‘Cui Bono?’--Can the Country Benefit From This?

There’s a question going unasked amid all the current hubbub: Cui bono? Who benefits? As the Romans knew, that simple question can unlock the densest political riddle and help to illuminate the darkest historical passage.

History happens, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, and it’s one of history’s perverse habits that it always happens in its own peculiar way. Despite President Bill Clinton’s personal failings, and despite the faux-sophisticates who have been posturing to the effect that powerful men always do whatever they can get away with and to hell with the truth, the squalid little drama that has absorbed the Republic for the last seven months has played out on a historical stage that is the unique creation of our own moment in time. Therein lies its real interest.

On that stage, many tales are met and melded. L’affaire Lewinsky is at once a morality play, with self-destructive Clinton cast as the emblem of the self-indulgent baby-boom generation; a cultural parable, about the post-1960s trashing of the distinction between the public and private spheres--or, in the ‘60s’ own idiom, the distinction between the personal and the political; a media story, with journalists competing to serve up the dirt that the post-Watergate public has learned to love to hate, and a legal melodrama, with the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, and his minions cast as rogue Javerts in pursuit of a truly culpable Jean Valjean or, depending on one’s perspective, as knight-guardians of the Constitution--but, in either case, armed with the tools of the independent-counsel statute that was itself a product of the Watergate era.

Not least, it is a political saga, with much at stake for both sides as a new millennium and the next presidential election loom just months away. Whatever our prurient interest in Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes, whatever the claims of lawyers who insist they are only impartial servants of justice, what we are witnessing is a political event--what is more, a political event unspooling in a specific time and place. Indeed, what makes this episode so extraordinary is that those many narratives have been braided together into an extravagant Clintoniad that may, in the end, reveal nearly as much about modern American society as Virgil’s epic did about ancient Rome.

Presidents are not monks, and many have sinned. But though other presidents have got themselves in various degrees of hot water by committing transgressions in one or another of those several domains--the moral, the cultural, the legal, the political or the precincts of the Fourth Estate--it has been Clinton’s singular fate that he has managed simultaneously to stir the Furies who inhabit each and every one of those realms.

President Ulysses S. Grant and President Warren G. Harding offended the public morality of their day and were publicly chastised for it (Harding posthumously), but both those Republican presidents enjoyed broad GOP majorities in Congress and were never in danger of anything more than a rhetorical rebuke. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, perhaps even Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, violated the canons of private moral behavior in their respective eras, but were never brought to book in their lifetimes--thanks to the strength of cultural conventions about what was the public’s business and what was the individual’s, and the agreement of the press to abide by those conventions. Roosevelt lied intentionally and often to the American people about the imminence of the Nazi threat to the United States, but contemporaries and historians alike have forgiven him on the grounds that he prevaricated for good reason, and for a good cause.

Significantly, President Andrew Johnson’s offenses were almost purely political--he disagreed strongly with congressional Republicans over Reconstruction policy--and he is the one president ever subjected to the full process of impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial by the Senate. Lying, corruption and personal venality--and surely not sexual misconduct--formed no part of the bill of indictment.

Richard M. Nixon is the first president who can be said to foreshadow Clinton’s destiny, at least faintly, in that he managed at one and the same time to provoke his political opponents, who were then the congressional majority, antagonize the press and baldly lie to the American public realm. But Nixon was an old-fashioned offender, a president who abused his office for purposes of subverting the political process--a crime unambiguously in the public realm.

Clinton’s original trespasses lay in what most people would once have agreed is among the most sacrosanct zones of the private sphere, his own sexual behavior. There this story began; all subsequent chapters flow from that. And though it is true that Clinton, in the fashion of his generation, has projected a persona of less official majesty and more emotional accessibility than any of his predecessors (opening the door to the fabled question about his underdrawers, which he almost unhesitatingly answered, inquiry and response alike providing telling commentaries on our cultural mood), it is virtually inconceivable that any previous president’s private life could have been exposed to such relentless inquiry.

It is against that backdrop that Clinton’s failure to ‘fess up in January becomes more understandable. He was being a bit old-fashioned. He lied like a gentleman, as the Victorians used to say, a posture damned as hypocrisy in our time, with its passion for authenticity and its faith in the therapy of disclosure, but a practice once considered quite conscionable, even honorable. His falsehoods then have come back to haunt him now. But how could even such an astute reader of the cultural and political mood as Clinton have foreseen in January that in the ensuing seven months he would be subjected to the onslaught of media curiosity about his erotic habits that we have witnessed, not to mention the implacable juggernaut of Starr’s investigation?

Leaving aside the morality of Clinton’s sexual behavior, it was neither unprecedented nor unreasonable for him to have responded then as he did, on the logic that a question about an illegitimate subject does not deserve a legitimate answer. So how did the question ever assume the urgency--and the official status--that it did? On what specific grounds did Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and the panel of federal judges who oversee Starr authorize the extension of his largely failed Whitewater investigation into the Monica S. Lewinsky matter? That question deserves the closest scrutiny when Starr’s final report is at last submitted.

In the meantime, the president has been compelled to mortify himself in public for his private indiscretions. The spectacle recollects the ancient practice whereby the victors dragged the vanquished behind their chariot wheels. But what exactly has been gained, and who precisely has won?

As a people, we have apparently lost some of our appetite for scurrilous information about our public figures--a positive gain in my view. But the facts remain that a man has been humbled, a wife and daughter shamed, the institution of the presidency deeply damaged and the public further disenchanted with politicians, politics and government itself.

That last item perhaps provides a clue to the political logic of this sorry chapter. For most of this century, Americans have debated the role of government. That debate has been particularly intense in the last 30 years. Clinton may now have brought us to a denouement. Surely the major beneficiaries--if any--of this sordid episode will be those who want the government to do less.

Clinton is a post-Reagan Democratic moderate; no state-builder like Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, but nonetheless a recognizable legatee of the old New Deal-Great Society faith in government as an instrument for the common good. He has been largely stymied in his major public-policy initiatives, notably health-care reform, but he is a wily politician and a powerfully persuasive voice in the bully pulpit. Now this public humiliation threatens to deprive him of whatever vestigial ability he may have had to stem our era’s determination to dismantle government and unthrottle the engines of let-’er-rip, laissez-faire, 19th-century-style capitalism.

Cui bono? The question answers itself.