Moral authority

Inappropriateness in leadership is a broader church than sex

It’s over a quarter century since the Monica Lewinsky scandal rocked America and mildly amused the rest of the world. What follows is a commentary by the American broadcaster Alistair Cook on the speech given by Bill Clinton as his come clean moment in 1998. It is followed by a commentary by Nick Clarke, Cook’s biographer, on the disposal of the matter after Clinton’s speech had been given.

In terms of sexual impropriety, I suppose parallels can be drawn with Donald Trump’s cases at the hands of E. Jean Carroll and, at least tangentially, Stormy Daniels, and there may be cheerleaders for the Democratic Party who see no intrinsic harm in the Clinton legacy as far as his peccadilloes with Lewinsky, Flowers and Jones were concerned (but who nonetheless draw enormous capital from Mr Trump’s indiscretions). After all, in French politics, an adventurous love life is almost expected as de rigueur from a president of that republic, so why not of America’s?

However, I side with Cook in his conclusion to the matter, that this essentially has nothing to do with sex. The Lewinsky matter was all about clever words and verbal manipulations, and the question of whether he who leads possesses the moral fibre required of one who leads. And that is not a question that rests on his indiscretions or otherwise in terms of his trysts, but on the moral rectitude that underpins the decisions he alone takes: in Clinton’s case to bare-faced lie to the people he represents; in other cases, to supply his allies with armaments when he knows the nefarious and immoral purposes to which they will be put—even when he disagrees with the policies of the ally to whom he supplies them—even when his own electorate beseeches him not to do so.

Moreover, I side with Professor Weiker, in that the moral fibre that a people requires of its leader is in large part reflective of the moral fibre of the people whom the leader leads.

Mr Biden’s cheerleaders dismiss any argument that considers the imminent race between Republican and Democrat as the choice of a lesser evil. I fear Mr Biden is evening up the assessments in terms of who, between him and his prospective opponent, is indeed the greater of those evils, however.

The bold emphasis is my own in the following.

The president will address the nation at 10:00 PM this evening Eastern Daylight Time, 9 Central, 7 Pacific. Of all the times a similar announcement has come over the radio or the television, I can’t recall one when more millions of Americans mentally made a date with history as they did last Monday.

This time more than sixty millions of them. Whatever the outcome from that four-minute speech of the President, Monday the 17th of August 1998 will be remembered as long as there’s a television station with an unfaded videotape, not to mention a living American with a memory of our time.

Looking back on the days before the fateful hour, it strikes me now that, semi-consciously, vast numbers of people had the feeling, the hope too, that this would mark the end of the affair. This only showed how much we’ve been brainwashed by the movies. In the real drama of prosecutor Starr versus President Clinton, it was at best only the beginning of the end. I ought to say, though, why even some veteran politicians of both parties hoped that the President’s address to the nation would put an early end to things. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who would be the man to arrange the trial of the president if the House voted articles of impeachment, an old hand at such hearings and a political opponent, Senator Hatch, said just before the address that, if the President made an outright, from-the-heart, candid confession of his relationship with Miss Lewinsky and gave convincing word that he had not conspired or cajoled anybody into covering it up or otherwise lying about it, if he then threw himself on the mercy of the American people, he might most likely be forgiven because, as the senator put it, for the good of the nation and our form of government, nobody wants to impeach him.

When the President had finished, the Senator, that same Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Hatch, was, like many members of both parties, aghast with anger and disappointment. They felt, as the overwhelming editorial opinion of the country expressed it, that he’d spoken from a legally contrived script, that, as a confession, it was feeble and inadequate. Several of Mr Clinton’s cabinet rallied at once with urgent pleas to move on and carry out the nation’s business. But the President’s leaders of his own party were as dispirited as the press: the House Democratic leader: “I’m very disappointed in his personal conduct;” the Democrats’ Senate leader: “A more complete explanation of his relationship should have come earlier;” and of the senior senators of the two most populous states, California and New York, both Democrats, Senator Moynihan of New York remarked, he had made no adequate apology to an awful lot of people he has put through terrible times. These people must have referred mainly to his loyal staff, not least, though, to Mrs Clinton, whom the President said he had misled, which came out to me that, only last Sunday, the night before his address, did he tell his wife that he lied about the Lewinsky affair.

Then the senior senator from California, the most politically powerful of all the states, with an essential mass of votes to offer in any election, Senator Dianne Feinstein, she stood at the President’s side on that famous, or infamous, day in January when he wagged his finger at us and swore to the nation he had had no sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. After Monday night, Senator Feinstein said she was blazing with anger: “I believed him; I felt betrayed.”

So if, finally, so many influential people, papers, Democrats have changed their mind and lost their loyalty, why does the great body of the Democrats in Congress stay mum, so far? Because of the puzzling fact that while 60-odd percent of the voters believe the President had lied before Monday evening, 60-odd percent say he’s been a good president and shouldn’t be impeached. This contradiction is, especially for the politicians of both parties who are running for reelection in November, the great awkward stumbling block to the free exercise of their conscience.

What was it about the speech, apart from its brevity and lack of open-hearted candour, that left so many people with the complaining word inadequate? Well, before it was written and finally transcribed to a teleprompter, the substance and style of the speech had been fought over, we are told, up to the last hour on Monday evening by two factions: the President’s White House political cronies, and his legal advisers. The politicians told him his one chance of redemption was a heartfelt complete confession and apology to his many supporters, no mention of the special prosecutor or the length of the investigation, and then throw himself on the people’s mercy. The politicians lost. The lawyers had convinced themselves that his best chance of survival was to contrive a careful legal evasion of the whole truth. So, the speech was a lawyer’s extra-delicate exercise in weasel words.

I cannot think whom these characters imagined they would fool by having the President go back to his deposition in the Paula Jones case, after which he gave that little speech to the press, and said, “I swear to you I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” So, Monday night, he says that phrase in January was legally correct but, in the next sentence, his lawyers had him say, “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” Mr. Clinton left it to the 60-odd million to figure out the difference between a sexual relationship and an inappropriate one.

Incidentally, and very much incident to presidential crises, inappropriate has become— since Mr. Nixon used it frequently 25 years ago—inappropriate has become the adjective of choice for defendants, for men accused of practically any crime in the book. Nixon, till the day he abdicated, never said he did wrong: he left office because he did not have sufficient political backing in the Congress; his actions had been, he feared, inappropriate.

Once Monday’s speech was over, the first effect that the sharpest White House reporters noticed was on the faces of the staff, the close advisers who can be seen next morning. They had forgiven him Jennifer Flowers, with whom he swore he’d never had any sex, then said months later, “Sorry, yes, just once.” She said, with hours of taped telephone calls to give weight to her claim, that they had been lovers for 12 years. All forgiven. Paula Jones and the self-exposure incident in the hotel long ago, which even the judge in the Paula Jones case said was, if true, gross behaviour. But the judge threw the case out, not for disbelieving Miss Jones but for finding no evidence that she’d suffered grievous harm professionally and privately. But, Miss Lewinsky: they trusted him as did many, many more. It came out in the past few days that Mr Clinton, before the grand jury, refused to answer most questions on the Lewinsky matter, about which we reliably hear he was amazed to discover how much detail Mr Starr knew, presumably from the grand jury testimony recently of Miss Lewinsky. Accordingly, Miss Lewinsky was called back to the grand jury this Thursday.

Well, having waded through this welter and foam of cross-currents of opinion, whatever the final consensus, we have to confront the root question of self-government: what is meant by moral authority and does a leader need it?

Moral authority in a leader, old man Aristotle pointed out 2000 more years ago, resides in a leader because he’s a better-than-average character. Moral authority does not mean sexual behaviour; it means the capacity for being trusted, to have the people believe the word of the leader in many things and be ready to follow him when he judges what is the right thing to do. It means Lincoln declaring that a civil war had to be fought, not to free an enslaved race but to preserve the union. It meant Franklin Roosevelt taking the United States into the war against Hitler and Japan, not because it was legal (he did many things that cried aloud for his impeachment) but because it was right. It was Harry Truman declaring that, since the League of Nations had failed because the western Europeans were too cowardly to stop Mussolini in Ethiopia, the United States had a moral duty to save the United Nations by going into South Korea to stem the communist invasion from the north.

It is a pattern of lying in Mr Clinton that the prosecutor is investigating and that has offended and bewildered much of the country. This may still leave unexplained the discrepancy between the 60-odd percent of the country who believe he lied about his sexual relation with Miss Lewinsky, as with Paula Jones, as with Jennifer Flowers, and the 60-odd percent who say, still, he’s a good president and shouldn’t go. There is one pungent voice that’s worth at least listening to: an old politician from Connecticut, not a party man, a maverick and a retired governor who now teaches politics at the University of Virginia: asked how come about 60 percent think Clinton lied and about 60 percent want him to stay governor, Lowell Weiker, implying that they reflect the sad moral climate of our time, said, “Then, that 60 percent, those people, are equally to be condemned with the President as having no sense of the moral side of leadership.”

So, after the four-minute confessional on Monday, there are only two opinions that are shared by the great majority of the people: one, this investigation is by no means over, that the President’s troubles reach forward certainly to the day of Mr Starr’s delivery of an impeachment report to the House; the other consensus, which sympathetic and even forgiving people are reluctant to come to, is that, if he survives, Mr. Clinton will be a limping leader through the remaining two years of his presidency.

Alistair Cook: Letter from America for 23 August 1998

The independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr duly published his 445-page report on the affair in September citing 11 grounds for impeachment. Hearings in the House of Representatives were delayed until after the midterm elections in November, where the Democrats actually gained seats. In a bitter debate in the House, the vote went against President Clinton and articles of impeachment were issued on two grounds: perjury and the obstruction of justice. In the Senate, there followed 21 days of hearings before the senators made their judgment. Voting was close and generally along party lines, but the 2/3 majority to convict was not achieved, and the President was acquitted on both charges. He remained in office with no further legal censure.

This whole process was either a fine vindication of the American democratic and legal process or a sordid and cynical exercise in political self-serving, depending on your point of view.

Nick Clarke, Alistair Cook’s biographer.