"I Know No Oath"
"I KNOW NO OATH" The full-figured lady has sung—and retired to her mother's Watergate apartment—but Washington's epic opera of presidential pathology is not quite over yet. The title character must...
...Two days later, even Hillary Clinton seemed inclined to agree, at least in theory...
...Then again, of course, depending on your definition, I sort of did...
...Bill Clinton was similarly under oath a few days later, when he directed the same denial at a national television audience—in that famous, clenched-jaw, finger-wagging act...
...He knew perfectly well what he was being asked in January, and he knew perfectly well what his answers were intended to convey...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the Oval Office sex qua Oval Office sex—forget the law—could well prove fatal to Clinton's presidency because "If it's so, it represents a disorder...
...When the job in question is the presidency, and the lies are maintained even after the philandering is exposed, national politics as a whole is victimized— not just the president's wife and mistress...
...If a president commits adultery in the White House and dissembles to cover it up, she was asked, should Americans demand his resignation...
...In this respect, he is always under oath...
...This new claim by Clinton will itself be deceitful...
...We have spent most of this year, instead, obsessed with the narrower, safely antiseptic question whether Bill Clinton is guilty of a crime...
...This magazine consistently rejected the long-advanced White House line that critics of the president must entirely ignore his "allegedly" repellent private life and either convict him of a crime or shut up...
...Needless to say, there would be no reason for Clinton seriously to plan for such an acknowledgment if it were false...
...An on-the-job philanderer lives both his private and public lives in a suffocating vacuum of dishonesty...
...For his Lewinsky dalliance, and for the brutality with which he has manipulated American politics to conceal that dalliance, Clinton must somehow, in some form, receive official sanction...
...Was the relationship "in any way sexual," one of them asked him...
...But in real life, in the Oval Office, it is intolerable...
...I know no oath...
...It shouldn't matter...
...If he does, though, by the inescapable logic of his own Oval Office "practice sessions," he will be perjuring himself...
...He was under oath for months thereafter, as he sent his deputies to attack Ken Starr as a maniac and to clog the courts with spurious assertions of testimonial privilege...
...Or at least it should be...
...On January 25, Sen...
...I think that would be a very serious offense...
...Almost nobody talks this way any longer...
...In our constitutional order, the president must keep faith with the people who have elected him...
...But punishment there should be...
...The passage of time—as the president obviously hoped it would—has dulled public opinion to the scandal's lurid details...
...Non so di giuramenti, the Don replies...
...Will he not be thereby admitting to an earlier perjury in his Paula Jones deposition...
...Which "truth" will his audience prefer...
...It still remains possible, the Times cautioned, that the president will persist in his Monica denials when questioned by Ken Starr's prosecutors...
...Until just moments before his cue, Bill Clinton has been huddled offstage with his coaches, struggling to refine a tiny little nuance in the libretto...
...The sex is finally beyond dispute...
...we might settle for something less as Clinton's punishment...
...this is jazzy, modern music...
...If the president offers Starr a pro forma, white-lie "confession" this week, the controlling view in Washington lately has it, we should all be prepared to let bygones be bygones...
...Was this lawyer language, they wondered...
...And should Clinton concede the sex as the Times suggests is likely—what then...
...I didn't have sex with the intern...
...The relationship was not sexual," the president responded...
...The evidence in our courts and the honor of our president are not supposed to turn on microscopic wordplay...
...And now that it seems clear he is guilty—Starr will shortly forward an impeachment report to Congress based exclusively on the Monica Lewinsky controversy— gray-bearded wise men everywhere, Republicans and Democrats alike, are mumbling that even these suspected felonies do not warrant formal public action...
...In the realm of Art, such chronic betrayal is fascinating...
...And here the national conversation remains, as always, terribly confused...
...And so all the while, the American presidency was a lie...
...And there is a broader principle that must be sustained as well...
...Last Friday's New York Times reported what looked to be an authoritative White House leak: Clinton and his lawyers have prepared for his grandjury appearance this week by "designing answers that allow him to acknowledge a relationship with Ms...
...The only meaningful question remains, as always: What's to be done about it...
...Period...
...After all, the particular crime that now rivets the nation's attention—Clinton's perjury in the January 17 Paula Jones deposition and whatever obstruction of justice might be associated with it—is just the first and least of the president's public sins in the Lewinsky scandal...
...We now reject, in turn, the newly emerging White House line that Clinton must be held practically harmless for the crime—because that crime is, at worst, a lie about his undeniably repellent private life...
...Yes, the crime is about the lie is about the sex...
...And pretend the scandal never happened...
...Early in Mozart's opera about another seducer, Don Giovanni makes a solemn promise—"I swear it on my honor"—and almost immediately breaks it...
...Well, they should certainly be concerned about it," Mrs...
...Some people even gave it voice...
...It will be an improvised scene...
...Come what may this week, in short, Bill Clinton will lie about the intern—again...
...No can do, we say...
...When the Lewinsky story broke, American reaction was instinctive and near-universal...
...The title character must now belt out his showstopper aria, which calls for him at last to tell the truth about his own behavior...
...What about your vow, he's asked by his servant, Lep-orello...
...It was all a lie...
...Lewinsky without going into graphic detail...
...No, the president will apparently contend: When he swore in January, among other things, that "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky," he was testifying honestly—because Jones's attorneys didn't pose their queries the right way...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...New and improved lies from the president will not be enough...
...Bill Clinton was under oath this way when, in the Monica eruption's early hours, he was questioned by reporters about his denial of an "improper relationship" with the intern...
...Don Giovanni was dragged to Hell in the end...
...Clinton responded...
...And I know what you mean, and the answer is no...
...But there should be no crime for which the president, of all people, is exempt from discipline...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
