President Makes It His Business to Keep Mum

When last he encountered reporters in anything resembling a free-wheeling give-and-take, President Clinton was standing outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem.

That was one month ago today.

Since then, the United States led a four-day bombing campaign in Iraq, the administration’s domestic program for 1999 took shape and, on one Saturday in December, the speaker-designate of the House backed out of his job and the president was impeached.

“He’s doing a good job hiding,” said Mary Carroll Gunning, political studies director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Hiding? Not the word the White House would choose. But if the White House holds to its plans, it could be many more weeks before Clinton leaves himself open to any sort of question-and-answer program likely to delve into his impeachment.

“Anything he says, somebody will have a problem with it,” said a senior White House official.

So, as his impeachment trial gets underway Thursday in the Senate, the best course for Clinton, he and his aides have decided, is to avoid any unscripted moments and keep his public focus on the policy matters at the top of his agenda.

Consider the options facing the president on Monday: He could have kept to his customary practice and held a joint news conference with a visiting foreign leader, in this case President Carlos Menem of Argentina, or he could forgo the encounter.

He chose the latter.

As a result, television newscasts were left with pictures of Clinton gliding about the White House after a state dinner, showing off his tango steps with the wife of a visiting Argentine official. The alternative would have been videotape of the president, most likely appearing beleaguered, undergoing a grilling about impeachment, with an ill-at-ease Menem at his side.

It is not a topic about which White House officials care to speak extensively.

“It’s unproductive right now to get into--for the president to get into--a long Q&A; on this subject, which is self-evident,” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said Tuesday.

As White House officials see it, Clinton has nothing to gain at the moment by speaking in public about impeachment, and lots to lose: If he sounds too confident, he would risk irritating senators--always prickly about their independence--at a time when they are serving as jurors in his impeachment trial.

On the other hand, said one White House aide, if Clinton held a news conference and refused to answer questions about impeachment, he would appear arrogant, possibly angering the public.

There are times when a president’s responsibility is to be accessible to the people, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

But this is not necessarily one of those times, she added.

“It’s important right now that the president act as though he’s the president and go about his business,” Jamieson said. Her point: It would be difficult to maintain a presidential demeanor amid one more round of questions about Monica S. Lewinsky.

Still, said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in government studies at the Brookings Institution, “there’s a certain irony: If the argument the president is making is that he’s conducting business as usual, that he is so good at compartmentalizing that he can prepare the State of the Union address, meet with the visiting heads of state and bomb Baghdad, he’d have to consider part of business-as-usual is meeting with the press.”