Bill Clinton: I Misled People

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Another meeting convened in the solarium about two hours before the speech, and it was a contentious scene. Aides kept arguing against an attack on Starr, and Clinton kept arguing back. Starr is the only prosecutor who would have delved into his personal life, he said, adding that not everyone in America knows this, and this would be an opportunity to tell them. He said there was an an anti-Starr group out there that would welcome his criticism. The aides persisted. Hillary turned to her husband and said, "It's your speech. You say what you want to say." Then she left the room, and the arguments continued.

It is too soon to know whether, as the millennium approaches, Monday night was the moment the Spin Decade ended. Clinton's sharpest sword has always been his ability to persuade. And even as the speech approached, it was hard to know whether to root for or against the man from Hope, to wish that he might seize what the office affords him in grace and redemption: to apologize and, with just the right mix of candor and contrition, to make himself new again. Or wish that he wouldn't.

After so much criticism of his promiscuous use of language, Clinton made his basic points very directly. "It was wrong." "A personal failure." His observation that even Presidents have private lives was compelling and legitimate--most Americans agree that what goes on in a President's bedroom is no one's business but his. It skipped right past the problem that the conduct he admitted to occurred not in his bedroom but off the Oval Office, with a junior employee, an act disgraceful enough that any manager in any other job would lose it.

But he was tripped up by his anger at Starr and the collapsing weight of his own double-talk. He essentially did not say he was sorry for what he had done; he was just sorry he got caught. The reason he lied was to protect himself, protect his family and--this was the biggest error of all--because the cops were after him. And then he appealed for us to make it all go away.

The language also had that Clinton smell. Seven months of lies and the famous finger wag somehow amounted only to an admission that he "gave a false impression." As for defending answers as "legally accurate," most people think something is accurate or it is not. The idea of establishing some new zone of semitruth immediately brings to mind another phrase, the one that still haunts Al Gore: "no controlling legal authority." That too was one supplied by lawyers. This may have been a necessary way of avoiding admitting perjury, but the whole speech said the opposite: I was lying then, I'm telling the truth now, but I never perjured myself.

The speech played beautifully to an audience of one. But other than Hillary, the instant reviews started out surprised and went down from there. The polls were generally neutral, didn't move up or down; but the editorial pages were blistering, and, more important, the Democrats lifted scarcely a finger to rally round their man. Democratic leaders on the Hill grew more incensed after White House officials, acting on Kendall's guidance, called Monday evening to report that the President's testimony had gone just fine.