Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

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That assessment was already looking generous by the weekend, as Americans resigned themselves to turning on the news or picking up their papers and having to read stories that painted the White House as a harem, the President as a lecher and the government as a hostage to his libido. No matter what he does, the President now faces a steady flow of ugly leaks from the conversations Tripp recorded or recalled having with Lewinsky. In those conversations, Lewinsky is graphic in detailing, and at times denigrating, the President's sexual characteristics and performance. Clinton, she claimed at one point, had a strict rule: oral sex only. "At my age," she says he told her, "you can't take the risk of intercourse." Lewinsky jokes that if she ever got to leave her job at the Pentagon and return to the White House, she would be made "Special Assistant to the President for b___ j___."

Even White House soldiers trained by years of muscular damage control staggered last Wednesday when they picked up their morning papers. The first few hours were horrible, easily the worst day in a presidency with more than its share of bad days. Within the hour they faced a parade of hyperventilating talk-show hosts clutching the Constitution and handicapping the prospect of impeachment proceedings; of psychologists explaining how to tell children that the President might be a liar and a serial philanderer; of network anchors jetting back from Havana, where they had thought maybe the big story of the week would occur; and of Clinton explaining that yes, the American people had a right to hear an answer about whether he had seduced an employee, but no, he wasn't ready to give it just yet. The normally surefooted White House spokesman Mike McCurry couldn't get through the daily press briefing without getting stuck in the contrivances of strict legalese over what was meant by denying any "improper relationship." "I'm not going to parse the statement," he said, not once, but five times. "It speaks for itself."

"It's like we're standing under Niagara Falls, looking for a boat to get us out of here," McCurry said privately. Many in the White House had the air of experienced plane-crash investigators going about their business with grim efficiency. As with past scandals like Whitewater and Travelgate, the White House operation divided cleanly between the President's legal team--Charles Ruff, David Kendall, Bob Bennett--who didn't want Clinton to talk, period, and his political strategists, who wanted to send him out to calm the waters. And so, true to form, the President did both: gave his interviews but didn't say anything. And that only made matters worse.

By this time everyone has learned that a Clinton denial must be decoded. The man who once said he had "never broken the laws of my country" when answering questions about his marijuana inhaling (he was at Oxford at the time), and who claimed to have "caused pain in my marriage" to avoid having to use the singular or plural when discussing his love affairs, now faces an audience no longer naive about presidential double-talk. Thus when Clinton sat down with Jim Lehrer on Wednesday afternoon and repeated, in heavily lawyered cadences, that "I didn't ask anybody not to tell the truth," reporters pounced on the use of the double negative as another linguistic trapdoor. Try as it would, the White House could not seem to manage a believable denial all day.