ANALYSIS
Clinton's Behavior
Patterns Become Issue
By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 13, 1998; Page A29
There is a surreal scene on Page 242
of the Starr report where President
Clinton is offering several false or
misleading explanations to a White
House assistant a few hours after the
Monica S. Lewinsky story broke last
Jan. 21. Clinton asserts he has "done
nothing wrong," had talked to
Lewinsky perhaps once on the
telephone, and that she "made a
sexual demand" on him but he
rebuffed her. She had threatened him,
he said, was "known as a stalker"
among her peers, and would not leave
him alone.
After making this sweeping
declaration of innocence to his aide, Sidney Blumenthal, a former
journalist steeped in politics, literature and conspiracy theories, Clinton
compares himself to Nicholas Rubashov, the protagonist in a famous
Arthur Koestler novel who is imprisoned and eventually executed on false
charges, a victim of the monstrous powers of a police state.
"I feel like somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is
creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out," Clinton says. "I feel
like the character in the novel 'Darkness at Noon.' "
In avoiding blame for his troubles and comparing himself to Rubashov,
Clinton evoked many of the characteristics that are a familiar part of his
history: his fertile literary imagination, his sense of victimhood, his desire to
please, his need to conceal his own embarrassing sexual behavior, his
tendency toward self-delusion, his legitimate concerns about the invasive
powers of his adversaries, and his peculiar manipulation of semantics to
construct a story line at once compelling and illusory.
The 453-page report by the Office of Independent Counsel is replete with
scenes of Clinton adjusting to his predicament in similar ways. He might be
talking almost anywhere to anyone -- in the White House with an
assistant, on television addressing the nation, in the Oval Office flirting with
Lewinsky, in the outer office refreshing the memory of his secretary, Betty
Currie, on the telephone with his friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr. or his old
consultant Dick Morris, at a lawyer's office giving a civil deposition, even
in the Map Room testifying before a federal grand jury -- and the same
Clinton characteristics emerge time after time.
These behavior patterns are at the core of the case against the president,
and also, paradoxically, at the heart of his defense. The implicit but
unstated theme of the legal and political debate that now imperils his stay
in office is this: Should Bill Clinton be impeached for being Bill Clinton?
From the perspective of Clinton's biography, the Starr report in many
respects seems to be plowing another path down a well-worn field. Since
Clinton first ran for office in Arkansas nearly a quarter-century ago, the
evidence suggests that he has placed himself in danger through his sexual
recklessness and then done virtually everything he could, after the fact, to
conceal his actions from family, friends, aides, party allies, adversaries,
and the voting public, thereby avoiding the worst personal and political
consequences of his private behavior.
In the past his efforts to conceal information, to the extent that they were
known or suspected, were largely considered in that context: as damage
control undertaken to keep his marriage together, his friendships intact, his
staff loyal, his party and the voters on his side, his adversaries at bay, his
political dream alive.
But Kenneth W. Starr and his deputies, by focusing on the patterns of the
president's actions in the Lewinsky affair, dramatically shifted the lens.
Clinton's sexual behavior and his efforts to conceal it have now been
placed in a criminal framework. What for decades had been habitual
personal and political damage control suddenly became grounds for
impeachment.
Both sides are now using the essence of that notion in their arguments. The
defining theme of Clinton's rebuttal, as presented Friday by his lawyer,
David E. Kendall, is the line: "The simple reality of this situation is that the
House is being confronted with evidence of a man's efforts to keep an
inappropriate relationship private." The Starr report puts it this way: "The
nature of the relationship was the subject of many of the president's false
statements, and his desire to keep the relationship secret provides a
motive for many of his actions that apparently were designed to obstruct
justice."
Perhaps it was inevitable that the impeachment case would turn largely on
issues of semantics. Clinton's entire career has been shaped by disputes
over words: what he has said, or failed to say, or almost said, or denied
saying, or insisted that he had said, or people thought he had said. The
stakes in that debate seemed to increase every year, until finally they
reached the level of whether his words constituted perjury or obstruction
of justice.
It is apparent from the Starr document that the president's "close parsing"
of words, as the report refers to it at one point, drove the independent
counsel and his deputies to distraction, and that they became determined
to call him on it. But what was really new here was the context, and
Starr's prosecutorial powers, not the pattern of Clinton's semantic
maneuverings.
A journey back into his career would find abundant examples of Clinton's
"close parsing" during any era, some involving sex, others not. During the
1992 campaign, when he denied Gennifer Flowers's allegations that she
had had a 12-year affair with him, his statement that "the story is untrue"
was his way of denying only that the affair lasted for 12 years, not that he
never had sex with her. Similarly, when he uttered the phrase "a woman I
never slept with" to further refute Flowers's allegations, Clinton might
maintain that it was technically accurate because he never literally fell
asleep with her.
The best known Clinton wordplay of that kind involved drugs, not sex.
During his years in Arkansas, Clinton responded to all questions about
whether he had ever smoked marijuana by stating that he had never
broken any state or federal laws. Finally, when pinned with the precisely
correct question -- had he ever smoked marijuana while a Rhodes scholar
in England -- he acknowledged that indeed he had (though he had not
inhaled).
Such semantic tricks seemed preposterous, if nonetheless somewhat
effective, at the time. Now they are completely accepted as a central
aspect of Clinton's defense. In their rebuttal to the Starr report, Clinton's
lawyers perfectly capture his semantic legerdemain by making the
argument that it is within any defendant's rights to state things that are true
but misleading. "Answers to questions that are literally true are not
perjury," they argue. "Even if an answer doesn't directly answer the
question asked, it is not perjury if it is true -- no accused has an obligation
to help his accuser." It is also within his rights, they said, to give "narrow
answers to ambiguous questions."
From Clinton's history one can see the antecedents: the Flowers
statements were perhaps true but misleading, and the marijuana answer
was a narrow response to an ambiguous question. During his days in
Arkansas, people who dealt with Clinton became accustomed to these
methods of "close parsing." He once told the state teachers union that if
they endorsed another candidate he would "tear off their heads and beat
their brains out."
When the teachers interpreted this to mean that he might hold a grudge
against them if they endorsed his opponent, Clinton thundered, "Nothing
could be further from the truth and I resent this!" In his semantic realm, his
limb-and-head-wrenching threat was meant only to apply to the moment,
not to the future, he insisted.
Clinton used all of these techniques in responding to questions under oath
during the Lewinsky investigation. The Starr report claims that Clinton
committed perjury when he testified under oath that he had not had a
sexual relationship, or sexual affair, or sexual relations with Lewinsky. He
and his lawyers assert that he was merely being misleading, that in his mind
only sexual intercourse, not oral sex, met those definitions.
During his grand jury appearance before Starr and his deputies, Clinton
acknowledged his practice of giving statements that were true but
misleading. When he was asked whether he had lied to his top aides in the
days after the scandal broke, the president asserted that he had said
"things that were true about this relationship" with Lewinsky. ". . . I said,
there's nothing going on between us. That was true. I said I did not have
sex as I defined it. That was true."
Clinton even went on to explain how he used grammatical tenses to make
distinctions in truth, especially as applied to his previous statements that
"there is no" relationship with Lewinsky. "It depends on what the meaning
of the word 'is' is," he testified. "If 'is' means is and never has been . . . that
is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true
statement. Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having
any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a
question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have
been completely true."
Starr and his deputies found Clinton incredible in all of his semantic moves
and based their 11-count impeachment referral on their conclusion that he
was a practiced liar who knew that he was lying. At the Paula Jones
deposition, they asserted, "the president could not have believed that he
was telling 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' in denying a
sexual relationship, sexual relations, or a sexual affair with Monica
Lewinsky."
But an utterly ironic argument can be made, according to some legal
scholars, that Clinton's long-standing pattern of semantic maneuvering has
had the effect of making his claims against perjury more credible. Perjury
requires that a person knowingly and willfully set out to deceive. Perhaps
Clinton has become so habitual in his methods that they are no longer an
act of deception.
"Given Clinton's past history of trying to avoid responsibility for his actions
by using narrow and technical language," said UCLA law professor Peter
Arenella, "there is every reason to accept his claim that he believed what
he did with Monica Lewinsky did not meet the definition of sexual
relations."
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