APR?S LE SPEECH
NORDLINGER, JAY
APR?S LE SPEECH by Jay Nordlinger IF PRESIDENT CLINTON could count on anyone in the press, it was Eleanor Clift, the Newsweek writer known in certain quarters as “Eleanor Rodham Clift.” She never...
...And not only, apparently, to the officials...
...As for Clinton’s statement that we must “move on,” Rivera chimed, “He’s absolutely right about that...
...Brill’s view of the scandal is consistent, if peculiar...
...Our president, our commander-inchief, mourning the murder of our fellow citizens...
...Nobody but the bitterest of cynics can protect themselves, and then by believing in nobody...
...Margaret Carlson, meanwhile, is expressing a new, somewhat subtle indignation...
...Even as they mouthed the usual points—“a dismissed civil lawsuit...
...Gene Lyons is an especially sorry case...
...Nelson was unconcerned about legal points, “all trivial...
...Nelson, before the speech, wrote that if Clinton lied, “he is unfit to lead the nation and ought to have the decency to resign...
...He told Robert Novak on CNN, “I would be bitterly disappointed” if the president lied about Lewinsky, “and although I don’t think he should be impeached for that, he would no longer have my support...
...He said on July 30, “If there is a semenstained dress, I will be disappointed to my very core...
...On August 13, following Clinton’s appearance at a memorial service for victims of terrorism in Africa, Rivera said, “We saw him today in all his wounded glory...
...In a piece published on August 10, Carlson argued that it would behoove the president not to make any confession at all, for it is “one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered it up” and another “to hear it from his own mouth, to have the fig leaf of doubt removed and be forced to confront our own moral laxity in being willing to overlook it...
...And a few opted to dump the president altogether, turning on him with the fury of those who have been suckered and burned...
...After the speech, Nelson wrote another column, this one revealing the depth of his hurt...
...Steven Brill, of “Pressgate” notoriety, was a guest on Rivera’s show, where he furthered his campaign against Starr, charging that the independent counsel was in gross violation of law and ethics, favoring pliant reporters with leaks intended to harm the president...
...who teamed up, I think, with a prosecutor who was in quest of a crime, and then together, they basically teamed up—I mean, it wasn’t a deliberate . . . —with a press corps that needs to fill a constant vacuum...
...It will still be proof of just a sex lie,” of course...
...Their careers will no doubt continue undisturbed...
...In this, she may have been thinking of herself and her colleagues in the pro-Clinton camp...
...Nelson had been as contemptuous as any of the effort against the president, lashing out at “the Gestapo School of Interrogation” and Starr’s “Night Ambush Squad,” with its “police-state tactics...
...Under President Gore, the dread Newt Gingrich “would be a heartbeat away from the presidency,” but Clinton’s resignation was nonetheless imperative...
...Strong and sympathetic...
...So too when she commented on August 18 that, “in a sense, the president is protected from Hillary by her anger at Ken Starr...
...Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But from now on, things will, somehow, be different...
...We need to remember that this started with someone working with a book agent, looking for a book deal...
...And “to use a federal grand jury to go after something that is essentially the scarlet letter is, to me, an appalling breach in judgment that smacks of partisanship...
...Clinton’s advisers and family had placed faith in the president...
...Monica Lewinsky “knew what she was doing, and she is old enough to have sex with whomever she wants...
...For Brill, Monicagate can be understood as a concoction of dark Washington forces, with a dash of presidential stupidity thrown in...
...He said of Hillary on August 13—using one of the president’s favorite phrases—that “she’ll be there until the last dog dies...
...He charged that Starr was “trying to parlay adultery into impeachment...
...those who remain seem sillier...
...Anybody’s trust can be abused...
...She never wavered...
...Their numbers are fewer now...
...Olbermann later issued an apology...
...And, I think, enormously believable...
...Anybody can be lied to...
...Citing the Bible, Lyons dared his readers to cast the first stone...
...In her post-speech column, Carlson had to agree with Orrin Hatch’s muttered evaluation of Clinton as a “jerk”—even if Starr (and here was the necessary symmetry) is a jerk, too...
...Thus, Clinton’s time of testing was a challenge for his rooters in the press, as well...
...a 20- year-old land deal”—there was a quiver of panic in their throats, their confidence undermined, their smirks no longer fixed...
...Nelson, so stung, went all the way with his conversion, snorting that Clinton’s fling with Lewinsky was no private matter: “Exploiting her sexually was an abuse of power, a violation of trust, a betrayal of office...
...four years and 40-million dollars...
...For him, “the sex, if true,” was unforgivable, and “the lie to the American public, if it has been a lie,” was “reason enough to hound him from office...
...After a night’s sleep, Clift announced, “Kenneth Starr is the one with the problem this morning, not Clinton...
...But Lyons, too, proved angrier at Starr than at a dishonest president...
...As late as July 25, she was saying, “My feeling is that he told the truth...
...Like her employer, Time magazine, she has assumed a stance of moral equivalence between Clinton and Starr, declaring a pox on both their houses...
...Others were disappointed in him, but still bent on reviling his enemies...
...The journalist who broke most dramatically with Clinton was Lars-Erik Nelson, columnist for the New York Daily News...
...On CBS after the fateful speech, he said that Clinton had failed to “erase a lot of the legacy of the many, many weeks of coverage that we’ve seen...
...Make no mistake,” he warned: “Anything Kenneth Starr and his prosecutors can do to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, they can also do to you...
...Lyons’s message was that Americans should be afraid—very afraid—of police powers like those wielded by Starr...
...He began his August 19 column with an excerpt from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eightyfour— the novel’s climax, at which the protagonist and his love are trapped by Big Brother...
...Immediately after Clinton’s Map Room speech on August 17, she observed that “this was a consensual relationship between two people...
...To the officials who defended him,” Nelson concluded, “this was a shattering betrayal...
...If he now pursues the president, would not there be some sort of a comparison...
...What truly galled Nelson was that a Clinton mea culpa “would make heroes of Starr, Linda Tripp, and Lucianne Goldberg,” and who could abide the “vindication” of the “haters...
...The pro-Clinton media were forced to come to terms with the moment—and, more painfully, with themselves...
...Some, like Clift, were happy to exonerate Clinton, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, as usual...
...August 17 was a day of reckoning for the entire Clinton orbit, and not least for those journalists who had defended the president through seven months of fevered debate...
...He is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette writer who sees an organized conspiracy to trump up evidence against the president and topple him...
...She allowed on August 17, before the president spoke, that it was “shocking” to read polls indicating that the public is unbothered by Clinton’s “stonewalling...
...But Lyons had vowed a few days earlier that he himself would not...
...It was Linda Tripp’s “betrayal” that “forced” Lewinsky into the open, transgressing a proper “zone of privacy...
...compassionate...
...Clinton had acknowledged that “he is both a liar and a sexual predator...
...He is “not a CEO,” who might lose his job over an affair with an intern: “He’s been elected by the people...
...Now it has fallen to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to do the Third Reich bit: “It finally dawned on me,” he said last week, “that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of, facially, all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses...
...Now “we get our noses rubbed in it...
...And “anybody who wishes to have fun at their expense—or at mine—for giving Clinton the benefit of the doubt, do feel free...
...compelling...
...Geraldo Rivera was fairly nervous about the speech...
...After Clinton made his partial confession, Rivera had a confession of his own: Clinton, in admitting his deceit, had “sent chills through my body...
...Look at him, ladies and gentlemen...
...Rivera—practically alone among journalists—was willing to accept even the president’s claim of “legal accuracy” in his Paula Jones deposition: “That is technically correct...
...But Rivera did not stay chilled for long...
...Lyons, for all his foaming about “illegal leaks” and a “sexcrazed media,” scribbled like a man bereaved...
...But “it will be such glaring evidence of insincerity that it will demoralize even those who feel, as I do, that Ken Starr is way out of line...
...Clinton, said Clift, “is an empathetic president, and he will receive empathy in return...
...Brill also continues to heap abuse on ABC’s Jackie Judd for having been spot-on about Lewinsky’s infamous dress...
...For weeks, he had been bracing himself for disaster...
...And, inevitably, there was the independent counsel to kick...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 48
