That the “story” itself might in this case be anything other than (in Witcover’s words) “a fast-breaking, incredibly competitive story of major significance” was questioned by only one panelist, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who characterized “the obsession of the press with sex and public officials” as “crazy,” but allowed that “after Linda Tripp went to the prosecutor, it became hard to say we shouldn’t be covering this.” The more general attitude seemed to be that there might have been an excess here or an error there, but the story itself was important by definition, significant because it was commanding the full resources of everyone on it — not unlike a campaign, which this story, in that it offered a particularly colorful version of the personalized “horse race” narrative that has become the model for most American political reporting, in fact resembled. “This is a very valid story of a strong-willed prosecutor and a president whose actions have been legitimately questioned,” Walter Isaacson of Time said. “A case involving sex can be a very legitimate story, but we can’t let our journalistic standards lapse simply because the sexual element makes everyone overexcited.”
This, then, was a story “involving sex,” a story in which there was a “sexual element,” but, as we so frequently heard, it was not about sex, just as Whitewater, in the words of one of the several score editorials to this point published over the years by The Wall Street Journal, was “not merely about a land deal.” What both stories were about, of course (although in the absence of both sex and evidence against the president one of them had proved a harder sell), was which of the contenders, the “strong-willed prosecutor” or his high-placed target, would go the distance, win the race. “The next forty-eight to seventy-two hours are critical,” Tim Russert was saying on January 21, 1998, on MSNBC, where the daily recalibration of such sudden-death scenarios would by August raise the cable’s Nielsen households from 49,000 a year before to 197,000. “I think his presidency is numbered in days,” Sam Donaldson was saying by Sunday of the same week.
“On the high-status but low-interest White House beat, there is no story as exciting as that of the fall of a president,” Jacob Weisberg observed in Slate in March. The president, everyone by then agreed, was “toast.” The president “had to go,” or “needed to go.” The reasons the president needed to go had seemed, those last days in January and into February, crisp, easy to explain, grounded as they were in the galvanizing felony prospects set adrift without attribution by the Office of the Independent Counseclass="underline" obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury. Then, as questions threatened to slow the story (Would it not be unusual to prosecute someone for perjury in a civil suit? Did the chronology present a circumstantial case for, or actually against, obstruction? If someone lied in a deposition about a matter later ruled not essential to and so inadmissible in the case at hand, as Lewinsky had been ruled in Jones v. Clinton, was it in fact perjury?), the reasons the president “needed to go” became less crisp, more subjective, more a matter of “the mood here in the capital,” and so, by definition, less open to argument from those not there in the capital.
This story was definitely moving, as they kept saying on MSNBC. By April 1, 1998, when U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright rendered the possibility of any felony technically remote by dismissing Jones v. Clinton altogether, the story had already rolled past its inconvenient legal (or “legalistic,” a much-used word by then) limitations: ten weeks after America first heard the name Monica Lewinsky and still in the absence of any allegation bearing on the president’s performance of his duties, the reasons the president needed to go were that he had been “weakened,” that he would be “unable to function.” The president’s own former chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had expressed concern about “the slow drip-drip process and the price he’s paying in terms of his ability to lead the country.” When the congressional staff members were asked in late March 1998 where they believed the situation was leading, twenty-one percent of Democratic staff members (forty-three percent of Republican) had foreseen, in the absence of resignation, impeachment proceedings.
The story was positioned, in short, for the satisfying long haul. By August 17, 1998, when the president confirmed the essential fact in the testimony Monica Lewinsky had given the grand jury eleven days before, virtually every “news analyst” on the eastern seaboard was on air (we saw the interiors of many attractive summer houses) talking about “the president’s credibility,” about “can he lead” or “still govern in any reasonably effective manner,” questions most cogently raised that week by Garry Wills in Time and, to a different point, by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. Proceeding from a belief both in President Clinton’s underlying honor and in the redemptive power, if he was to be faced by crippling harassment, of the “principled resignation,” Wills had tried to locate the homiletic possibilities in the dilemma, the opportunities for spiritual growth that could accrue to the country and to the president through resignation. The divergence between this argument and that made by Friedman was instructive. Friedman had seemed to be offering “can he lead” mainly as a strategy, an argument with which the professionals of the political process, who were increasingly bewildered by the public’s apparent disinclination to join the rush to judgment by then general in the columns and talk shows, might most adroitly reeducate that “substantial majority” who “still feel that Mr. Clinton should remain in office.”
In other words we had arrived at a dispiriting and familiar point, and would be fated to remain there even as telephone logs and Epass Access Control Reports and pages of grand-jury testimony floated down around us: “the disconnect,” as it was now called, between what the professionals — those who held public office, those who worked for them, and those who wrote about them — believed to be self-evident and what a majority of Americans believed to be self-evident. John Kennedy and Warren Harding had both conducted affairs in the Oval Office (more recently known as “the workplace,” or “under the same roof where his daughter lay sleeping”), and these affairs were by no means the largest part of what Americans thought about either of them. “If you step back a bit, it still doesn’t look like a constitutional crisis,” former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella told the Los Angeles Times to this point. “This is still a case about whether the President had sex with someone half his age. The American people have understood — certainly better than politicians, lawyers, and the press — that if this is ultimately about sex, it’s really no one else’s business. There are acceptable lies and unacceptable lies, and lying about someone’s sex life is one of those tolerated lies.”
Ten days after the president’s August 17 admission to the nation, or ten days into the endless tape loop explicating the inadequacies of that admission, Mr. Clinton’s own polls, according to The Washington Post, showed pretty much what everyone else’s polls showed and would continue to show, notwithstanding the release first of Kenneth Starr’s “narrative” and “grounds for impeachment” and then of Mr. Clinton’s videotaped testimony and 3,183 pages of “supporting documents”: that a majority of the public had believed all along that the president had some kind of involvement with Monica Lewinsky (“Cheat once, cheat twice, there’s probably a whole line of them,” a thirty-four-year-old woman told Democratic pollster Peter Hart in a focus session attended by the Los Angeles Times) continued to see it as a private rather than a political matter, believed Kenneth Starr to be the kind of sanctimonious hall monitor with sex on the brain they had avoided in their formative years (as in the jump-rope rhyme Rooty-toot-toot! Rooty-toot-toot! / There go the boys from the Institute! / They don’t smoke and they don’t chew / And they don’t go with the girls who do), and, even as they acknowledged the gravity of lying under oath, did not wish to see the president removed from office.