SEX, LIES AND SPECULATION

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Sex, both municipal and federal, made the news last week, but like car-chase scenes and new stock market highs, sex scandals don't automatically take the world by storm anymore. The reluctant entry of another woman into the Paula Jones case hardly created a ripple. And when speculation that New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani might be having an affair surfaced last week in Vanity Fair, followed by the tabloids, it sparked not so much a feverish rush of readers to newsstands as a snippy debate in the New York press about standards of proof. Just as it now takes an airborne President punching out terrorists for a movie to open big, it may take, as former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards so archly put it, finding a politician in bed with a dead girl or a live boy to arrest public attention.

But the press--or notable fragments of it--is more easily titillated. Consider the case of Kathleen Willey, 51, a former low-level aide in the White House who was subpoenaed by Paula Jones' lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, after he received an anonymous tip that the President had made a grab for her. Willey's lawyer said she has no information relevant to Paula Jones or Bill Clinton, and he is filing a motion to quash the subpoena. But that hardly cooled the frenzy. Two "friends" of Willey's told reporters that something happened--they don't agree about what--one day when Willey visited the President at the Oval Office. And one of those sources peddled to a supermarket tabloid a stock photo of Willey with the President at a reception. Even Clinton was accused of being "evasive" when he declined comment at a press conference. We are at the point where we believe a woman who says the President made a crude sexual advance, but we don't believe a woman who says he did no such thing.

In New York the Vanity Fair piece stung the tabloids by portraying the Manhattan press corps as a bunch of cowering wusses afraid to follow up gossip that the mayor was having an affair with his communications director. The city's tabloids rose to the bait, producing three days of buzz about the state of Hizzoner's marriage and alleged philandering before it dawned on them that perhaps the reason no detailed story had appeared earlier was because there wasn't one: the principals weren't talking, and no one else was in a position to really know. The old excuse used by the mainstream press to write about the private lives of public officials--because the tabloids already have--has been dropped. The new hook seems to be, Let's castigate those tabloids for not giving us an excuse to write about them.

Few things in life are as confounding as marriage, and that includes your best friend's, if not your own. What we do know is that when good people have bad marriages, they often behave poorly. If half of what we write about him is true, Clinton should weep with gratitude that Hillary hasn't left him. But she hasn't left, and no amount of reporting is going to make us a better judge of that decision than she. In New York, a more germane question for the press would be whether the mayor's wife should give up the first lady's staff, budget and car if she's unwilling to act as first lady. Just maybe the Giulianis are in a rough patch. If they're lucky, they'll work it out. Maybe we should let them try. In peace.