A Game of Semantics

“It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. . . . If “is” means “is,” and never “has been,” that’s one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

--President Clinton in his Aug. 17, 1998, grand jury testimony, answering whether he had lied in his Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Corbin Jones case

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Bill Clinton was flying high. On the plane back from Bosnia, where the citizenry of Sarajevo had hailed him as the savior who had finally brought peace to their land, the president strode back to the section for the reporters traveling with him.

Launching into a riff on the Superman story, he called himself a boy from an alien place who “grew up to be a mild-mannered president of the United States . . . fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.” Unbuttoning his denim shirt, he exposed--not a big letter “S” but a T-shirt proclaiming: “Trust me. I’m a reporter.”

No one on the plane--not even Clinton himself--could have known that a phone call he had made just five days earlier would soon leave him enjoying hardly any more public trust than the press. It would also bring him to the brink of becoming the first of America’s 42 presidents to be expelled from office by Congress.

At 2 o’clock the morning of Dec. 17, he called the Watergate apartment complex--the same complex that had given its name to a political scandal a generation earlier.

Monica S. Lewinsky answered the ring. The president informed her that she was on the witness list in the sexual harassment case that Paula Corbin Jones had brought against him. The last thing he wanted was for his family or his political enemies to learn about his sexual frolics with the former White House intern. A few words of caution to her that night, or so he thought, might keep the embarrassing news from becoming public.

So he reminded her of the cover stories they had discussed many months before. He told her, as he later testified, that she could probably wriggle out of testifying if she would sign an affidavit describing her time at the White House. He advised her that it would be “factually truthful” to say that she had sometimes brought letters to him when she worked in the White House and that, when she had visited the White House after having gone to work at the Pentagon, she had come to see Betty Currie, not him.

On Jan. 7, 1998, Lewinsky signed an affidavit saying she had met the president several times and he always “behaved appropriately.” She also declared that she “never had a sexual relationship with the president.”

In preparing for his own deposition, Clinton told his lawyers the same story that Lewinsky had included in her affidavit: no sexual relationship. Gesturing to the floor-to-ceiling windows in the Oval Office and mentioning the Secret Service agents stationed right outside the door, Clinton told his lawyers that there was no way he could have fooled around on the job.

He did not tell them that, in his own view, “sexual relations” meant intercourse, which he and Lewinsky did not have.

He may have convinced himself that he wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t telling the whole truth either.

On Saturday, Jan. 17, Clinton rode in his limousine the two blocks to the office of his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, where Jones’ lawyers would take his sworn testimony. He felt confident that he could truthfully deny having sexual relations with Lewinsky.

There was only one problem: Bennett was not clued in to Clinton’s semantic parsing. When Jones’ lawyers asked about the relationship between the president and the intern, Bennett challenged them. Incorrectly quoting her affidavit, he said she had stated that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.”

The president leaned back in his chair, betraying little emotion while his carefully laid plans crumbled. He did not correct his attorney and said flatly the young woman’s affidavit was “absolutely true.”

Unbeknownst to Clinton, Starr was already hot on the trail of Clinton’s escapades with Lewinsky. Clinton’s denial in his deposition would lead him straight into Starr’s clutches.

Just three days after his deposition, on Tuesday evening, Jan. 20, Clinton learned that the story of his relationship with Lewinsky would be made public in the next morning’s newspapers.

Through the night and into the next day, Clinton frantically sought the advice of friends and staff. To virtually all of them he maintained the same fiction that he had with his lawyers. The lie grew bigger and bigger.

He denied the truth to his wife when he woke her up with the news that morning. Friends said Mrs. Clinton told them that her husband assured her that he was merely “ministering to a troubled young person.” In a television interview six days later, Hillary Rodham Clinton said she was confident that her husband’s relationship with Lewinsky would turn out to be characteristic of a man who “tries to help people who need help.”

He denied the truth to his top political advisors, some of whom would later repeat the denials in testimony to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury. White House aide Sidney Blumenthal testified that Clinton had told him that Lewinsky had “made a sexual demand” on him and that “he rebuffed her.”

Only to Dick Morris, the president’s longtime political consultant, did he appear to give even a glimpse of his real relationship with Lewinsky.

In Morris’ version of a telephone conversation with Clinton at 11:45 on the morning of Jan. 21, Clinton told him: “I didn’t do what they said I did, but I did something.”

Morris said he suggested that Clinton confess to the American people and ask for forgiveness, and he offered to conduct an instant poll to gauge how various strategies would fly with the public. The questions he would ask included whether the public would tolerate a president who had committed perjury. He added a haunting warning: “The one thing you’ve got to avoid is getting trapped like Nixon into a rigid posture of denial. . . . Presidents only get killed when they get stuck.”

Opting to Make Misleading Statements

With his annual State of the Union address less than a week away, the president had scheduled three interviews with news organizations for the day the story broke. Trying to project a business-as-usual image, he went ahead with them.

But he did not come clean. He opted for the misleading statements that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. And he could not muster his usual, casual confidence.

In the first interview, the president resorted to an unusual verb tense. He told Jim Lehrer of PBS, “There is no improper relationship.”

Reporters who watched the interview flooded Clinton’s aides with questions. Was the president parsing words, as he was famous for doing? In fact, he was.

“People are now questioning your use of tense,” a couple of his top political advisors told him during a break between interviews, according to one of them.

So in his next interview with the congressional newspaper Roll Call, the president bent the truth a little further: “The relationship was not sexual.”

Morris called back at 11:15 p.m. “Well, I’m wrong,” he told the president. The respondents to his poll had overwhelmingly said they would forgive the president for adultery but not for perjury or obstruction of justice. “You can’t tell them about it,” Morris said. “They’ll kill you.” The implicit message: Clinton could acknowledge his relationship with Lewinsky, but if there had been any interfering with the legal process, he had better keep mum about it.

Clinton agreed. “It just won’t fly. It just won’t.”

To many of the president’s political advisors and friends, the stories about Lewinsky rang true. They believed that if he came clean, he would take a hit in the polls but could make it up in a few months.

Most of them hesitated to take that message directly to Clinton. But David E. Kendall and Mickey Kantor, Clinton’s personal attorneys, pressed the president hard, according to people they confided in. He still didn’t budge.

“He didn’t think the [Jones] suit was legitimate,” said one of the White House officials who was closest to him at this time. “He was not going to do anything to help them. And, on a personal level, he was embarrassed about this. He was trying to ensure the embarrassing parts never got exposed.”

Plus there was the thrill Clinton gets from winning what James Carville, back in 1992, had called “these games of gotcha.”

“He’s done this before and he’s gotten away with it,” said one of those who were advising him then. “What’s the difference here? Clinton’s smarter than most of us. My sense is he just figured he could talk his way through this.”

Clinton’s friends and advisors flocked to his side. Rather than forcing him to come clean, they ended up bolstering his deception.

Harry Thomason, a Hollywood producer who had known Clinton for 30 years and helped develop his winning media image for the 1992 campaign, watched Clinton’s denial on PBS and decided the president needed his services.

So he flew to Washington, arriving Saturday night, Jan. 24, and stayed in the White House for 34 days. After midnight Sunday morning, Thomason and Clinton took Buddy, the Clintons’ chocolate Labrador, for a walk around the circular jogging path on the South Lawn.

Thomason, according to his grand jury testimony, told Clinton he thought the president had appeared hesitant during his PBS denial. He warned that unless he made a more forceful statement, the public would see him as weak.

“You know, you’re right,” Clinton said. “I should be more forceful than that.”

It didn’t take long. The very next morning produced one of the most familiar episodes of the entire drama: a finger-wagging Clinton insisting that “I have not had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

The next evening, Clinton appeared to defy the law of gravity with a nationally televised, top-of-his-game State of the Union address. Every viewer wondered how Clinton would handle the charges that were whirling around him. He didn’t devote a word to them. His approval ratings in public opinion polls jumped from the high 60s to the low 70s, the highest level of his presidency.

In mid-February, Clinton had one more chance to change his story and reduce his legal peril. Witnesses have 30 days to correct depositions. As the deadline approached, Clinton’s lawyers asked several times if he wanted to change anything; as often as they asked, he said he did not. As Thomason later put it: “That ship had sailed.”

For the next several months, the president did his best never to mention the scandal.

His lawyers and political advisors went on the attack. They appeared on television to argue the president’s innocence. They slammed the media for doubting him. They attacked Starr for leaking evidence to the media.

Another Allegation of Sexual Encounter

In mid-March, another woman clouded the picture. Former White House volunteer Kathleen Willey, 51, appearing on “60 Minutes,” described in steady, believable tones an unwanted sexual encounter with the president near the Oval Office in which he groped her and put her hand on her crotch.

Clinton denied the incident ever happened and said he was “mystified and disappointed” that Willey would say such things. The White House sprang into action, seeking to discredit Willey by releasing friendly letters she had sent the president after the date of the incident she had described.

The media quickly dropped the story. Polls showed that more people believed Clinton than Willey.

In late March, Clinton traveled to Africa.

In Senegal, his last stop, he received an April Fool’s Day present: A federal judge threw out Jones’ sexual harassment suit for lack of substantiation. Gone was the lawsuit that had put the president in such danger. A television crew caught Clinton in a Dakar hotel suite, chomping on a cigar and strumming a guitar.

It was a premature celebration. At home, Starr’s grand jury was still taking testimony.

During a single week starting in late July, the two things that Clinton had feared most happened. Starr subpoenaed him to testify to the grand jury on his relationship with Lewinsky. And Lewinsky agreed to testify under a grant of immunity from prosecution.

The president’s advisors split over strategy: his private lawyers worried that testifying could put him in legal jeopardy; his political advisors argued that it would be political suicide to invoke the 5th Amendment.

Clinton followed the political advice. He would testify.

A pesky piece of evidence began filling news reports. Lewinsky had passed on to the prosecutor a navy dress that she said had a telltale stain from the president’s semen.

Starr asked for a sample of Clinton’s blood before his testimony. It was, in effect, a warning to the president that the prosecutor had the physical evidence. A White House physician drew the blood from the president’s arm in the White House Map Room--with a Starr aide observing to make sure no one tampered with the evidence.

When Starr’s prosecutors came to the White House to question the president, Clinton did not yet know the results of the blood test. But he knew enough to realize that he needed to change his story.

He had three goals in his testimony: to avoid committing perjury in front of a grand jury, to avoid admitting he had lied in his January deposition and to avoid being drawn into a demeaning, detailed discussion of what he and Lewinsky had done together.

His strategy was to read a carefully crafted statement that acknowledged an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky but one that would not fit the definition of “sexual relations” in the Jones suit. He could not concede to touching her with intent to arouse.

“You are free to infer that my testimony is that I did not have sexual relations, as I understood this term to be defined,” Clinton told Starr’s deputies.

But knowing the full story told by Lewinsky, the questioners pressed him for more details. They asked: “Including touching her breast, kissing her breast or touching her genitalia?”

Under Clinton’s game plan, he should have told the prosecutors to refer to his prepared statement. Instead, he gave an uncharacteristically crisp reply: “Correct.”

That denial, which Lewinsky contradicted, would be assailed again and again as Congress weighed the charges against the president.

The four-hour testimony finished, Clinton decided to deliver a confessional speech to the American people. It was a decision that his political aides came to regret. If only Clinton had waited another day to simmer down, perhaps the next several months would have turned out differently.

Instead, the president betrayed to a national television audience the bitterness and anger he had felt at answering probing and embarrassing questions. He said what he had done was “wrong” and that he took “complete responsibility.” But he also lashed into Starr for his investigation.

“It’s nobody’s business but ours,” Clinton said. “Even presidents have private lives. It’s time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives.”

Clinton’s defiance stung Republicans. “It wasn’t one of our finest moments,” one of the president’s closest aides said gloomily.

Clinton also had to confess to his family, lawyers and top aides that he had deceived them for almost seven months and turned them into unknowing accomplices in his cover-up.

Some members of his staff, having suspected as much, took the news in stride. Others, furious, contemplated leaving.

No one did. But the stage was set for the impeachment drama in Congress.