Vintage Didion

by Joan Didion

  In most discussions of how and why this matter came so incongruously to escalate, the press of course was criticized, and was in turn quick to criticize itself (or, in the phrasing preferred by many, since it suggested that any objection rested on hairsplitting, to “flagellate” itself), citing excessive and in some cases erroneous coverage. Perhaps because not all of the experts, authorities, and spokespersons driving this news had extensive experience with the kind of city-side beat on which it is taken for granted that the D.A.’s office will leak the cases they doubt they can make, selective prosecutorial hints had become embedded in the ongoing story as fact. “Loose attribution of sources abounded,” Jules Witcover wrote in the March/April 1998 Columbia Journalism Review, although, since he intended to attribute the most egregious examples to “journalistic amateurs” and “journalistic pretenders” (Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge), he could still express “hope,” based on what he discerned two months into the story as “a tapering off of the mad frenzy of the first week or so,” that, among “established, proven professional practitioners,” any slip had been “a mere lapse of standards in the heat of a fast-breaking, incredibly competitive story of major significance.”

  For the same CJR, the cover line of which was “Where We Went Wrong … and What We Do Now,” a number of other reporters, editors, and news executives were queried, and expressed similar hopes. The possibility of viewer confusion between entertainment and news shows was mentioned. The necessity for more careful differentiation among different kinds of leaks was mentioned. The “new technology” and “hypercompetition” and “the speed of news cycles these days” were mentioned, references to the way in which the Internet and the multiplication of cable channels had collapsed the traditional cyclical presentation of news into a twenty-four-hour stream of provisional raw takes. “We’re in a new world in terms of the way information flows to the nation,” James O’Shea, deputy managing editor for news of the Chicago Tribune, said. (The Lewinsky story had in fact first broken not in the traditional media but on the Internet, in a 1:11 A.M. January 18, 1998, posting on the Drudge Report.) “The days when you can decide not to print a story because it’s not well enough sourced are long gone. When a story gets into the public realm, as it did with the Drudge Report, then you have to characterize it, you have to tell your readers, ‘This is out there, you’ve probably been hearing about it on TV and the Internet. We have been unable to substantiate it independently.’ And then give them enough information to judge the validity of it.”

  That the “story” itself might in this case be anything other than (in Witcover’s words) “a fast-breaking, incredibly competitive story of major significance” was questioned by only one panelist, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who characterized “the obsession of the press with sex and public officials” as “crazy,” but allowed that “after Linda Tripp went to the prosecutor, it became hard to say we shouldn’t be covering this.” The more general attitude seemed to be that there might have been an excess here or an error there, but the story itself was important by definition, significant because it was commanding the full resources of everyone on it—not unlike a campaign, which this story, in that it offered a particularly colorful version of the personalized “horse race” narrative that has become the model for most American political reporting, in fact resembled. “This is a very valid story of a strong-willed prosecutor and a president whose actions have been legitimately questioned,” Walter Isaacson of Time said. “A case involving sex can be a very legitimate story, but we can’t let our journalistic standards lapse simply because the sexual element makes everyone overexcited.”

  This, then, was a story “involving sex,” a story in which there was a “sexual element,” but, as we so frequently heard, it was not about sex, just as Whitewater, in the words of one of the several score editorials to this point published over the years by The Wall Street Journal, was “not merely about a land deal.” What both stories were about, of course (although in the absence of both sex and evidence against the president one of them had proved a harder sell), was which of the contenders, the “strong-willed prosecutor” or his high-placed target, would go the distance, win the race. “The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours are critical,” Tim Russert was saying on January 21, 1998, on MSNBC, where the daily recalibration of such sudden-death scenarios would by August raise the cable’s Nielsen households from 49,000 a year before to 197,000. “I think his presidency is numbered in days,” Sam Donaldson was saying by Sunday of the same week.

  “On the high-status but low-interest White House beat, there is no story as exciting as that of the fall of a president,” Jacob Weisberg observed in Slate in March. The president, everyone by then agreed, was “toast.” The president “had to go,” or “needed to go.” The reasons the president needed to go had seemed, those last days in January and into February, crisp, easy to explain, grounded as they were in the galvanizing felony prospects set adrift without attribution by the Office of the Independent Counsel: obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury. Then, as questions threatened to slow the story (Would it not be unusual to prosecute someone for perjury in a civil suit? Did the chronology present a circumstantial case for, or actually against, obstruction? If someone lied in a deposition about a matter later ruled not essential to and so inadmissible in the case at hand, as Lewinsky had been ruled in Jones v. Clinton, was it in fact perjury?), the reasons the president “needed to go” became less crisp, more subjective, more a matter of “the mood here in the capital,” and so, by definition, less open to argument from those not there in the capital.

  This story was definitely moving, as they kept saying on MSNBC. By April 1, 1998, when U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright rendered the possibility of any felony technically remote by dismissing Jones v. Clinton altogether, the story had already rolled past its inconvenient legal (or “legalistic,” a much-used word by then) limitations: ten weeks after America first heard the name Monica Lewinsky and still in the absence of any allegation bearing on the president’s performance of his duties, the reasons the president needed to go were that he had been “weakened,” that he would be “unable to function.” The president’s own former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had expressed concern about “the slow drip-drip process and the price he’s paying in terms of his ability to lead the country.” When the congressional staff members were asked in late March 1998 where they believed the situation was leading, twenty-one percent of Democratic staff members (forty-three percent of Republican) had foreseen, in the absence of resignation, impeachment proceedings.

  The story was positioned, in short, for the satisfying long haul. By August 17, 1998, when the president confirmed the essential fact in the testimony Monica Lewinsky had given the grand jury eleven days before, virtually every “news analyst” on the eastern seaboard was on air (we saw the interiors of many attractive summer houses) talking about “the president’s credibility,” about “can he lead” or “still govern in any reasonably effective manner,” questions most cogently raised that week by Garry Wills in Time and, to a different point, by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. Proceeding from a belief both in President Clinton’s underlying honor and in the redemptive power, if he was to be faced by crippling harassment, of the “principled resignation,” Wills had tried to locate the homiletic possibilities in the dilemma, the opportunities for spiritual growth that could accrue to the country and to the president through resignation. The divergence between this argument and that made by Friedman was instructive. Friedman had seemed to be offering “can he lead” mainly as a strategy, an argument with which the professionals of the political process, who were increasingly bewildered by the public’s apparent disinclination to join the rush to judgment by then general in the columns and talk shows, might most adroitly reeducate that “substantial majority” who “still feel that Mr. Clinton should remain in office.”

  In other words we had arrived at a dispiriting and familiar point,
and would be fated to remain there even as telephone logs and Epass Access Control Reports and pages of grand-jury testimony floated down around us: “the disconnect,” as it was now called, between what the professionals—those who held public office, those who worked for them, and those who wrote about them—believed to be self-evident and what a majority of Americans believed to be self-evident. John Kennedy and Warren Harding had both conducted affairs in the Oval Office (more recently known as “the workplace,” or “under the same roof where his daughter lay sleeping”), and these affairs were by no means the largest part of what Americans thought about either of them. “If you step back a bit, it still doesn’t look like a constitutional crisis,” former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella told the Los Angeles Times to this point. “This is still a case about whether the President had sex with someone half his age. The American people have understood—certainly better than politicians, lawyers, and the press—that if this is ultimately about sex, it’s really no one else’s business. There are acceptable lies and unacceptable lies, and lying about someone’s sex life is one of those tolerated lies.”

  Ten days after the president’s August 17 admission to the nation, or ten days into the endless tape loop explicating the inadequacies of that admission, Mr. Clinton’s own polls, according to The Washington Post, showed pretty much what everyone else’s polls showed and would continue to show, notwithstanding the release first of Kenneth Starr’s “narrative” and “grounds for impeachment” and then of Mr. Clinton’s videotaped testimony and 3,183 pages of “supporting documents”: that a majority of the public had believed all along that the president had some kind of involvement with Monica Lewinsky (“Cheat once, cheat twice, there’s probably a whole line of them,” a thirty-four-year-old woman told Democratic pollster Peter Hart in a focus session attended by the Los Angeles Times) continued to see it as a private rather than a political matter, believed Kenneth Starr to be the kind of sanctimonious hall monitor with sex on the brain they had avoided in their formative years (as in the jump-rope rhyme Rooty-toot-toot! Rooty-toot-toot! / There go the boys from the Institute! / They don’t smoke and they don’t chew / And they don’t go with the girls who do), and, even as they acknowledged the gravity of lying under oath, did not wish to see the president removed from office.

  The charge that he tried to conceal a personally embarrassing but not illegal liaison had not, it seemed, impressed most Americans as serious. Whether or not he had ever asked Vernon Jordan to call Ron Perelman and whether Vernon Jordan had in fact done so before or after the subpoena was issued to Monica Lewinsky had not, it seemed, much mattered to these citizens. Outside the capital, there had seemed to be a general recognition that the entire “crisis,” although mildly entertaining, represented politics as usual, particularly since it had evolved from a case, the 1994 Jones v. Clinton, that would probably never have been brought and certainly never been funded had Mr. Clinton not been elected president. For Thomas L. Friedman, then, the way around this was to produce more desirable polling results by refocusing the question, steering the issue safely past the shoals of “should he be president,” which was the essence of what the research was asking. “What might influence the public most,” Friedman wrote, “is the question of ‘can’ Mr. Clinton still govern in any reasonably effective manner.”

  Since taking this argument to its logical conclusion raised, for a public demonstrably impatient with what it had come to see as a self-interested political class, certain other questions (If the president couldn’t govern, who wouldn’t let him? Was it likely that they would have let a lame duck govern anyway? What in fact was “governing,” and did we want it?), most professionals fell back to a less vulnerable version of what the story was: a story so simple, so sentimental, as to brook no argument, no talking back from “the American people,” who were increasingly seen as recalcitrant children, fecklessly resistant to responsible guidance. The story, William J. Bennett told us on Meet the Press, was about the “moral and intellectual disarmament” that befalls a nation when its president is not “being a decent example” and “teaching the kids the difference between right and wrong.” The story, Cokie Roberts told us in the New York Daily News, was about reinforcing the lesson “that people who act immorally and lie get punished.” The story, William Kristol told us on This Week, was about the president’s “defiance,” his “contempt,” his “refusal to acknowledge some standards of public morality.”

  Certain pieties were repeated to the point where they could be referred to in shorthand. Although most Americans had an instinctive sense that Monica Lewinsky could well have been, as the Referral would later reveal her to have been, a less than entirely passive participant in whatever happened, we heard about the situational inviolability of interns (interns were “given into our care,” interns were “lent to us by their parents”) until Cokie Roberts’s censorious cry to an insufficiently outraged congresswoman (“But with an intern?”) could stand alone, a verdict that required no judge or jury. We heard repeatedly about “our children,” or “our kids,” who were, as presented, avid consumers of the Nightly News in whose presence sex had never before been mentioned and discussions of the presidency were routine. “I’d like to be able to tell my children, ‘You should tell the truth,’” Stuart Taylor of the National Journal told us on Meet the Press. “I’d like to be able to tell them, ‘You should respect the president.’ And I’d like to be able to tell them both things at the same time.” Jonathan Alter, in Newsweek, spoke of the president as someone “who has made it virtually impossible to talk to your kids about the American presidency or let them watch the news.”

  “I approach this as a mother,” Cokie Roberts said on This Week. “We have a right to say to this president, ‘What you have done is an example to our children that’s a disgrace,’” William J. Bennett said on Meet the Press. The apparent inability of the public to grasp this Kinder-Kirche point (perhaps because not all Americans could afford the luxury of idealizing their own children) had itself become an occasion for outrage and scorn: the public was too “complacent,” or too “prosperous,” or too “fixed on the Dow Jones.” The public in fact became the unindicted co-conspirator: “This ought to be something that outrages us, makes us ashamed of him,” Mona Charen complained on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. “This casts shame on the entire country because he behaved that way and all of the nation seems to be complicit now because they aren’t rising up in righteous indignation.”

  This was the impasse (or, as it turned out, the box canyon) that led many into a scenario destined to prove wishful at best: “The American people,” we heard repeatedly, would cast off their complicity when they were actually forced by the report of the independent counsel to turn their attention from the Dow and face what Thomas L. Friedman, in the Times, called “the sordid details that will come out from Ken Starr’s investigation.” “People are not as sophisticated as this appears to be,” William Kristol had said hopefully the day before the president’s televised address. “We all know, inside the Beltway, what’s in that report,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin said. “And I don’t think … the country needs to hear any more about tissue, dresses, cigars, ties, anything else.” George Will, on This Week, assured his co-panelists that support for the president would evaporate in the face of the Referral. “Because Ken Starr must—the president has forced his hand—must detail graphically the sexual activity that demonstrates his perjury. Once that report is written and published, Congress will be dragged along in the wake of the public…. Once the dress comes in, and some of the details come in from the Ken Starr report, people—there’s going to be a critical mass, the yuck factor—where people say, ‘I don’t want him in my living room anymore.’”

  The person most people seemed not to want in their living rooms any more was “Ken” (as he was now called by those with an interest in protecting his story), but this itself was construed as evidence of satanic spin on the part of the White House. “The presid
ent’s men,” William J. Bennett cautioned in The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, “… attempt relentlessly to portray their opposition as bigoted and intolerant fanatics who have no respect for privacy.” He continued:

  At the same time they offer a temptation to their supporters: the temptation to see themselves as realists, worldly-wise, sophisticated: in a word, European. This temptation should be resisted by the rest of us. In America, morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe, and precisely this moral streak is what is best about us…. Europeans may have something to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on the matter of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe.

  American innocence itself, then, was now seen to hang on the revealed word of the Referral. The report, Fox News promised, would detail “activities that most Americans would describe as unusual.” These details, Newsweek promised, would make Americans “want to throw up.” “Specifics about a half-dozen sex acts,” Newsday promised, had been provided “during an unusual two-hour session August 26 in which Lewinsky gave sworn testimony in Starr’s downtown office, not before the grand jury.”

  This is arresting, and not to be brushed over. On August 6, Monica Lewinsky had told the grand jury that sexual acts had occurred. On August 17, the president had tacitly confirmed this in both his testimony to the grand jury and his televised address to the nation. Given this sequence, the “unusual two-hour session August 26” might have seemed, to some, unnecessary, even excessive, not least because of the way in which, despite the full knowledge of the prosecutors that the details elicited in this session would be disseminated to the world in two weeks under the Referral headings “November 15 Sexual Encounter,” “November 17 Sexual Encounter,” “December 31 Sexual Encounter,” “January 7 Sexual Encounter,” “January 21 Sexual Encounter,” “February 4 Sexual Encounter and Subsequent Phone Calls,” “March 31 Sexual Encounter,” “Easter Telephone Conversations and Sexual Encounter,” “February 28 Sexual Encounter,” and “March 29 Sexual Encounter,” certain peculiar and warped proprieties had been so pruriently observed. “In deference to Lewinsky and the explicit nature of her testimony,” Newsday reported, “all the prosecutors, defense lawyers and stenographers in the room during the session were women.”