Do it for the children:
December 11, 1998
To the Wavering Republicans
By Mark Helprin, a novelist and contributing editor of
the Journal.
If you think of the achievements of your predecessors, you need neither
waver nor fear. Yours is the party of Lincoln. It was born of unpopular
principle and did not hesitate to wage civil war and tear the nation asunder
for the sake of equal justice. More recently and despite insult and injury
from the advocates of accommodation it held the line at the end of the Cold
War, to defend the principle of self-government. There is no end to
principles it can support, no end to battles it can fight, and no brake on the
number of adherents it can attract if it will operate courageously and in
service of what is great and transcendent.
Greatness and transcendence are why people join political parties, and why
they go to war. It is why they risk and sacrifice, and engage in political
argument. Ultimately they are moved by principle, and will for its sake
throw aside or forgo the material things that scoundrel politicians think they
hold above all else.
Though Republican leaders have not dared to address it forthrightly, thus
leaving the field to a president and his supporters who grow day by day in
boldness and mendacity, Bill Clinton's problem is neither personal nor
political, it is how he governs. Regardless of the precise nature of the
independent counsel's legal referrals, such things as the FBI files, the Travel
Office firings, the extortion of money from impoverished Indian tribes, and
the abuse of presidential powers to evade criminal responsibility happened
on the president's watch, they all point to him, and he is answerable.
President Nixon did not himself burglarize the Watergate, and was originally
unaware of a break-in. He was, however, rightly held to account, and
according to the standards by which he was judged President Clinton would
by now have been required to leave office.
Every springtime does not bring a semen-stained dress. Of the key
Whitewater witnesses, two live in the family quarters of the White House;
one died in a federal prison alone and in disgrace; one is dead by his own
hand, the documents from his White House office levitating into a closet in
the family quarters alluded to above; one, a felon, speaks of rolling over for
the residents of these same family quarters and has obviously been paid to
do so; one, the former wife of the dead federal prisoner, will not testify until
fish grow hair; one, with credibility problems, has sung; and all others hang
tough.
Quids, Pros and Quos
This pattern, as if plagiarized from a Martin Scorsese movie about the Cosa
Nostra, continues into the campaign finance investigation, with 60 witnesses
taking the Fifth and many others rendered inaccessible by flight. All fight
doggedly, but apprehensible by everyone who can read a newspaper is that
the president's campaign received millions of dollars originating in the
People's Republic of China, that the contributors have been identified as
agents of China, that by presidential exception much in the way of
nuclear-relevant supercomputers, missile technology, and previously
restricted machine tools have found their way to China, and that the quids,
the pros, and the quos go all the way back to Little Rock.
There is so much more that one needs thick guidebooks (which The Wall
Street Journal has actually published) to describe just the portion of the
iceberg visible above the water. But the trails are brushed and the tracks are
covered with obsessive and remarkable industry, even in the relatively
transparent Lewinsky affair. To this day, the president admits only to having
misled, which all presidents do from time to time, and to having had an
inappropriate relationship, which could mean, for example, flirting while
playing knock-hockey.
But Clinton/Lewinsky is an anomaly. No one is dead, no one is in China,
and purely by accident the president's habitual practices and methods have
come to light and been pinned down ineluctably. No matter how heavy the
torrents of obfuscation, it is clear that the president has committed a number
of serious crimes against the system of justice he is sworn to uphold, and
they are no more about sex than the theft of money from a cash register is
about business.
Perjury is not sex, obstruction is not sex, and abuse of power is not sex.
They stem from an effort to cover up the evidence of a case in which the
highest elected official in a state selected a woman who was then escorted
to him by his police, and who was next commanded to get down on her
knees and the rest is well known. That is not sex, it is abuse of power, plain
and simple. It is the root of the Paula Jones case (tried unfittingly under the
law of sexual harassment, as a body of regulations concerning abuse of
power is obviated by the existence of impeachment). It is thus the root of
the Lewinsky case. And it is the reason the president went to such lengths
to suppress the essentially political truth of this incident.
No American politician or officeholder in any capacity who under color of
his authority treats a citizen with such contemptuous injustice has the right to
any office of public trust at any time thereafter, including, and perhaps most
obviously, the presidency.
The defense of the president by his allies has become a nightmarish
excursion into sophistry, stupidity, and insincerity. Are we now in the fifth or
the sixth cycle of false contrition? What could be more telling, and perhaps
divinely appropriate, than that one of his chief defenders is a man who did
not know that a prostitution ring was operating out of his own apartment?
Other indignant enthusiasts of the point of order, with throbbing conviction,
liken the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the
world--he who raises millions at a single dinner, who commands armies of
soldiers and lawyers, who has bent the vast apparatus of state into his own
interest, who is protected by an immense guard for which he asserts
privileges previously unknown in American history, who sits in his huge
plane on the runway at LAX as his hair is cut--to a slave.
Quite obviously these partisans are attempting to infect the law with
Alice-in-Wonderland gobbledygook designed to enforce the idea that truth
is merely the servant of power. By their facile reckoning Kenneth Starr is
Inspector Javert in mad pursuit of Jean Valjean. But, for once stealing a loaf
of bread, the upright and saintly Jean Valjean would have been returned to
the quarries and almost certain death. Is Javert comparable to the
independent counsel, whose struggle has been merely to establish the truth
of a thing against hysterical resistance and every type of log throwing
imaginable? And the punishment in this case is not death for having long ago
stolen a loaf of bread but, rather, on account of multiple, habitual, and
continuing violations, transgressions, and lies, to move out of the White
House.
Bill Clinton is neither Jean Valjean nor a persecuted slave. Rather, he is a
unique creature devoted to the frenzied cultivation and consumption of the
adoration of strangers.
He is a man who takes credit for what he has not done, denies responsibility
for what he has, lies with a Picasso-like genius, uses the Oval Office as a
kind of duck blind for hunting zaftig Valley Girls, and, had he honor, shame,
or even a sense of humor, would already have resigned a hundred times.
The wonder that even out of pure partisanship or indelible loyalty he has so
many defenders in his own party may be explained by the greater wonder
that Republican leaders have sat so long on such a low fence. This they
have done out of fear that the American people may be sufficiently
corrupted that in 2000 they will punish the GOP for standing against, among
other things, perjury. This is not a heroic view of the American sense of
justice, which though at times slow to awake has, like the long gray line,
never failed us.
Perhaps the leaders, who seem not to have the courage even to follow,
think we have sunk irretrievably into moral relativism and have forgotten
whence we came and what we did along the way. Perhaps they believe that
in a Senate trial, in which the jury would be asked to judge carefully
narrowed charges, more than a third of the senators will disregard and
offend the Constitution by basing their decisions not on a finding of
innocence or guilt but on their opinions of the proceedings or their partisan
loyalties--as perhaps they will, though perhaps they won't. Certainly the
Republican leaders fear an electoral debacle when the two-thirds of the
American people commonly cited as opposing impeachment next vote.
But if the middle third does not swing--as it did, after long delay, against
slavery, for intervention in World War II, for universal suffrage, for equal
justice regardless of race--it is because it will not have heard the appeal of
those in appropriately high places, that appeal never having been made.
Where are the speaker designate, the Senate majority leader, the
governors, the emerging presidential candidates, and the former presidents?
Certainly they must have an opinion on this grave matter that has so long
preoccupied the nation. Are they for impeachment, or against it? This vote
is up or down. It is either one thing or another, pro or con, night or day,
freeze or boil. We know very well who the president is, some of what he
has done, and what he is made of. Of Republicans, however, even
Republicans are now entitled to ask, who exactly are you, what do you
stand for, and what are you going to do?
Blob of Ooze
The leaders should know and the waverers should know that even from a
purely political perspective it is better to fall with the truth firmly in hand than
to stand for a few additional moments the prisoner of one's own ambition. It
is, as well, poor politics to surrender in the face of every difficulty and
danger and to stand consistently for nothing but what is safe. That is not
how a political party gains adherents or even respect. It is not how a
political party wins elections. It is, rather, how a political party is
transformed into a blob of ooze.
Honorable members, vote what you think is right, not what will preserve
your office, and, God willing, you will get what is right and your office will
be preserved. Think of the American soldier, who gave his life for the
principles you are now charged to uphold. When, over the course of
centuries, he was asked to give all for the sake of holding a hill or taking a
trench, he was able to see that upon small things great things ride. Neither a
lawyer nor a member of Congress nor sometimes even schooled, he
understood the way things connect and the way battles are won. If you
keep in mind what he sacrificed and with what knowledge, can you then,
out of fear, ratify one standard for the president and one for the common
man? Can you not rise to the occasion, as he did?
You must be able to say, when all this is long done, "I was there. I was told
that America had lost its will to justice, that the country had changed, that I
would have no say about this, and that it was not for me to judge. But I
voted otherwise." For when you vote you will be deciding not the life of the
nation but your honor, which is the only thing you have that no one can take
from you if you so determine. When you vote you will either reaffirm that
we are a nation of laws or you will decide that we are not. You will either
bestow upon the president kingly rights that no president ever has had, or
you will keep the president one of us. You will either give your imprimatur
to corruption, or you will withhold it. You will either confirm the exceptional
constitutional character of these United States or you will, after more than
200 years, carelessly contradict the hopeful chapter of history in which we
have proclaimed that no man is above the law.
Though you have no choice but to vote in the moral twilight of our times,
you can be certain that what you do in the next few days will be illuminated
by the light of history. Therefore, rise to the occasion. Lead the people.
Uphold your oath. Protect the Constitution. Confound power, and put it in
its place. Honorable members . . . stand and deliver.
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