Feinstein Stresses Clinton Role as Leader

Continuing to anguish publicly over the repercussions of President Clinton’s private conduct, California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday said Clinton needs to prove he is not too wounded to lead the nation.

Although she stopped short of calling for Clinton’s resignation in the wake of the release of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report to Congress on the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, Feinstein said, “He has to find ways to show he can continue to be a strong president. . . . That’s where the jury is out.”

Feinstein had been one of Clinton’s earliest and harshest critics immediately after he acknowledged his affair with Lewinsky in an Aug. 17 televised speech. But since then, she had maintained a near-silence on the issue, awaiting the Starr report.

Since the report was released Aug. 11, Feinstein said her office has been inundated with 12,000 phone calls from constituents and 1,500 e-mails, with the communications running 2-1 in favor of impeachment, resignation or censure.

Feinstein said some callers have broken down in tears.

Still, she would not call on Clinton to resign. “The strength of our democracy is that this is a government that does not easily fall,” she said. “I am not there yet.”

At her hastily arranged session Thursday with reporters in her Washington office, Feinstein described her disappointment in uncharacteristically personal terms--”a gut-level sense of betrayal,” she said.

Asked to recall her emotions as she read the Starr report, she fought back tears. “I am looking for a word. . . . I can’t come up with an adequate word,” she stammered, pausing for several seconds.

A moderate Democrat who can be fiercely independent, Feinstein has never been what the White House would consider a loyal foot soldier. But she had a close personal relationship with Clinton, celebrating her 60th birthday in 1993 at the White House and welcoming his counsel as she struggled this year over whether to leave the Senate to run for governor.

On Thursday, she said she was still turning over in her mind the way he looked in January when, as she sat in the front of an audience at the White House, he wagged his finger and strongly denied ever having sex with Lewinsky.

“I believed it, and I believed it totally,” she said, adding that when he confessed, “my world came crashing down.”

She revealed that her anger was so intense after Clinton’s confession that when a White House aide called her afterward to ask if a few private minutes with the president would help--an invitation senators usually stand in line for--she turned the offer down.

“I don’t think it would have been a constructive conversation at that point,” she said.