U.S. v. Clinton

National Review, Sept 28, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr., David Gelernter, Peter Robinson, James J. Kilpatrick, George McGovern, Lance Morrow

What follows is taken from a speech given by WFB at Kent State University on April 1. In the light of what has since happened, and what looms as United States v. Clinton, we reproduce (without editing) the body of the talk on the then-developing case of Bill Clinton and Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky. The article is followed by commentary by David Gelernter of Yale; Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution; James J. Kilpatrick, columnist and author; George McGovern, Democratic candidate for President in 1972; and Lance Morrow, author of Time Magazine's 1992 Man of the Year essay on: Bill Clinton.

I AM impelled tonight to ruminate on the overriding phenomenon of recent months, which is of course the crisis of President Clinton.

It is overwhelming in its demand for attention. At the most dramatic personal level it asks, Should the President, if allegations are substantiated, resign? At the most dramatic plebiscitary level, it asks, What in the way of behavior does the American public, in the year of Our Lord 1998, expect of its President? And in between, questions arise concerning morality, public and private. We wonder about political implications, the role of special prosecutors, the application of justice at presidential levels, and maybe even the insufficiencies of the Constitution.

I have endeavored to formulate a few propositions. Their purpose is to clarify my own thinking on these questions and, I hope, to engage your interest.

MY first proposition is that the Paula Jones affair should have been aborted. As we know, all nine members of the Supreme Court ruled a year ago that the suit brought against the President by Mrs. Jones should stay on the court calendar. The offense complained of had been committed before the defendant became President of the United States, so that no special immunity attached to him. Moreover, there was no reason to assume -- the court argued -- that Mr. Clinton could not simultaneously defend himself at trial and conduct the nation's business. It was suggested in effect that if it happened that the trial were to fall on the very same day as a projected bombing of Iraq, the trial judge could reasonably be expected to put off the proceedings for a week or two.

There is a sense in which this lawsuit crept up on the American public substantially unnoticed, rather like the computers that are destined to crash at midnight of the New Year's Eve that brings on the next millennium. On the computer front, we simply assume, or at least I do, that the wizards of Silicon Valley will find the right plug to pull at some point before midnight, and the cyberworld will continue to hum. Something -- it was generally thought, until the appearance of Miss Lewinsky -- would happen and Paula Jones would go away, and Mr. Clinton would continue on through his term.

The American public was less than shaken by the implications of the case. But there was a certain consternation in the international diplomatic community. There are people out there who think it would be distracting to meet with the President the day before or the day after his exposition of his private parts to a jury to test the credibility of the plaintiff Jones.

I proposed three years ago in my newspaper column that Republican and Democratic leaders agree for the sake of the public tranquillity to view Paula Jones's challenge as a bipartisan problem. Back then, Mrs. Jones was asking for damages of $700,000 and an apology from the President.

Not inconceivably, her lawyers might have persuaded their client to forgo the apology and pocket the cash. There is, after all, always a chance, in a jury trial, of losing. It is hardly inconceivable that at least one juror, in a trial of Jones v. Clinton, would express the same blind affinity for the Presidency that 12 jurors expressed for Afro Americans when they voted that O. J. Simpson was guiltless. One of the jurors (or several, or all) might have decided that whatever the manifest guilt of the President, that juror was not going to participate in a process that would humiliate the Chief Executive of the world's only superpower.

If Mrs. Jones had persisted in her demand for an apology, we'd have needed to see a display of diplomacy in Mr. Clinton. Even if he were entirely innocent, he might have been counseled to go ahead and accept the release of an apology written as if he might have been guilty.

Every day, people in commerce sign consent decrees in which they acknowledge the hypothetical possibility of guilt even when absolutely convinced of their guiltlessness. Mr. Clinton could have reasoned that his concern for presidential decorum outweighed any appearance he might permit of hypothetical guilt. He could have said, ''Whatever I did that gave offense to Mrs. Jones, I regret.''

That and $700,000 could have rescued us all from the lengthy trough ahead. And of course the question is left with us now, Was the failure to settle, back then, an early warning sign of defective presidential leadership? Our Chief Executive is also our First Politician. Expert politicians are expected to avoid unnecessary crises.