The Cost Of It All

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Clinton knew going into his testimony that Americans by a vast majority believed there was sex; believed he shouldn't perjure himself; thought Starr had no case if it's just about sex. We don't want to know all the details; we just want an acknowledgment from him that he did wrong and then to move on. Clinton needed to give us precisely that--just enough and nothing more. The battle between him and the independent counsel can be cast as another skirmish in the 225-year-old war over whether any of us can be safe in our persons, houses, places and effects. Clinton is shrewdly counting on the notion that Americans would give up a lot to preserve their own fragile privacy, and so most will vicariously defend his. That is why he has done everything possible to suggest that this investigation is about something that is nobody else's business, obsessively pursued by a prosecutor who has no business asking about sex in the first place. It is why Starr will confront a reluctant Congress and an angry public if all he produces after four years is a report that reads like a family diary best left to therapists and theologians. And it is why Clinton's aides are most defiant when the subject of obstruction of justice comes up.

Until recently, neither side showed much restraint, and each blamed the other for the cost. It has been maddening to watch Starr and Clinton go at it, because they gave the sense that they were in this for themselves and not the rest of us. If they were concerned about the tender pressure points between the branches of government, they would have called a truce long ago. Instead they barreled through, conducting the nation's business like alley cats.

The only antagonist equipped to corner a man as elusive as Clinton is an independent counsel as relentless as Starr. Clinton did not think he should be forced to talk about what he considered totally private matters. Just as firmly, Starr thought that the President was lying in this case as he had lied in others, and that the pattern needed to be exposed. Starr would make a demand, and Clinton's lawyers would try to block it, forcing Starr to ratchet up the demands.

Because Starr had two things most career prosecutors never have--an unlimited budget and virtually unbridled power to probe--he was acting as his own judge as well as Clinton's. "You have to set your own ethical bounds as a prosecutor because of the sheer power you have, especially at the grand-jury stage," says former Watergate prosecutor Henry Ruth. "Because federal grand-jury case law is practically all on the prosecutors' side, the system places a lot of reliance on voluntary ethical limits. This is one of the great dangers of the independent counsel act."