On Clinton, the "Newt Defense," and "going all the way"
Tommaso and others --
I am old enough (older than Clinton, anyway) to remember the days when boys & girls made a big distinction between "going all the way" (e.g., having sexual intercourse) and indulging in "heavy petting" (anything at all short of sexual intercourse). Fear of the possible consequences of actually having intercourse -- a) pregnancy, b) deeper emotional involvement -- is what dictated what now looks to us like a very silly distinction indeed.
If you have read the blow-by-blow Starr Report account of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters, you will see that Clinton still believed this distinction was valid. Note how he resisted Monica's entreaties that they go "all the way."
As for his defense (we did not have "real" sex -- we did not "go all the way"), this was once christened the "Newt Defense."
That term was coined in the wake of a Gail Sheehy article on Newt Gingrich published in Vanity Fair in September, 1995. Ms. Sheehy uncovered a woman (Anne Manning) who had an affair with the married Gingrich in 1997. As summarized in a recent article in Salon Magazine (I never saw the original Vanity Fair piece), Ms. Manning had the following to say:
"We had oral sex," Manning revealed. "He prefers that
modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept
with her.'" She added that Gingrich threatened her: "If you
ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."
Manning was then married to a professor at West Georgia,
the backwater college where Gingrich taught. "I don't claim
to be an angel," she told Sheehy, but "he's morally
dishonest."
The author of the Salon piece, Stephen Talbot (who co-wrote and produced the 1996 PBS documentary, "The Long March of Newt Gingrich") goes on to add that Gingrich has had some problems with his core constituency on this score:
Newt's oral sex
denial proved embarrassing at a time when he was the
secular leader of the "family values" crowd, appearing
frequently at Christian Coalition gatherings.
During Gingrich's 1995 summer book tour, when he was
testing the waters for a presidential bid, demonstrators
hounded him about his oral sex hypocrisy. I was covering
Gingrich for a PBS documentary when the speaker
appeared at a book signing in Los Angeles and was
confronted by a man waving a Bible and shouting, "I want
to know here where it says that oral sex doesn't count as
adultery." The gentleman was hustled out of the bookstore
by the Secret Service before Gingrich could answer his
theological question.
Talbot said he was stunned when Bill Clinton also tried to use the "Newt Defense." Doesn't stun me. Rather, it does not surprise me. Both men are children of the fifties, for heaven's sake.
jbe
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