It’s Not What You See, It’s How You See It

No one knows whether last week’s release of the Senate Whitewater Committee report marks a fatal turning point in the political fortunes of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. That’s the ghoulish thrill of a big scandal: You’re never sure what disaster might pop up next. But there is one thing the report has demonstrated beyond a doubt: Discussion of public ethics in this country has become so fragmented and opportunistic that it is now virtually useless except as a weapon for scoring partisan points.

The committee’s Republicans issued one report, the minority Democrats another. The Republicans said the first lady was most likely guilty of a pattern of interference with official investigations going back almost 10 years. The Democrats said she was blameless. You would not guess it from the starkly opposing conclusions, but the reports were based on virtually the same facts and testimony.

The GOP’s majority report concerned itself with two major topics. First, was the question of whether Clinton associates tried to keep federal investigators away from damaging Whitewater evidence that remained in the office of White House aide Vincent W. Foster Jr. after he died.

Republicans said a convincing chain of circumstantial evidence led to the conclusion that the first lady directed these efforts at evasion. There were other wise inexplicable telephone calls among the first lady, her chief of staff Margaret Williams, friend Susan Thomases and White House Counsel Bernard W. Nussbaum just after Foster’s death. There was testimony from the Foster investigators themselves, one of whom said he had actually seen Williams carry documents out of Foster’s office. There were the massive memory lapses by Williams and Thomases when they testified before the committee.

So what? the Democrats’ report responded. There was nothing in those memory lapses that couldn’t be explained by the stress of Foster’s death. The White House counsel followed legally justifiable procedures. The witness who claimed he’d seen Williams with the documents gave confused testimony.

Besides, said the Democrats, Williams had passed polygraph tests. No matter, said the Republicans preemptively in their report; such tests were known to be unreliable.

Same facts, wholly different inferences. The gap leaves an outside observer without a single square inch of solid, agreed-upon ground on which to stand and make a judgment. Both sides looked at the witnesses; each made a party-line determination of credibility.

The reports’ other major concern was the mysterious Rose Law Firm billing records, detailing Hillary Clinton’s legal work on what turned out to be a fraudulent land deal in Arkansas. Investigators asked for the records in 1993, after the first lady had already destroyed other relevant documents. Yet, the records did not turn up until 1995, in a White House room, part of the private residential quarters, to which few people but the first family had access. Only Hillary Clinton, said the Republicans, had the means and motive to suppress, then release, the incriminating records.

The Democrats, in their accounting, asserted that the records did not show Hillary Clinton doing much work on the land deal--so there wasn’t much of a motive. And the Republicans had no direct evidence for their string of suppositions.

So how did the billing records arrive in the first family’s residential quarters? It could well have been through an innocent route--such as a construction crew that worked in the White House and moved things around.

Once again, there isn’t much there that would persuade an outsider to pick one version over the other.

No Republican argument persuaded the Democrats, and vice versa. After a make-believe search for common moral ground, committee members ended up on opposite sides of a river whose bridge was washed out.

It was not always this way, even in highly contentious scandal investigations. There have usually been a few--sometimes a very few--senators or representatives with a reputation for moderation in their partisanship. Some members of Congress have been noted for intellectual honesty. Such people were the pivotal middle, listeners who could be swayed by new impressions and facts. They were the audience that made it worthwhile to argue the case on merits.

The Watergate investigations had their considerable impact partly because they managed to pull Republican congressmen, not just Democrats, away from President Richard M. Nixon. The Iran-Contra hearings were more visibly partisan, but the investigation was moderated because Democrats decided there were limits on their appetite for Republican presidential blood.

Sometimes important committee members had reputations for nonpartisanship that did not fit the facts. In Watergate, for example, Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. was a fierce anti-Nixon partisan but managed to look and talk like a country lawyer with no allegiance except to the Constitution. Ervin was convincing because people still believed that some members of Congress were independent and unpredictable--in political terms, unreliable.

Virtually no one believes such a thing today. Most members of Congress have given up trying to pretend otherwise--and the Whitewater report is one result.

The report shows, sadly, that the Whitewater committee members proved reliable indeed--that is, reliably partisan.

No Republican conceded that, maybe, news of a close friend’s suicide might have rattled Clintonites enough to impair their actions and memories, or at least that there was no clear-cut evidence to the contrary. No Democrat scratched his head and said that, even without hard evidence, there was something disturbingly strange about the number of occasions on which inconvenient documents related to the first couple’s affairs had turned up missing.

Instead, Republicans and Democrats held two separate, symmetrical press conferences to mark the reports’ release. Republicans fielded performers like Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York; the minority presented, among others, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut. Each laid out his side’s position in the kind of fiery, passionate language normally used to convey the idea that the speaker is absolutely certain of his facts and judgments.

Why the hardened positions? On the Democrats’ side, there is presidential politics--and, it appears, real anger at the vehemence of the GOP’s attack. On the Republican side, there is, well, presidential politics--and a boiling anger that Hillary Clinton should be asking for a benefit of the doubt that she has frequently denied to others. After years of constantly casting nasty aspersions on each other’s characters, the two sides are beyond giving one another the slightest quarter.

This is cynicism of a profound sort. We will be undeservedly lucky if we do not see its effects in matters far more important than Whitewater.*