Clinton may yet survive
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Clinton to testify on video in Lewinsky case
THE booming US economy came to a sudden halt in the second
quarter of this year. The Clinton presidency is now following suit in
the third quarter. If I had to make an idle prediction, I would say that
these two events may soon start to feed on each other in an
accelerating downward spiral. It will not end until the excesses of the
era have been cleaned out of the American system.
Possibly so, respond my friends in Arkansas, but don't bet on the
demise of Bill Clinton just yet. They know from long experience that
this is a man who carries a special gene for survival. Every kind of
scandal swirled around him at one time or another during his 12-year
tenure as state governor, whether it was money from a convicted
cocaine dealer funding his election campaigns, or rumours of a joint
bank account with a convicted fraudster (which later turned out to
be true), or a record of seductions that, touchingly, showed no bias
on grounds of race, class, age, weight or, for that matter, looks.
But charm always brought him through, and his cultural "cohort" in
the American press has been famously unwilling to strike one of their
own. In the 1992 presidential primaries, Gennifer Flowers appeared
with tapes indicating that Mr Clinton had suborned perjury and had
engaged in the criminal obstruction of a court proceeding.
"If everybody kinda hangs tough. If they don't have pictures, and if
no one says anything, then they don't have anything," he can be
heard saying to the blonde cabaret singer. The press responded by
destroying her, not him. Six years later, Gennifer Flowers was
essentially vindicated when the President admitted, in compelled
testimony, that the two had indeed had a sexual relationship.
But things are rather different in 1998. Charm and a friendly press
are no defence against a special prosecutor, appointed by the
judicial branch, with a statutory duty to pursue evidence of
wrong-doing by the President. There are different views about
Kenneth Starr, of course. The White House has succeeded in
demonising him as the Inquisitor from Hell, bent on overturning the
verdict of a democratic election.
This is very useful. If he exonerates Mr Clinton, it will be said that
even Mr Starr could not dig up any dirt, with his army of
investigators, in a three-year witch-hunt that saw subpoenas
delivered to half the population of Arkansas. (Or so goes the
folklore.) If he indicts, or submits a report to Congress
recommending impeachment, his motives can be impugned. Judging
by the polls, the majority of Americans believe that he is "out to get"
Mr Clinton by whatever means.
I can only laugh. In my own experience, Mr Starr is a trimming,
limp-wristed procrastinator with the zeal of a plump sheep, who
works part-time on the job, craves approval and bears the imprint of
the last person who sat on him. He panicked when his own lead
prosecutor told him there was evidence of an FBI cover-up of the
1993 death of the White House aide Vincent Foster. Mr Starr was
not going to quarrel with the FBI. The case was shut down. His
prosecutor resigned in disgust, and later accused the Office of the
Independent Counsel of unethical behaviour.
But after years of ineffectual dithering, Kenneth Starr has at last got
the bit between his teeth. Something must have nettled him.
Mutterings about his incompetence within the legal fraternity,
perhaps, or more likely an arms-length White House smear
campaign that saw a private investigator hired to watch his social life.
(It was alleged, falsely, that he had a mistress in Little Rock.)
In recent days, Mr Starr has secured the grand jury testimony of 11
Secret Service agents who work in the presidential protection detail.
One of them reportedly served as a "facilitator", procuring "come
hither" women spotted by the President on his trips around the
country. It will be interesting to see if this agent can match the tally
set by my good friend L D Brown, former corporal in the Arkansas
State Police, who has testified under oath that he solicited more than
100 women for Bill Clinton during a two-year stint at the Governor's
Mansion in the 1980s.
This Secret Service testimony seems to have convinced Mr Starr
that he finally had enough evidence to move against the White
House. He promptly issued Bill Clinton with a summons to appear
before the grand jury, the first such subpoena ever served on a
President. In quick succession, Monica Lewinsky's lawyers
announced that she had agreed to a deal with the Office of the
Independent Counsel, promising "full and truthful testimony" in
exchange for blanket immunity from prosecution. Her mother,
Marcia Lewis, who seems to have been an assiduous promoter of
her daughter's Oval Office trysts, also struck a deal. And if that was
not enough, Mr Starr won a separate victory when a federal appeals
court ruled that Bruce Lindsey, the President's closest confidant at
the White House, did not enjoy attorney-client privilege and would
therefore have to testify as well.
It has been a long wait, but it now looks as if the shoe really is going
to drop. According to press reports, Miss Lewinsky is prepared to
testify that Clinton "encouraged" her to lie about their "alleged" affair
under oath and to take evasive measures to cover their tracks, such
as disposing of tell-tale gifts that had been subpoenaed as evidence.
If true, she will be accusing him of suborning perjury, obstruction of
justice and perjury in a federal lawsuit. That lawsuit, not that it
matters much now, was the sexual harassment case of Paula Jones.
The suit has since been thrown out of court, but Ms Jones has been
granted something of a posthumous victory. The documents of her
case have become foundation stones in Kenneth Starr's effort to
prove a campaign of witness intimidation, witness tampering, serial
perjury and assorted skulduggery by the President and his men.
I hesitate to conclude that Bill Clinton is doomed, however. What if
he puts on one of his magnificent, lip-biting, teary acts of contrition in
the Oval Office, with the whole nation watching bewitched on
television, and ends with an admission of the Lewinsky affair and a
plea for forgiveness? He could throw everything in the stew: the early
death of his natural father; his abusive, alcoholic step-father; how
they teased him at school and called him "fat boy"; his late mother's
death from cancer; his feelings of deep remorse over the pain
inflicted on his wife and daughter; his regret that he had let down the
women and men of America who had put their trust in him, not once,
but twice. It would be utterly nauseating, yet it might very well work
in the mushy, sentimental, post-Christian morality of fin de siŠcle
America.
He may skate yet, as they say in Arkansas. |
