Hats off to the amazing Ken Starr. He surpassed my wildest expectations. With his gripping, Linda-Tripping, bodice-ripping 445-page report to the Congress, Starr has done what I would have thought impossible: He has managed to make me feel sorry for Bill Clinton.
Before I am elected to succeed presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal as the chairman of the Society to Worship Adulterous and Mendacious Presidents (SWAMP), I had better insert the kind of censorious passage that we have come to know so well:
Yes, the president's conduct was morally reprehensible. By the reading of virtually everyone who is not a Clinton lawyer, the president perjured himself in the Paula Jones case and quite likely compounded the crime in his testimony before Starr's grand jury.
Clinton's mawkish apologies (I counted seven separate lip bites during a TV snippet from his talk at Friday's prayer breakfast) are to contrition what pro wrestling is to sport. If the president can feel remorse, it is probably only because he regrets getting caught and laments getting involved with a childlike woman as indiscreet as Monica Lewinsky.
But barring future evidence, Clinton's sordid middle-aged misdemeanors do not justify impeachment. Rather than building an airtight case for constitutional action, the Starr report instead paints a devastating portrait of the president as a pitiful, helpless giant. Not even the Watergate tapes conveyed such presidential pathos.
Set aside morality and Starr's legal claims for a moment, and look at life in the White House the way Clinton probably did: The only zone of privacy that a modern president has is in the Oval Office bathroom. As Betty Currie testified, "The President, for all intents and purposes, is never alone. There's always somebody around him."
Sharing an Easter Sunday interlude with Lewinsky on April 7, 1996, the president was interrupted mid-ecstasy not once but twice. Clinton first had to signal Lewinsky to continue her ministrations as he took a phone call from Dick Morris, who may well have been informing the president about the latest campaign poll on family issues. Then, when the action resumed in the White House study a few minutes later, Harold Ickes hollered, "Mr. President," prompting Lewinsky to flee.
For all the global reach of American power, Clinton's own domain consisted of the bathroom and the windowless hallway outside the study, where the door was always ajar. When he dared frolic in his study, the president often felt compelled to turn out the light for security, not romantic, reasons.
How chilling it must be for Clinton to know that every visitor to the Oval Office and every presidential phone call is logged. "When the president wanted to talk with Ms. Lewinsky," the report says, "Ms. Currie would dial the call herself rather than go through the White House operators."
But that's only one reason why, for Clinton, the presidency is indeed the loneliest job in the world. Explaining his reluctance to climax during oral sex, Clinton told Lewinsky "that he needed to wait until he trusted me more."
Spies, who represented the president's better angels, were everywhere. Evelyn Lieberman, a former aide to the first lady, was responsible for abruptly exiling Lewinsky to the Pentagon. When the president questioned Lieberman about this firing, he quickly backed down when she took personal responsibility for the decision.
"Oh, OK," Clinton said in a telling display of presidential passivity.
But the saddest side of this sordid saga are the suggestions that Clinton, like all graying baby-boomers, cannot escape the mortifications of age. It was a bad enough cliche that Clinton told Monica that "she made him feel young." But he also explained that leaning against the bathroom doorway during their sexual encounters "eased his sore back." Talk about emulating John Kennedy!
During his Independence Day 1997 meeting with Monica, Clinton sounded like a man imprisoned by fate, as he lamented his inability to spend time with her. Threatened by Lewinsky's hints of exposing their relationship, the president lavishly praised her beauty and "her intellect."
According to Lewinsky, Clinton even allowed her to create an air-castle fantasy that maybe they could be together after he left office. But then the president asked, in the most poignant passage in the report, "What are we going to do when I'm 75 and I have to pee 25 times a day?"
What are we to say of a president who falls under the sway of an intern whose idea of subtle flirting is to show "him the straps of her thong underwear"? Clinton tried to resist, temporarily ending their trysts on, yes, President's Day 1996.
But Clinton soon fell from grace, as he had so many times before. "Earlier in his marriage," Monica says the president once confided, "he had hundreds of affairs, but since turning 40, he had made a concerted effort to be faithful."
How mortifying it is to see a president, however weak of flesh and morally adrift, stripped of the last shred of dignity. Thank you, Ken Starr, for destroying forever any lingering schoolbook myths about the grandeur and glory of the American president.
Walter Shapiro's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
