The Price of Duplicity
THE PRICE OF DUPLICITY 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...
...And "he has accepted responsibility...
...A federal judge, we are sorry to report, is still pondering this preposterous theory after more than a year, without conclusion...
...Lying remains a sin, of course...
...either President Clinton's meeting with Jiang or the CEO party in Shanghai...
...And if a news organization then reveals such decep-tion—and embarrasses the deceiver in the process— it is liable for damages...
...When taxes go down, economists teach us, a burst of entrepreneurial activity inevitably follows...
...District Judge Susan Webber Wright's latest and perhaps final decision in the Paula Jones litigation...
...We have only Steele's word that these interviews were conducted off the record...
...William Kristol and Robert Kagan, for the Editors...
...Then on October 1, China will be staging a mammoth celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Communist party's victory...
...Failing that, those interviewees are authorized to deceive...
...In flat, unaccented American English—but for the barely vocalized "m" between its second and third syllables—"Clérambault's Syndrome" is, phonically, "Clara Bow Syndrome...
...You have a legally enforceable right to whisper lies, penalty free, to the press...
...Agreed, there is no longer much point in belaboring the Lewinsky matter per se...
...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...
...testimony at Steele's recent perjury and obstruction trial—by her own best friend of 18 years standing—would seem to have destroyed it...
...Friday morning, senator John McCain issued a welcome statement criticizing the administration's "failed policy of pressuring Taiwan" and declaring, correctly, that "strategic ambiguity will not serve United States interests or values in this current crisis...
...Will we respond militarily in some other way...
...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...
...He need not worry...
...According to the Washington Post and New York Times, Chinese officials have been trying to gauge Washington's reaction to a possible Chinese attack on one of Taiwan's offshore islands...
...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 ero-tomanic affliction in question, must simply have written it down wrong...
...We're not so sure...
...The president commits perjury and obstruction of justice and is given what amounts to a parking ticket...
...Now Steele is suing Isikoff...
...Next, she told Isikoff that Wil-ley had actually waited some weeks to speak about the incident—and that Clinton's moves had not necessarily been unwelcome...
...Would the administration cancel talks on China's entry into the WTO...
...For who was it who privately tipped off Safire about how Woodward had come to slip on the Clérambault/Clara Bow banana peel...
...If an attack is carried out, China experts and administration officials will argue that what is most needed is intensive diplomacy to defuse the crisis...
...Now let's consider late developments in what might be called the mystery of Clara Bow...
...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...
...Don't bet on it...
...Now, apparently, it also depends on how you spell it...
...Well, Podesta replied, "he will pay the fine...
...But that begs the question: To where, and to what effect, and at what cost...
...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...
...Will the United States then respond militarily to evict Chinese forces...
...But an August attack cannot be dismissed out of hand...
...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...
...And as with most such claims, this one is almost impossible to believe...
...In the end, the Chinese might wind up demonstrating to Taiwan, and to the rest of East Asia, that the United States cares more about doing business with Beijing than about defending some small Taiwanese island from attack...
...She admits she lied to him at first...
...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...
...Judge Wright herself says that she "grows weary of this matter...
...Fascinating, yes...
...Hoffmann wrote to insist, "I both respect and like Ms...
...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...
...Hoffmann . . . did not discuss with the author the 'Clara Bow syndrome,' since no such syndrome exists," he wrote...
...Meanwhile, everyone knows the U.S...
...Hmmm...
...Is public dishonesty no longer to be discouraged...
...And "I don't really have much more to say...
...de Cléram-bault...
...He is tried in the court of politics on those same charges— impeached—and is acquitted...
...Some leaders in Con-gress—notably Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, senator Robert Torricelli, and House International Relations Committee chairman Benjamin Gilman—have been strong in their support for Taiwan...
...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...
...This turned out to be correct...
...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...
...From what we gather, the Clinton administration has gone out of its way to avoid "provoking" the Chinese by stepping up our military presence in the region...
...Russert smiled politely and pressed on: "But does the president accept the judge's decision that he lied under oath...
...Then China is holding a giant party for over 300 American CEOs in Shanghai later in September...
...That, at least, was the inference drawn, in passing, by an editorial in this magazine's June 28 issue...
...That would really give Chinese leaders something to celebrate on October 1. Maybe we're wrong...
...As for the CEOs, we doubt they would allow a little thing like an attack on Taiwan to get in the way of supping with high-level Chinese bureaucrats...
...Got that...
...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...
...Now, the conventional wisdom is that China won't launch such an attack for several months...
...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...
...It promises dividends—capture and retention of the White House, for example—of the very highest value...
...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...
...Remember Julie Hiatt Steele, for example...
...innovative mendacity is in full flower...
...Again, "we have moved on...
...Why should the Chinese, or anyone else, assume that an attack on one of Taiwan's offshore islands, or even an attack on a couple of Taiwanese airfields, would necessarily derail IF THE CHINESE ARE GOING TO CARRY OUT SOME FORM OF AGGRESSION AGAINST TAIWAN, IT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE TO DO IT IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS...
...Reality in Washington already depended on what the meaning of the word "is" is...
...Under the present administration, the odds are we won't...
...A news organization must "explicitly bargain and contract for only truthful information" from its interview subjects...
...In fact, the Clinton administration might just choose the opposite course...
...And all the more so for what it suggests about the complaints The Weekly Standard received following our original mention of this whole business...
...And while Hoffmann did not specifically deny having told Bob Woodward about "Clara Bow syndrome," Cacheris denied it for her...
...And that means the United States must take steps to deter it...
...If you aren't prepared to explain what we should do to defend Taiwan in the current crisis, why should anyone think you are prepared to be president...
...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...
...Both versions of which story Isikoff published, citing Steele by name, in August 1997...
...Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, which also took everyone by surprise, occurred in August...
...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...
...First of all, the United States is now unprepared to respond quickly...
...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...
...The same China experts who told us China would not escalate the conflict are now telling us that they won't want to do so until these events are out of the way...
...Not that it seems to matter all that much...
...America has clearly "moved on...
...She does not pretend that he misre-ported the lies...
...Untruthfulness now carries a historically low risk...
...But the medical literature has henceforth named the syndrome after him: G.G...
...And he is returning to his "work for the American people...
...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...
...Plato Cacheris, we are reliably informed, whose public insistence that "no such syndrome exists" now appears in an entirely different light...
...Back and forth the two men went, neither budging...
...To which Hoffmann and her colleague, lead Lewinsky lawyer Plato Cacheris, strongly objected in letters to the editor that we subsequently printed...
...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...
...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 the new logic of the China experts, President Jiang Zemin won't want to initiate a conflict before his scheduled meeting with President Clinton in the middle of September...
...We invite you to confer with a reputable psychiatrist who we expect will confirm the non-existence of such a syndrome...
...government goes on vacation in August...
...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...
...Lewinsky," and, "I have never acted unethically in carrying out my responsibilities as an attorney...
...In 1922, the French physician who first reported such erotomania as a distinct condition called it "psychose passionelle...
...McCain called on the administration to be "very clear with Beijing" that the "United States will do what it must to help defend freedom and stability in Asia...
...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...
...It is happening already...
...David Tell, for the Editors THE PRESENT DANGER Last week, while many China experts inside and outside the Clinton administration were confidently predicting that China would not escalate the conflict with Taiwan, we warned that Beijing might well be contemplating an attack...
...Our guess is that after an attack, President Clinton would declare it more essential than ever to meet with Jiang...
...And here we would hazard a guess...
...It's not too late for the Clinton administration to act with the necessary resolve...
...Then Russert asked his guest, White House chief of staff John Podesta, whether the president would "now accept the judge's words as true...
...If the Chinese are going to carry out some form of aggression against Taiwan, it makes a lot of sense to do it in the next few weeks...
...Now it's time we heard from the other presidential candidates...
...If the Chinese act quickly, they can present the United States with a fait accompli...
...To Safire, this was a fascinating example of the "mishearing, or passed-along garble, of another's spoken communication...
...But forget about that, and consider Steele's legal argument against Isikoff on its own terms...
...The tax we impose on it would seem never to have been lower...
...Gary Bauer has also been a strong supporter of defending democratic Taiwan...
Vol. 4 • August 1999 • No. 46
