There are other all too familiar features, too. The pattern of behavior that, after a brief period of acknowledged panic on the part of those who have been suspected or accused, remains fairly constant: the counterattack, the attribution of the charges to political malice, the attempts to discredit, if not destroy, the whistle-blowers and compliant witnesses, the strangely open boasting about the smartness of the public-relations strategy irrespective of the truth or weight of the charges, the recurrent theme of how that strategy is prevailing, etc. And of course there is always the fact that (1) many of us in the media manage to overplay what we know and (2) this is then magnified into evidence that we must have made up the whole thing. So far as all of the above is concerned, the Clinton sex scandal is moving along right on schedule and in conformity with what we have learned to expect. This set-piece quality is so ingrained by now that some of us at The Washington Post can recall having been seen as accomplices of a left-wing conspiracy before we became, more recently, accomplices of a right-wing conspiracy.
Except that there are some differences this time, and you may have to be milling around in the capital to appreciate them. The most important one is the position in which the president’s defenders have been put and their reaction to it. The classic defense, often clung to long after deeply disappointed supporters probably know better, is that the leader who is under attack didn’t know what was being perpetrated in his name; it was the klutzy aides or the rogue security people or some other overreaching entity. Indeed, this particular defense has been very much in evidence in all the campaign-finance travails and related sorrows of both parties in Washington this year: the boss had no idea it was happening. Try that on the Monica Lewinsky story or the Kathleen Willey story. Either each is true or each is false. But whichever it is, it could hardly have been kept secret from the president. Nobody else can take the fall for this, as has happened in so many other White House scandals–no matter how self-sacrificing and loyal the would-be fall guy is. That is a prime distinction.
“Loyal” is the key word here. Over the brouhaha-ridden years that I have been in Washington, I have heard loyalist aides and associates of those in trouble hewing stubbornly and desperately to the line long after they had little reason to believe it was true; the line outlasted the collapse of any possible evidence supporting it. The defenders in this latest scandal can only maintain that the charges are not true or are not important, and this they publicly do with the same fervor you used to hear from the diehard partisans of other leaders under fire. But there is another difference: a certain private holding back and glumness when they are not pronouncing for the record, a conveyed sense of weariness and even anger with the one they have been publicly defending. Arguments will not go so much (if at all) to whether or not it happened as to how awful it would be if the Republicans got in or if the presidency were weakened or if the more questionable techniques of the investigation were validated. And–what is surely a first in my experience–many high-level loyalists engaged in the stout public defense will, after hours, easily and wholeheartedly engage in not just the gossip but also the endless gross jokes and banter to which the situation so notoriously lends itself.
What kind of loyalists are these, you ask? Loyalists don’t drop their brave masks like that, don’t join in the wild speculation and merriment, don’t on other occasions betray their telling depression. You want to bet? I am not talking about opportunists or both-siders or people trying to ingratiate themselves in case things don’t go the right way. I’m talking about many of the obdurately loyal, the committed. Political loyalty is a grand and historic subject. It generates profound conflicts between principle and allegiance, between political exigency and adherence to ideals. All that sounds pretty high-flown, but in one form and another, it has long constituted the tension between the leader and his lieutenants and agents. What do they owe him? What does he owe them?
That seems to me the set of questions that has stirred so many people in the capital this week. They will say, as we all rightly do, that they do not know the truth of the matter and are withholding final judgment till they do. But to hedge their bets in the meantime they will observe that many others in high office have had love affairs and longtime mistresses and why are Americans so uptight about it? They know, however, that the sordid charges have nothing to do with a “love affair” or even a “mistress,” for that matter, in any generally understood meaning of either term. They are about something else.
The charges could turn out to be false, or they could turn out to be true or–the worst outcome, I think–they could remain unresolved, a kind of continuing, low-grade political infectious disease that just goes on and on and brings out the worst in everyone. Bill Clinton’s loyal supporters, putting themselves at political and moral risk in his defense, are bound to be harmed if the situation just drags on, as are his party and his purposes. If his friends and clients owe him their loyalty, he owes them the straight story. It is a two-way street.
