True Colors - the coded speech of President Bill Clinton

National Review, Jan 25, 1999 by Carl M. Cannon

Monicagate is vintage Clinton-only this time he got caught.

Mr. Cannon, a longtime White House reporter, writes for National Journal.

In 1990, when Bill Clinton was planning his run for president, a Democratic media consultant named Raymond D. Strother asked him how he was planning to handle the question of youthful marijuana use. "I'm thinking of saying I never violated the drug laws of my country," Clinton replied. Strother, seeing through the ruse immediately, gently informed the one-time Rhodes scholar that such an answer wasn't likely to fool the national press. By 1992, of course, Clinton had settled on his "I didn't inhale" line.

Was this a lie? Had he really not inhaled marijuana smoke? No one knows for sure, though several people who were at Oxford with Clinton told presidential biographer David Maraniss that they believed him-thought it was possible that the young Clinton really hadn't known how to smoke. The larger point, however, is that Bill Clinton believed while in college, believed while in Arkansas, and believes today that the truth is something that he can finesse.

Of all the behavior exhibited by the president during the past year, as he micro-managed a little sex scandal into his own impeachment, the decision his critics find most inexplicable is his absolute refusal to concede that he lied. This from a man who arrived in Washington with the sobriquet "Slick Willie," who admitted "inappropriate" sex acts in the Oval Office, who confessed adultery and acknowledged turning the country topsy-turvy through his own lack of discipline. But what he has stubbornly refused to do-despite assurances from some Republicans that he could make it all go away-is admit that he twice took an oath to tell the truth during court proceedings and failed to do so.

On its face, this refusal seems not only self-destructive, but strange. Clinton has been a known dissembler for two decades, and certainly the American public has no illusions about him. In the same polls that show Clinton with Eisenhower-level approval ratings, only 8 percent give him high marks for truth-telling. What's more, the facts that Clinton has grudgingly conceded-quite apart from the DNA evidence on that infamous dress-make it plain that Clinton told falsehoods to Paula Jones's lawyers, to a federal grand jury, to Jim Lehrer and other journalists, and to various U.S. senators. He lied to his cabinet, to his vice president, to his aides, and to his friends (including the much-maligned Harry Thomason). The only person he appears to have confided the truth to, concerning Monica Lewinsky, is Dick Morris.

It was hardly any shock to House members that Clinton's veracity was shaky-not after slippery negotiations in which the president would say one thing to one group and something entirely different to another. This applies not just to Republicans but to the self-same Democrats who railed against Clinton's conduct on the House floor, then trucked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in a show of support for the second president in history to be impeached. Now, as the Senate grapples with a constitutional mess, one question that presents itself is, Was this wreckage avoidable, given Clinton's nature? Another is, Whose fault is it, anyway?

Some like to cast the president's ambitious wife as a primary culprit. They see Hillary Rodham Clinton as the "enabler" who ill served the country by standing by her man, not out of love or loyalty, but out of her own desire to wield power. This explanation strikes at least one professional Clinton-watcher (me) as too pat, and probably unfair. Those who know the First Lady well insist that, whatever her ambitions, she loves the big lug a great deal. Like many other wives, she believed her husband's denials when others did not. Moreover, Clinton's presidency is not threatened by extramarital activity, but by perjury, which Hillary Clinton has no authority to pardon. So the First Lady should not bear the blame. If we are to point to enablers, or co-conspirators, we might as well name the Arkansas political establishment, Clinton's ineffective presidential opponents, the Democratic party, and the media, all of whom let Clinton shade the truth for years without an adequate accounting.

Today, the entire political culture-including the president-is paying the price. Clinton realizes his denials and assurances aren't worth much anymore, no matter how thinly sourced the allegation leveled against him: whether it's that he fathered an out-of-wedlock child in Arkansas or that he bombed Iraq in an attempt to forestall or thwart impeachment. When questioned by reporters on the lingering "Wag the Dog" doubts about his airstrikes, Clinton didn't rely on his own word or that of his secretary of state-both of them were compromised by flat denials in the Lewinsky affair. Instead, the president fell back on the assurances made by his defense secretary, a Republican, and by a general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Despite these credibility problems, Clinton surely doesn't think of himself as a liar. His fury, when he is accused of lying, is too spontaneous to be faked, and the effort he puts into giving convoluted, nearly technically perfect answers is the trait of a clever lawyer, not a man who takes secret pleasure in devilish fibs. In his January 17 deposition, for example, this man renowned for his memory of people and places answered "I don't remember" 71 times, "I don't know" 62 times, and "I don't believe so" or "I don't think so," etc., another 134 times.