraged those so inclined to engage in sexual witch hunts...
...But this is the reflex of a dying culture...
...Listening to various commentators' nostalgia for the good old days of "Don't ask, don't tell," before those feminists decided that the 8 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 personal is political and oral sex made it onto Nightline, you would think that judging politicians' private lives is something new On the contrary, candidates, especially for the presidency, have always been vetted by the familyvalues cops for marital respectability...
...And so long as the public sees Clinton as a shamefaced liar, the moralists will have won, even if he keeps his job...
...It would have shifted the debate from whether personal lapses from conservative sexual and familial values should disqualify a candidate for public office to a more basic issue: should public officials be required to conform to those values in the first place...
...Speculating on the relevance of a president's personal relations with women to his public record on women's rights is an entertaining parlor game...
...His now admitted lie about Flowers has translated into wideDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 9 COMMENTS & OPINIONS spread skepticism about his present denial...
...But it also reflects salutary second thoughts about moralistic, antisexual tendencies in the women's movement, including the impulse to expand the definition of sexual harassment beyond all reasonable bounds...
...After all, most of the voters who elected Clinton didn't believe his denial that he'd slept with Flowers...
...Part of what they are saying, I suspect, is that if the president won't forthrightly stand up to his tormentors, why should they...
...No doubt feminists' lack of enthusiasm for Kenneth Starr's crusade—like their skepticism about the Paula Jones case—has in part to do with pro-Clinton partisanship and even more to do with hatred of his enemies on the right...
...They will keep winning until their targets are finally ready to say, "Yes, I've had sex outside my marriage...
...Yet declining to tell the lies that pay homage to virtue would have been a shocking, radical act...
...Next question...
...And ironically, even as some horrified liberals blame feminism for making the present inquisition possible, some conservatives have accused feminists of hypocrisy for not joining it...
...But in the end it's the latter that counts...
...Monica Lewinsky is young, but she is not a child, and she has not suggested that her alleged (at this writing it's still alleged) relationship with the president was anything but consensual...
...And though no one outside the radical right wants to see it happen, if Starr can prove Clinton is lying about Lewinsky the president may well be brought down...
...True, the scenario here replicates one of the culture's hardier sexist clichés: the powerful older man amusing himself with a woman whose youth, inexperience, lack of worldly clout, and awe of him feed his ego...
...To lie about having an affair is tacitly to accept—or anyway decline to contest— the idea that if the charge is true he is unfit for his office...
...Needless to say, the deal has never been available to female candidates or political wives...
...Until Ronald Reagan broke the taboo, no divorced man had ever become president...
...Perhaps...
...Bill can run, but he can't hide...
...COMMENTS & OPINIONS This conspiracy of silence, upheld by the press, served to maintain strict public norms and the illusion that authority figures exemplified the morality they preached, while cutting powerful men some slack...
...And suppose Hillary had added, "Not every marriage is monogamous...
...It also mystified sex, keeping the gritty details of respectable men's disreputable desires and practices from compromising the enforced "innocence" (that is, ignorance) of respectable women and children...
...Why, demands New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, don't they "ravage Clinton the same way they ravaged Clarence Thomas...
...In any case, Jimmy Carter, who kept his lust tucked safely in his heart, was terrible on women's issues, and so was the faithful Reagan, while the echtphilanderer Ted Kennedy has been staunch...
...Why is such candor unthinkable...
...But failure to transcend erotic stereotypes does not strike me as an impeachable offense...
...Given the president's importance as a cultural icon, I'd rather he had an affair with, say, Barbra Streisand...
...He wants to please, to charm...
...In the past, Clinton has never hesitated to pander to the right by wrapping himself in the family-values flag...
...Instead Clinton is insecure...
...What is new is the end of the trade-off that allowed politicians, in return for outward conformity, to lead a secret sexual life on the side...
...Might Clinton's sexual habits affect his policies...
...Presidential wives are supposed to be supportive mates, preferably mothers, domestic minded, and never openly sexual...
...Whatever mixed feelings he may have about Hillary— including the desire to rebel against her moral authority by being a bad boy—there's no doubt that he takes her seriously...
...The moralists are still a powerful political force—and besides, it's a deeply ingrained axiom of masculine conventional wisdom that the proper response to being caught at infidelity is to deny everything...
...This essay, with some differences, appeared in Newsday...
...For in that case he will have stranded himself not only on shaky legal ground but on his opponents' moral ground as well...
...If revelations of his sexual proclivities cripple his ability to indulge in pious blather about the evils of "illegitimacy" I can only cheer...
...I always admired Nelson Rockefeller for divorcing his wife to marry the woman he loved, though it meant the end of his presidential prospects...
...The truth is that no matter how hard Clinton tries to present himself as an upstanding family man, to the right he will always be an exemplar of sixties license...
...The breakdown of this corrupt bargain is part of our society's continuing revolt against Victorian morality, sexual hypocrisy, and a sexist double standard...
...Relationships are complicated, and ours is no exception...
...What most clearly illuminates the connection between personal and political is not Clinton's sexual behavior but his lies about it...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
