A Senator and Old Friend Delivers a Stern Sermon
By Karen Tumulty/Washington
If there is anything the White House should have learned from
the most searing scandals of recent history, it is to listen
warily to the Senate Chamber--for that is where it is likely to
hear the ominous rumble of truth. In Watergate it came in early
1974, when conservative Senator James L. Buckley called for
Richard Nixon's resignation, starting the massive Republican
defection that ultimately destroyed him. For the defiant and
powerful Republican Senator Bob Packwood, it came in 1993, when
freshman Democrat Patty Murray, speaking in a tremulous voice
that barely carried to the galleries, found the words that moved
the gentlemen of the club into ousting their colleague for
sexual harassment.
Such a signal may have come for Bill Clinton last week, when one
of his most reliable allies demolished the President's assertion
that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was a private matter
and also made the case that it transcended the dry question of
whether he broke the law. Connecticut Democrat Joe
Lieberman--Clinton's friend of almost three decades, a
politician whose own secure future would have allowed him to
remain silent, a devout man with no apparent agenda beyond his
sense of right and wrong--called the President's behavior
immoral and damaging to the country. In words made all the more
devastating by their careful measure, Lieberman said, "The
transgressions the President has admitted to are too
consequential for us to walk away and leave the impression for
our children today and for our posterity tomorrow that what he
acknowledges he did within the White House is acceptable
behavior for our nation's leader."
It barely mattered that Lieberman stopped short of doing what he
had been rumored to be planning, which was to call for a censure
of the President. He resisted pleas by White House chief of
staff Erskine Bowles to hold his tongue until Clinton's return
from Russia and Ireland, and thus underscored for White House
advisers the urgency of launching their own battle plan to
stanch the rapid deterioration of their defenses on the Hill.
But what Lieberman's speech, with its sonorous biblical tone,
seemed to prove is that the White House's emerging legalistic
strategy--to shift the focus of the debate from what Clinton did
to what insist he didn't do--is doomed to miss the big political
mark. Even before independent counsel Ken Starr gets his report
to Capitol Hill, the President's lawyers plan to submit their
own defense on what they consider the legitimate questions of
conspiracy and obstruction of justice, the questions raised by
the "talking points" that Lewinsky gave her friend Linda Tripp,
by the career help that Clinton and his allies gave Lewinsky,
and by the gifts from Clinton to Lewinsky that she left for
safekeeping with his secretary, Betty Currie.
Their tactic is one the White House employed to great effect last
year during the campaign-finance scandal--the "prebuttal." The
idea is to put forward information--even the damaging or
not-so-believable tidbits--before the other side can, on the
assumption that he who spins first has the advantage.
Details once fiercely guarded by the legal team are trickling
out with a telling regularity. Sources say, for instance, that
the relationship was briefer and more sporadic than generally
assumed: Clinton and Lewinsky had intimate encounters about half
a dozen times, starting in December 1995 or January 1996 and
continuing through April of that year, with one final tryst in
February 1997. Currie, reporters are now being told, took the
subpoenaed gifts at Lewinsky's request, not the President's.
According to this account, Currie stopped by Lewinsky's
apartment to pick up a box labeled DO NOT DESTROY, which the
secretary stored under her bed until its contents were turned
over to Starr. Though the scenario conflicts with Lewinsky's
version, and raises the obvious question of why Currie would
agree to provide ministorage for Lewinsky without the implicit
urging of her boss, it would help get Clinton off the hook for
possible obstruction of justice. The President's lawyers also
leaked word last week that Clinton had tried to put Lewinsky
back on the White House payroll last year after she was exiled
to the Pentagon by asking deputy director of White House
personnel Marsha Scott to meet with her; they also said he made
some tentative, unsuccessful inquiries to provide her with a
favorable job recommendation. He might have been trying to buy
her silence--but if he were really trying, wouldn't she have got
the job, or at least the letter?
However successful the White House is in making the case that
Clinton did not violate the law, Lieberman won't be the last to
argue that the President's conduct should be judged by a higher
standard. A West Coast Democratic Congressman says he was
stunned last week when a six-year-old in his district was told
that the lawmaker knew Clinton and asked, "Does he lie to you
too?" And White House aides themselves cannot answer the
question that most bothers his party now: Is there anything--or
anyone--else?
--With reporting by Jay Branegan with Clinton and James Carney/Washington
|
News
Click here