Glad It’s Over, but Not Glad It Happened

And so it finally ended: part soap opera, part grand opera, on occasion a morality play, but more often a melodrama about immorality. In the minds of many, an entire year of anguish and absurdity amounted to little more than a sideshow that diverted America and its leaders from very real business.

A loud minority crowed that the system worked and a corrupt president had been brought to shame by heroic defenders of the Constitution. But around the country, many Americans agreed that, from the day the name “Monica” entered the national vocabulary to the moment Friday when the Senate acquitted the president, little of lasting good or glory could be attached to the experience. “Can I say just one word which to me sums it up?” asked psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers. “Pitiful.”

No strong leader emerged to champion the wishes of a populace that said again and again that it deplored President Clinton’s sexual misconduct but opposed his impeachment. Little lyrical language flowed forth.

Holes in the American character became the topic of cloying daily sermons: on the radio, on television, in newspapers, in classrooms, at dinner tables--until, finally, millions of people tuned out. How many times, after all, can you watch even a good production of “Hamlet”? Top Chicago chef Charlie Trotter opined: “It’s a little like the O.J. trial. Not a pleasant thing for the country to observe.”

Yet around the country on Friday, many thoughtful people struggled to place some perspective on the weird political drama that surely will describe fin-de-siecle America. Poets and priests, business and community leaders, immigrants and a chief of police: Exhilarated that the nastiness was at last coming to a close, many tried also to find a coda.

“I think that I am like a lot of people in feeling that there has been a lot of hollow language, a lot of moral posturing--and that we’re sick of it,” said Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States and a professor at Boston University. “There has not been a sense of somebody rising to or above the occasion, and the comfort is, that doesn’t tear everything apart.”

Forcing Americans to Consider Integrity

There were some lessons. “It came home to me just this week that the effect of the whole proceeding has been to make Americans think about the concept of integrity,” said Dr. Elizabeth A. Nelson, assistant professor of medicine and medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “What is true ethical behavior, and is it different in personal and professional life? I don’t think that five years ago that question would have been asked.”

The country learned again about its Constitution, said James O. Friedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College. “We learned that the Constitution says every branch of government has a duty to enforce the Constitution,” not just the courts. But whereas the House of Representatives “showed us an example of an institution of government rushing to judgment, failing to take seriously its responsibility to enforce the Constitution,” Friedman said, the Senate comported itself with full deference to its constitutional mandate and with “patience beyond Job.”

The system held up, said Friedman, despite 13 months of turmoil that arose because “the president of the United States was not a man of character.” As a result, he said, the country saw that “this is not the failure of an institution; it is the failure of one man.”

Marty Evans, national executive director of the Girl Scouts of the USA, said the Senate’s acquittal came just as her organization prepares to launch a “Partnership for Trust in Government” campaign. Perhaps the fact that a young woman, Monica S. Lewinsky, was center stage in this sordid saga will provide an occasion to stress the Girl Scout message of “helping to make girls make positive life choices on a day-to-day basis,” she said.

In any case, Evans said, “this is the right time to help girls make an assessment of the world around them, to bring some focus, so they don’t just take a jaundiced view.”

For young people, said Bruce Fitch, executive director of the Outward Bound School in Denver, “the hard thing is to sort out this barrage of information so they can use and make sense of it. They hear the agendas.”

Stressing leadership and teamwork, Fitch’s program has shepherded young people through every mountain range in Colorado since 1961. “More than anything else in our course, we teach young people: Choose your own life, choose your own destiny. Don’t be swayed by the vicissitudes of opinion. From my point of view, that’s almost impossible in this political climate.”

In Salt Lake City, Latino community activist Ricardo Montano said he and his wife were dismayed that his teenagers refused to focus on the Clinton impeachment.

“They’ve heard us talking about it, but they never really engaged us in a conversation about it,” Montano lamented. “I told them to pay attention, because it’s a historical thing. It might never happen again in their lifetimes. But they said, ‘Dad, we’ve got other things to do.’ My son would say, ‘I’m going snowboarding.’ My daughter would say, ‘I have to call my boyfriend.’ ”

Many Urge Focus on Higher Priorities

Merely thinking about the abstractions inherent in the impeachment squabble is a luxury beyond the 10- to 18-year-old African American males in Houston’s 5th Ward Enrichment Program, said its executive director, Ernest McMillan.

“People here are worried about getting through each day. What’s going on in Washington isn’t something people are so concerned or surprised about. It’s not a sign of lax morals or apathy.”

The kids he works with “don’t see this as some kind of clinic in government or ethics,” McMillan explained. “There’s such a big gulf in America between people who think in those terms, and people are just trying to get by.”

And what about global issues? “Look at Kosovo! Look at the situation in Kosovo!” pleaded Marjorie Mitchell, a war refugee from Liberia now living in New York. “As an African,” Mitchell continued, “we say America is rich. That’s why they can play around with issues like this. There are so many important issues we haven’t even considered. Who gives a damn who sleeps with who?”

Looking at the last year of this country’s political calendar, “what strikes me most is seeing the way Americans love navel-gazing. They don’t have a perspective on the needs or priorities of the international community,” said Jerry White, co-director of the Landmines Survivors Network in Washington. White, a 35-year-old father of four, was a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem when he stepped on a land mine while hiking in 1984. It blew off his right foot and damaged his left leg.

At his home in Atlanta, Jermaine Dupri, a 26-year-old rap artist and CEO of So So Def Recording Co., also spoke of priorities. “Our president being humiliated for and scrutinized on the most private part of life, his bedroom, has been a disservice to this country. When we look back on the impeachment hearings, I’m sure we will wonder why we didn’t spend our tax money on the more critical issues of the day.”

In analyzing the relationship of Clinton and Lewinsky, the country will come to recognize “a heat-seeking missile headed straight for Washington--and he was too stupid to get out of the way,” said poet and philosopher Robert Bly, of Minneapolis. “That doesn’t excuse him at all.”

Nor would Bly mince sentiment about the House of Representatives. After spending much of his life studying male behavior, “I don’t consider these people in the House as men. They are adolescent boys. Their great problem is they have the testosterone, maybe, but they don’t have the authority of an older male. They acted like adolescent males doing a charade in order to undermine the high school principal--trying to get rid of the implication that one man in authority may be better, or more powerful, than they.”

‘Cynicism and Lack of Faith’

In the Denver suburb of Aurora, the Rev. Walter Sidney works every day with adolescent boys as president of the all-male Regis Jesuit High School. “I wonder what kind of men and women we are going to get in public life if every aspect of their private lives is under scrutiny. I worry about a country that would have such a high approval rating of the president and yet admit that what he did was wrong.”

If anything, said Sidney, “this situation points out how unrealistically we put our leaders on a pedestal. These leaders are subject to the same frailties as we all are.” Maybe as a consequence of this long year, “we are growing up, becoming more realistic.”

That outcome would please Chaplain Jeff Utter, president of the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council and a minister to homeless veterans in Inglewood. Utter blasted House Republicans for “blind self-righteousness” and compared the House managers to the biblical Pharisees during Jesus’ time who took delight in pointing out the moral violations of others.

“The irony is so many of these are presenting themselves as Christians when it’s clear they don’t know what the New Testament says,” Utter said. “It’s fundamentally about forgiveness and reconciliation, and not judging.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Tal Kahana in Los Angeles was confident the verdicts will not diminish the respect people hold for the oath to tell the truth.

“If somebody is inclined to tell the truth, they are not going to alter their standard of morality because of what the president did,” she said. “People who want to rationalize will rationalize anyway they want to rationalize. My standards don’t move in relationship to others. I just think that is such a juvenile way to think.”

Still, said San Diego Police Chief Jerry Sanders, who takes over on May 1 as president and chief executive of the San Diego United Way, the relentlessness of the impeachment process has made people weary. “You can see it all across the spectrum, cynicism and lack of faith. I think we’re going to see that played out in the next elections. People are worn out from this dance that they have played back there in Washington.”

Indeed, shortly after the Senate took its tally, packed its briefcases and bolted out of Washington, a hand-lettered sign went up in an office tower in the financial district of San Francisco.

It read: “Thank God it’s over.”

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Julie Cart in Denver; Mike Clary in Miami; Mark Fritz in New York; Mary Curtius in San Francisco; Hector Tobar, Steve Berry, Elaine Gale and Kate Folmar in Southern California; and researchers Lianne Hart in Houston, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and John Beckham in Chicago.