Questions for Future Historians

Now that 400 days of Monica S. Lewinsky are mercifully over, we face the daunting task of asking what it has all meant. Has it all been sound and fury signifying nothing, to be quickly forgotten? Will it have lasting political consequences, to be measured in 2000 and subsequent elections? Has it lowered the bar against other impeachments, or will it leave future Congresses reluctant to deploy so unwieldy a weapon, and presidents free to lie with impunity?

Because we live in the age of instant analysis, we want to know not only what to think of events unfolding before us, but also how History will judge them. Members of Congress have repeatedly invoked the judgment of history and the grave consequences that must flow from any resolution of this imbroglio. Republicans have acted as if they want to ensure that the name of William Jefferson Clinton is inscribed in History with a scarlet letter “I,” for impeached (though not “C,” for convicted), forever linked with Andrew Johnson and Richard M. Nixon in a rogue’s gallery of presidential reprobates.

Democrats, too, had their eyes on History. Last Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she wanted to write a censure resolution “for the history books,” as if future students would place the condemnation of the president alongside the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address as founding texts of the Republic.

Fortunately for historians, who need the work, no instantaneous assessments of this strange episode are possible. For one thing, its consequences will take years to unfold, certainly until the next election, arguably until another presidential impeachment allows this one to be ransacked for precedents, good or bad.

The task is complicated by the exceptionally idiosyncratic character of the past year’s melodrama. If there were other episodes it might be compared to, the task would be a shade easier. But comparisons do not come easily.

Sexual scandals of any serious kind are rare in U.S. politics. The closest analogue is the Peggy Eaton affair that disrupted President Andrew Jackson’s new administration in 1829. In that case, it was rumored that Peggy’s affair with Secretary of War John Eaton had driven her despairing first husband to suicide; and the slights then directed against Peggy by other Cabinet wives provoked personal and political rivalries that led to the creation of the new political party, the Whigs, which, in turn, ushered in a new age of mass democratic politics.

But how does that outcome compare to the likely consequences of our current affair? Here the issue is not whether new parties will emerge but, rather, whether the deep partisanship that has scarred these proceedings foretells continuing ideological trench warfare that will further sour the electorate on Washington?

Or consider a different but more obvious comparison: Watergate. No one who recalls those days would have imagined a second impeachment in one lifetime. Yet, the similarities between Watergate and Monicagate are superficial at best.

Then, one had the sense that impeachment, while improbable, was becoming ever more likely with fresh disclosures marking each passing week (sometimes day). If the chain continued to unwind, it would lead ineluctably to Nixon, and if it did, bipartisan impeachment would become conceivable, even likely, because there was never any doubt that the charges would involve overt abuse of the powers of the presidency.

In the current affair, however, what is remarkable is how little has changed since the initial revelations. Then, after failing to make a strong case for the gravity of the charges and conducting an inquiry that only reinforced partisan divisions, the Republicans forfeited any chance of producing the consensus they would need to make the charges stick.

Or ask whether this episode, for all its appeals to principle, deserves to rank among other great constitutional moments of history. Would anyone seriously compare this tempest to the great crisis of the mid-1930s, when the Supreme Court was gutting the New Deal and President Franklin D. Roosevelt sprung his ill-advised court-packing plan? Does it belong in the same scale of importance as the landmark rulings of the Warren court and the conflicts they gave rise to?

At the moment, the most lasting legacy of the current affair may be the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Paula Corbin Jones’ civil suit to go forward, on the assumption it would not distract the president from his duties. We have no way of predicting whether that decision will invite plaintiffs to file harassing suits against future presidents. If it does, perhaps the House managers will be justified in warning the Senate that a vote to acquit will license Clinton’s successors to lie with impunity.

But what future president would want to emulate his example and rely on these proceedings as a surety for immunity? If such suits do increase, the legalization of political disputes will inflict greater damage on the constitutional system than any encouragement Clinton’s acquittal might give to future presidential mendacity.

What all this suggests is that we have little reliable basis for predicting the historical consequences of the Clinton impeachment. What we can do, however, is anticipate the questions that future historians are likely to ask. Here, three queries offer useful points of departure.

The first is essentially biographical, and concerns the antihero of this drama (not its Starr). Clinton may not be a great president, but he has been an amazing presidential politician. The Clinton phenomenon should not be understated. Here was a governor from a political backwater who managed to defeat an incumbent president, fresh from a famous victory, at a time when Democrats doubted they’d ever again be any closer to the White House than Lafayette Park. Even with a little help from Ross Perot, it was quite a coup, and the ease with which Clinton gained reelection in 1996 provided lessons the GOP is still struggling to learn.

Yet, if this is true, how could Clinton, with his formidable political intelligence and skills, have allowed the cheap thrills of an “affair” that really wasn’t bring him to the brink of disaster? How did a graduate of a reasonably good law school, and a former state attorney general, allow his mendacity to trump his legal judgment? Why did he risk forfeiting the allegiance of his party and his aides by asking them, in effect, to take a fall for him, making fools of themselves by compounding his misstatements?

The second question will prove equally perplexing. Who can possibly assay the unstable mixture of political calculations and miscalculations, principled positions and personal animosities that drove Clinton’s opponents to pursue their fruitless quest to drive him from office? The late political writer Theodore H. White once observed that John F. Kennedy had the same effect on Nixon as the snake charmer has on the snake: Perhaps we will discover that Clinton set out to perform a similar stunt on his adversaries. But the puzzle of the Republicans’ behavior grows even more curious when we consider how weak a leader of his own party Clinton has been. Nothing better illustrates the depth of the Republicans’ errors than their ability to rally the Democrats to Clinton’s defense.

Too many Americans are inclined to place a pox on both parties. But ordinarily we treat the Constitution with more respect. So the final, and most disturbing, question involves measuring the damage that has been inflicted on the Constitution itself and the system of governance it still sustains.

It is not enough to say that by carrying the charges brought by the House through to a verdict that the Senate has assured that the Constitution has worked. In fact, these proceedings have done the opposite. They have taken one of the least useful (and least used) provisions of the Constitution, placed it at the center of a prolonged, embittered struggle and ended with the conclusion that any politically sophisticated 5th-grader could have predicted. And to what end: that Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) could call the spirits of Sir Thomas More, the war dead of Omaha Beach and now Henry V from the vasty deep of his memory, knowing they would not answer when he called?*