Post-Watergate Excesses Ignite Combustible Media

To begin: What is going on in Washington these manic and depressing days is certainly not Watergate, which was about grave and pervasive abuse of constitutional power by the president. By contrast, the case of Bill Clinton relates to a tawdry sex scandal in which allegations of criminal wrongdoing--as yet unproved, but likely to remain legally troubling--would seem to be the unforeseen consequence of an out-of-control libido.

During Watergate, it is often remarked, the American system--press, judiciary, citizenry, legislature--functioned magnificently. Twenty-five years later, serious questions are being raised not just about the wretched excess of the president but also overdue questions about wretched excess in our media culture, judicial process and political discourse. Yet, the immediate issue remains the conduct of the president and how Americans judge it.

The promise of Clinton has always been infinite. Perhaps no president of the postwar era has been so attuned to the people, their fears, their difficulties, their dreams. A comprehension of the American character in all its complexity shines through his public words and policies. He is unafraid of addressing the most divisive of issues, even race--though his legislative goals have become increasingly modest and his political compromises have left a trail of disillusion.

But, during our lifetime, Clinton may be remembered as much for Monica S. Lewinsky as for the first balanced budget in 30 years. If his presidency survives this scandal, which many influential Democrats and Republicans in Congress believe likely even if the president did violate the law, it may already be gravely wounded.

The possibility of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr sending “credible and substantial” information of presidential lawbreaking to the House of Representatives increasingly preoccupies White House aides. Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, waited until he had definitive evidence from President Richard M. Nixon’s tapes before he went to the House. In the Clinton White House, few believe Starr will be so cautious.

The legal threshold for such action can be far lower than prosecutorial standards for criminal indictment, and Starr and his attorneys already have reached a decision that there will be no attempt to indict the president. (Whether the Constitution permits indictment never has been decided.) Rather, if there is damaging evidence, it will be sent to the House. Interestingly, some lawyers who know Starr well believe he will be extremely careful in reaching a decision, yet they are highly critical of the special prosecutor’s four-year Whitewater investigation and his conduct before the Lewinsky allegations were joined to the case.

Though they are in full-battle mode, many non-lawyers in the White House are despondent. They have their private doubts about the president’s truthfulness. Some fear that Clinton, and perhaps his lawyers, are making a “semantic delineation” between specific sexual acts and a “sexual relationship.”

That the Clinton White House is stonewalling in the manner of the Nixon White House is, sadly, undeniable, down to sending surrogates unarmed with facts to attack press and prosecutor. There is no grand-jury prohibition that keeps the president from addressing the public and telling the full truth about his relationship with Lewinsky. Instead, the White House is embarked on a scorched-earth defense, the aim being to leave the president the last person standing, while destroying, in the public mind, Starr, the jackals of the press and Lewinsky.

Nixon’s strategy in Watergate was also to make the conduct of the press and the special prosecutor the issue, not the conduct of the president. But this time the assertions of prosecutorial partisanship, misconduct and media madness carry considerably more weight.

If the president is telling the truth, or it is sufficiently muddy, there could be a horrendous day of reckoning for both Starr and the media. Even if Starr makes a credible case against Clinton, his own excesses and blunders (accepting fees from the tobacco industry while prosecuting the president, speaking before conservative Christian audiences, quitting the investigation for a job in Malibu--then returning under fire and conducting an absurdly prolonged dragnet of the Clintons) have all but made certain that Congress will abolish the independent counsel system, though what it needs is thoughtful amending.

The current White House strategy seems to be based on a series of assumptions: that (1) in a worst-case scenario, neither the public nor members of the House want to impeach a popular president for trying to hide the truth about his sex life; (2) not only has Starr been a stalking horse for the right wing for four years, he can now be reasonably portrayed as the personification of Big Brother in millennial America, and (3) most Americans have had enough of the press poking around in the private lives of politicians, no matter how titillated TV ratings show people to be.

All these calculations--and the genuine belief that Clinton is doing a good job--help explain the president’s astonishingly high poll numbers.

However, White House officials I’ve talked to believe that, if Clinton is shown unequivocally to be lying about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky, those poll numbers--like Nixon’s--will crash, and the remainder of his presidency will, at best, be crippled.

Meanwhile, some of the frenzied media coverage, and the mistakes that have found their way into print and onto the air (the stained dress, the steward’s grand jury testimony that wasn’t), helps fuel the impression that Starr’s investigation is not about possible obstruction of justice but is really an intrusion into the personal sex life of the president--a witch hunt. This strikes a chord with the public: People lie about sex. Anyone would be outraged if the FBI and 18 professional prosecutors were poking into their sex lives and carting off their clothes for forensic examination. Wiring a young woman and attempting to catch the president of the United States in a sting operation are repellent to most Americans.

The Lewinsky case is not, alas, as Hillary Rodham Clinton has said, part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. But it is true that, virtually from the day he took office, Bill Clinton has been the target of a campaign of personal vilification more vicious than any aimed at a modern president. The Whitewater matter, in which he has been accused of everything from murder to aiding drug runners, has been going on now for six years since it was first reported in the New York Times, a failed Arkansas land deal more than 20 years old.

Meanwhile, the Lewinsky story is taking place in a combustible media atmosphere that didn’t exist during Watergate. The Watergate story went on for two years before its denouement--Nixon’s resignation. The Lewinsky story is now three weeks old, and though there have been some egregious excesses, much of the coverage has been excellent. Distinctions need to be made about how various news organizations are approaching the story, especially the 24-hour news networks, whose insatiable demand for something new often gives the appearance of movement when there is none.

It should be noted that, at the time of Watergate, America was not yet a talk-show nation, that gossip, sensationalism and tabloid culture were not mainstays of the media. G. Gordon Liddy was a burglar, not a talk-show host; the New York Post was a bastion of liberalism, not Murdochism. The notion of a Matt Drudge cybergossip sitting next to William Safire on “Meet the Press” would have been unthinkable. The Internet and cable news have created a more competitive news cycle for all media--an environment where mistakes are more likely.

At the Washington Post, no Watergate allegations were printed unless there was evidence to support them from at least two sources. Those sources were almost all people with first-hand knowledge of little pieces of the puzzle, which were gradually pieced together. None of the paper’s information came from the original Watergate prosecutors, who were infuriated by the Post’s stories.

But Newsweek’s original story about Lewinsky and the president was detailed, cautious, well-sourced and based partly on listening to tape recordings of Lewinsky and Linda R. Tripp. From the start, the extensive coverage in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the newsweeklies has been first rate, and most networks have been responsible in their reporting. All aspects of the story are being covered in depth, including backgrounds and motivations of those bringing the story to light and the performance of the media itself.

Though the public claims to be displeased by the tenor and amount of coverage, its appetite for the story seems insatiable, as evidenced by huge TV ratings and increased print circulation. That there is ambivalence and anger at (and within) the media about a story that requires reporting on the sex life of the president seems inevitable.

Finally, it needs to be reiterated that, notwithstanding the White House counteroffensive, this is an important story. Credible allegations led the attorney general to order investigation of whether the president committed perjury, suborned it or obstructed justice to cover up an alleged affair with a young White House intern. That is big news. And big trouble for Clinton.