In 1992, as in any election year, the story that had all of Washington holding its breath was the campaign, and since the guardians of the Zeitgeist, taking their cue from the political professionals, had early on certified Governor Clinton as the most electable of the Democratic candidates, his personal failings could serve only as a step in his quest, a test of his ability to prevail. Before the New Hampshire primary campaign was even underway, Governor Clinton was reported to be the Democratic candidate with “centrist credentials,” the Democratic candidate who “offered an assessment of the state of the American economy that borrows as much from Republicans like Jack Kemp as it does from liberals,” the Democratic candidate who could go to California and win support from “top Republican fundraisers,” the candidate, in short, who “scored well with party officials and strategists.” A survey of Democratic National Committee members had shown Clinton in the lead. The late Ronald H. Brown, at the time chairman of the Democratic Party, had been reported, still before a single vote was cast in New Hampshire, to have pressured Mario Cuomo to remove his name from the New York primary ballot, so that a divisive favorite-son candidacy would not impede the chosen front-runner.
By the morning of January 26, 1992, the Sunday of the 60 Minutes appearance and shortly after the candidate sealed his centrist credentials by allowing the execution of the brain-damaged Rickey Ray Rector to proceed in Arkansas, William Schneider, in the Los Angeles Times, was awarding Governor Clinton the coveted “Big Mo,” noting that “the Democratic Party establishment is falling in line behind Clinton.” In a party that reserves a significant percentage of its convention votes (eighteen percent in 1996) for “superdelegates,” the seven-hundred-some elected and party officials not bound by any popular vote, the message sent by this early understanding among the professionals was clear, as it had been when the professionals settled on Michael Dukakis in 1988: the train was now leaving the station, and, since the campaign, as “story,” requires that the chosen candidates be seen as contenders who will go the distance, all inconvenient baggage, including “the character issue,” would be left on the platform. What would go on the train was what Joe Klein, echoing the note of romantic credulity in his own 1992 coverage of the candidate Bill Clinton (that was before the Zeitgeist moved on), recalled in 1998 in The New Yorker as the “precocious fizz” of the War Room, “the all-nighters… about policy or philosophy,” the candidate who “loved to talk about serious things” and “seems to be up on every social program in America.”
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It was January 16, 1998, when Kenneth W Starr obtained authorization, by means of a court order opaquely titled “In re Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association,” to extend his languishing Whitewater inquiry to the matter of Monica Lewinsky. It was also January 16 when Monica Lewinsky was detained for eleven hours and twenty-five minutes in Room 1016 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia, where, according to the independent counsel’s log of the “meeting,” the FBI agent who undertook to read Miss Lewinsky “her rights as found on the form FD-395, Interrogation, Advice of Rights” was, for reasons the log does not explain, “unable to finish reading the FD-395.” Miss Lewinsky herself testified:
Then Jackie Bennett [of the Office of the Independent Counsel] came in and there was a whole bunch of other people and the room was crowded and he was saying to me, you know, you have to make a decision. I had wanted to call my mom, they weren’t going to let me call my attorney, so I just — I wanted to call my mom and they — Then Jackie Bennett said, “You’re 24, you’re smart, you’re old enough, you don’t need to call your mommy.”
It was January 17 when President Clinton, in the course of giving his deposition in the civil suit brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones, either did or did not spring the perjury trap that Kenneth Starr either had or had not set. By the morning of January 21, when both Susan Schmidt in The Washington Post and ABC News correspondent Jackie Judd on Good Morning America jumped the stakes by quoting “sources” saying that Monica Lewinsky was on tape with statements that the president and Vernon Jordan had told her to lie, the “character issue” had gone from idle to full throttle, with Sam Donaldson and George Stephanopoulos and Jonathan Alter already on air talking about “impeachment proceedings.”
In most discussions of how and why this matter came so incongruously to escalate, the press of course was criticized, and was in turn quick to criticize itself (or, in the phrasing preferred by many, since it suggested that any objection rested on hairsplitting, to “flagellate” itself), citing excessive and in some cases erroneous coverage. Perhaps because not all of the experts, authorities, and spokespersons driving this news had extensive experience with the kind of city-side beat on which it is taken for granted that the D.A.’s office will leak the cases they doubt they can make, selective prosecutorial hints had become embedded in the ongoing story as fact. “Loose attribution of sources abounded,” Jules Witcover wrote in the March/April 1998 Columbia Journalism Review, although, since he intended to attribute the most egregious examples to “journalistic amateurs” and “journalistic pretenders” (Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge), he could still express “hope,” based on what he discerned two months into the story as “a tapering off of the mad frenzy of the first week or so,” that, among “established, proven professional practitioners,” any slip had been “a mere lapse of standards in the heat of a fast-breaking, incredibly competitive story of major significance.”
For the same CJR, the cover line of which was “Where We Went Wrong … and What We Do Now,” a number of other reporters, editors, and news executives were queried, and expressed similar hopes. The possibility of viewer confusion between entertainment and news shows was mentioned. The necessity for more careful differentiation among different kinds of leaks was mentioned. The “new technology” and “hypercompetition” and “the speed of news cycles these days” were mentioned, references to the way in which the Internet and the multiplication of cable channels had collapsed the traditional cyclical presentation of news into a twenty-four-hour stream of provisional raw takes. “We’re in a new world in terms of the way information flows to the nation,” James O’Shea, deputy managing editor for news of the Chicago Tribune, said. (The Lewinsky story had in fact first broken not in the traditional media but on the Internet, in a 1:11 A.M. January 18, 1998, posting on the Drudge Report.) “The days when you can decide not to print a story because it’s not well enough sourced are long gone. When a story gets into the public realm, as it did with the Drudge Report, then you have to characterize it, you have to tell your readers, ‘This is out there, you’ve probably been hearing about it on TV and the Internet. We have been unable to substantiate it independently.’ And then give them enough information to judge the validity of it.”