Trial Run: Is This Any Way to Make History?

If on television, it should be a show, right? If historic, it should feel like history.

But the impeachment trial of President Clinton isn’t and doesn’t.

“Is this any way to convict a president?” Ted Koppel wondered on ABC’s “Nightline” Thursday night.

Because this is untested turf, and we’ve only just begun, who is to say?

If it’s on TV, must it be a show? Because nearly everything else on TV is presented as entertainment, must the impeachment trial also be a pulsating thriller to hold an audience?

“I get the sense that there are some people sitting in front of this as if it were a movie, expecting a car chase,” CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield said on TV Friday morning. Greenfield found it “ludicrous” that some would rate the trial of Clinton by whether it “matches ‘ER.’ ”

Or “Judge Judy.”

Those series notwithstanding, the trial is competing with history, too, and with expectations that something of this enormous tonnage should be captivating lore for storytelling around the campfires of future generations.

Yet heading into the week, the trial hadn’t risen to its billing. It’s epic, all right--epic pastel. Instead of the gravity of the moment, you feel gravity forcing your lids into your eyeballs.

It’s like watching a World Series played with whiffle balls. Seeing crayon art on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Hearing Beethoven’s Fifth or Rachmaninoff 2 on a xylophone. Listening to Don Ho croon “The Barber of Seville.” Sitting through Jaclyn Smith as Lady Macbeth. Witnessing history through the wrong end of a telescope.

If the late Times sports columnist Jim Murray were watching from his press box, he might see what’s happening in the Senate chamber as--to borrow his own words--”tap dancing while sitting down.”

In part that’s because the Senate-controlled C-SPAN pool camera is magnetized to the podium, where colorless Republican House managers are presenting their case against the president like speakers at an insurance underwriters’ convention. As these suits speak, the camera’s eye is locked on them.

Bad enough that Senate rules require its 100 members to debate and decide Clinton’s future in private, out of public view, after the president’s lawyers have sought to answer the charges against him. Yet even in this public segment of the trial, TV is not allowed to roam. It’s not allowed to soak up the atmosphere and shoot it back to America, not free to beam reaction shots of gallery spectators. Of William Rehnquist in his stripe-sleeved customized robes (Is he the United States’ chief justice or commodore?). Of senators showing the “pervasive sadness . . . and lots of yawns” that NPR’s Nina Totenberg told PBS talker Charlie Rose she observed inside the chamber.

It would be nice if the rest of America could observe that, too. Not that a mobile camera can’t be troubling, especially when applying spin to speakers’ words by showing responses either pro or con, as TV will do Tuesday night during President Clinton’s scheduled State of the Union address.

Camera fluidity gives a much greater sense of things, nonetheless, and the shackling of TV in this instance helps make the moment one-dimensional and as static as the lens.

In part that’s also because nothing magical or lyrical has come from these presentations. Instead of architects, these are carpenters hammering in minutiae methodically, and perhaps (we may discover later) effectively.

But not memorably.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said as much on NBC Thursday during a break in the trial’s first day. With that gleam in her eye, she said she’d always wished she could have been present for historic moments, to have been with Abraham Lincoln, for example, when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

“You want to be enlarged by being at those great moments,” she told anchorman Tom Brokaw. Instead, she added, the impeachment trial came across on TV as diminished. “It doesn’t leave me as a historian feeling as excited as I always thought it would be.”

She and historian Michael Beschloss said much the same that evening on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” the PBS program where they are two-thirds (along with veteran journalist Haynes Johnson) of a regular panel whose reasoned historical perspective is one of many components that elevate this newscast far above others.

“I don’t think I can remember a word spoken here today,” said Beschloss in a rare lapse of circumspection. In repeating in detail what was charged many times previously, the initial House prosecutors’ attack on Clinton reminded Beschloss of a famous scene in the film “North by Northwest,” when a solitary Cary Grant is repeatedly buzzed by a crop-duster trying to kill him.

And even if Clinton’s actions in office are found to rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, Goodwin could not reconcile the likes of Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and Linda Tripp rising to the level of momentous history.

It is boggling, if not surreal, to imagine a chapter in a history text titled “Monica Lewinsky” or “The Blue Dress.” Or one with excerpts from Friday’s prosecution (“touched and kissed her breasts . . . “). Talk about your dumbing down.

Yet future generations may have a different view. Perhaps, as Goodwin allowed, being at the epicenter of history, or living it as we are now, is never quite as arresting, ironically, as when viewing it backward through the microscope of another epoch. Perhaps she would have been just as underwhelmed if watching on television when Lincoln issued his document that freed the slaves in rebelling states on Jan. 1, 1863.

Historians! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

On the other hand, our impatience as a society--this quickening of pulses caused largely by TV--is incompatible with historical perspective. Just as entertainment shows usually fix all problems before the final credits, so do news programs rev up facile answers prematurely.

“Your handicapping of the arguments so far?” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams asked Washington pundit-about-town law professor Jonathan Turley, during the first break Thursday. Of course, the handicapping--TV being such a medium of the moment.

But not always, thankfully.

The “NewsHour” ended 1998 with another of its history chats, this one reviewing the year against a background of earlier times--a calm, measured analysis from talking heads at their most interesting, one whose depth and intelligence stood out staggeringly from other newscasts.

It was the best of times, they agreed, and the worst of times. A time for “making stunning gains,” Johnson noted, “and yet something was sick at the core of the society.”

What that was may not be clearly defined until the end of this impeachment trial. And while watching it, you wonder what these historians, and those who follow them, will say about 1999.