Forget the Confession, Mr. Clinton

All last week, political Washington rallied ‘round the notion that what President Bill Clinton must do to get the Lewinsky mess behind him is to tell the whole story, apologize sincerely and throw himself on the mercy of a forgiving American people. The degree of unanimity among the cognoscenti is amazing, with everyone from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) to former presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos endorsing the unmodified, unlimited hang-out strategy. But, in fact, there is virtually no chance that the public will get a real confession out of Clinton. For that we should consider ourselves lucky.

Nothing about the president’s situation is likely to force him to depart from his habit of responding with omissions and evasions when asked uncomfortable questions about his personal life. Let’s say, for starters, that Clinton’s behavior toward Monica S. Lewinsky was innocent; in that case, he can’t spill the beans because there are no beans to spill. If the president’s behavior was a little more ethically ambiguous, trying to explain it will almost surely backfire: The more he talks, the worse it will sound.

In the alternative, assume, for the sake of argument, that the president behaved badly with Lewinsky. Assume, further, that when he testifies before the grand jury, he is still in the dark about whether the prosecutors have any physical or other hard evidence to corroborate his misbehavior. Under these circumstances, you can be reasonably sure that Clinton will tell the grand jury the truth, give or take a few nonindictable details.

But the president’s testimony, even if truthful, is only the beginning of the game, because his grand-jury testimony is supposed to be secret, which is why congressmen who want the whole story aired are trying to get Clinton to talk about it in public as well.

These congressmen are, in a semi-veiled way, threatening impeachment proceedings if he does not talk openly. If proceedings do get underway, the House could use pre-impeachment hearings to develop its own, public evidence.

The problem with this strategy is that, as of now, the impeachment threat is empty. As long as Americans want to keep Clinton in office, impeachment preparations are unlikely to get far, and the House will not develop its own authoritative public record of Clinton’s doings.

If there is no such public record, there is no need for the president to offer his own account. Meanwhile, Clinton would run big risks by talking fully and frankly. Even if people say they forgave him, the picture of the president disowning his past statements would be hard to forget. Clinton has trouble inspiring trust; he can doubtless imagine the proportions to which the problem would grow after a public admission of mendacity.

So Clinton will hang tough, and you can bet against the prospect of the nation’s gathering around the tube any time soon to hear the president explain it all.

But this likely absence of a presidential confession is a good, not a bad thing, first because the demand for such a confession asks too much.

Clinton, Hatch has told us, cannot satisfy the confession requirement just by standing up and spouting euphemisms, the way he did when dealing with the story of Gennifer Flowers. No, said the senator, Clinton would “have to really pour his heart out to the American people.” But we have no right to require the president to pour out his heart to us. We can demand that he behave well, speak so as to inspire us and exhibit as much of his character as necessary to enable him to lead, but we have no legitimate call on access to his innermost thoughts. To say otherwise--to insist that he incriminate himself publicly and abase himself out of his own mouth--smacks not of democratic politics but of a distasteful desire for Maoist self-criticism.

Still, if the idea of confession asks too much of the president, there is also a sense in which it asks too little--of both the president and the rest of us.

The notion that the process of confession and forgiveness will provide a way out of l’affaire Lewinsky, for Clinton and for his audience, has considerable appeal. It draws on the deepest Judeo-Christian impulses and imperatives. In this scandal, especially, coming clean seems appropriate medicine--because so much of the damage done by the scandal has been the result of the president’s silence.

What is more, we can be confident that this particular president would sound the themes of admission and redemption gracefully: This is, after all, the leader who told a religious audience that he goes to bed each night knowing he has sinned and awakes each morning grateful for another chance.

But the confession talk currently wafting on the Washington air should not be confused with the genuine article. Among other distinctions, real confession, the kind that merits divine forgiveness, consists of not just reciting words but making difficult amends to those whom the sinner has wounded. This is a long-range activity, with absolution at the far end--farther, certainly, than the oft-mentioned political deadline of the 1998 midterm congressional elections.

The idea of confession also gains legitimacy from another body of thought with power in our society--the secular religion of psychotherapy. Even here, though, the real thing--the process of facing the inner demons in order to exorcise them--requires a large emotional effort stretching over a substantial amount of time. By contrast, the talk strategy currently suggested for Clinton is just that--a strategy. It reflects, or exploits, the culture’s propensity to homogenize every misdeed into fodder for the endless public talk that is now thought to be a cure for everything. The strategy just as plainly reflects the fixation of the elite on the idea of openness as the key virtue of political morality, a fixation that often as not produces not candor but its counterfeit.

In short, the drive for confession distracts attention from what should be the central issues of this mess: the questions of how the president behaved and how we should evaluate his actions.

The country would have been fortunate if we had never been forced to contemplate, let alone judge, the Lewinsky scandal. But that wish comes far too late. I, for one, now want to know what the president did. Then I will decide, for what it’s worth, what I think of him. I do not care whether he confesses these things publicly or whether the truth comes to me from a note in a bottle found floating in the Potomac.

In short, I don’t want his apologies. I just want some accountability.