Nightmare's End

Friday was graduation day, full of pomp and circumstance. The Senators voted to acquit the President, and he gave his 82-second commencement address. The daffodils didn't know enough to stay under the mulch, the little white flags fluttered on the South Lawn putting green, aides stood in the sunshine listening to him apologize and reconcile one more time. And of course it was the postscript that sealed the day, after he turned to leave and heard the heavenly question transmitted by Sam Donaldson. "In your heart, sir, can you forgive and forget?"

Perfect. Pause. "I believe," Clinton answered, reaching for his diploma, "any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it."

He had been up so late--thinking and writing, thinking and writing, the long version, the short version--that he slept through his 8 a.m. wake-up call and was still scribbling as the votes tolled, guilty, not guilty. He knew--everyone knew--that every time he had opened his mouth about the scandal he had made things worse: too glib, too bitter, too unbowed, too phony. But as Dick Morris once said, Bill Clinton will make every mistake a President can make, but he will make it only once. This time he was so determined to get the tone right that he kept searching for the word he knew was still missing. The last word he added came at the end, when he urged everyone to "rededicate ourselves to the work of serving our nation and building our future," and then wrote in "together."

So much for burning down the House.

Nobody needs to be told what to hate about this year, what made us flinch or groan, change the channel, fling the magazine across the room. Generations of scholars yet unborn will read shelves of books yet unwritten trying to figure out what went wrong in America in 1998 and why. So maybe it's the lazy luxury of relief, now that it's over, to look at what might have gone right and toast the new era with a glass half full.

The serial predictions of anarchy never came true. The markets did not crash, the public did not rush to judgment, fact and fiction met but didn't merge, and the unending Senate trial took precisely 37 days. Within moments of the vote, the Senators were cheering the Chief Justice and one another, and no one lunged for anyone else's throat. The U.S. is still a superpower, and the only elected President to be impeached is still the leader of the free world.

A public content to ignore its government can take heart that its institutions are sturdy and forgiving: the presidency forgave a reckless President, the Congress survived a bout of cannibalism, the Constitution warded off anyone who tried to ransack it for any reason. It was tempting to blame the clanking 18th century impeachment mechanisms for dragging out the investigation for months after the public had made up its mind; yet that stately pace served the purpose of forcing both sides to confront the evidence, honor the process, hear each other out. It turns out the Constitution wasn't built for speed. It was built to last.