Cover That Keyhole

By Richard Lacayo

The single strangest thing about the week that led up to the release of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony was the consensus around Washington. It was something like a certainty that the tapes would be the coup de grace. Clinton would destroy himself by twitching, equivocating and storming out of the room. To believe that, all you had to do was ignore the weight of public opinion that's been pressing upon this event all year. Most Americans already know what they dislike about the President. What was brought home by the Clinton squirm session, and then by the transcripts of Monica Lewinsky's testimony that were released the same day, is that the man who really unnerves them is Ken Starr.

So it's not so surprising that after the tape was released, polls showed Americans rejecting the idea of impeachment or resignation by even larger majorities than they had before. You didn't have to watch all four hours of Clinton's excruciating performance to get the picture. With most kinds of video porn, a few minutes is enough. While the President's mood sometimes changes--humble, combative, pedantic, stammering--the eerie climate of the room remains pretty much the same. A cornered, equivocating man is questioned forever by clinical, off-camera voices:

Q. She professed her love to you in these cards after the end of the relationship, didn't she?

A. Well--

Q. She said she loved you?

Prosecutors need to be careful when they start tossing around the word love. They make it sound like a subclause in your mortgage. So much the worse, then, when they get to sex and end up like some fidgety imitation of Woody Allen. "Back to the touching of your breasts for a minute," Lewinsky gets asked at one point in her testimony. "Was that then through clothing or actually, directly onto your skin?" The seamy, repetitive questions laid bare the puritanical monomania that infects this mad pursuit: "Would you agree that the insertion of an object into the genitalia of another person with the desire to gratify sexually would fit within the definition used in the Jones case as sexual relations?"

You don't have to care much for Clinton to know that any number of things about Starr's inquiry feel unsound. His indifference to the niceties of nonpartisanship, his way of delivering the evidence without the exculpatory alternatives that prosecutors generally offer would be enough. What's really unsettling is the larger dynamic. At a time when the notion of a protected personal realm is beginning to seem quaint and sepia toned, even people who don't expect government investigators on their doorstep sense that Starr has breached more than just the President's tattered defenses. By its very example, his investigation furthers a truly unwholesome idea: that relations between consenting adults--even juvenile, unappetizing and wrongful ones--can be criminalized. All you have to do is corner the people involved, question them under oath and make them squirm.

It will be a while before we understand all the ways Starr has changed things. To be sure, the notion of privacy has suffered. But even civic moralizing has taken a hit. From now on it takes place in an even more muddled context. It will be interesting to watch the House debating pornography on the Internet now that its own Judiciary Committee has launched the President's cigar into cyberspace. Or to watch cities attempt to zone porn shops to the margins now that the Starr report has been sold next to the cash register at Barnes and Noble. Or to sit through the next election season of family-values campaigning by candidates fending off news about past "indiscretions."

It will also be different to think about adultery, which was still taboo just a few months ago. It may now be on its way to something like normalization, moved along by the simple fact that in Clinton's wake, so many other public figures have been and will be cornered into admitting that they did it too. Ralph Waldo Emerson said there was "a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy." But in order to thrive, some institutions--and marriage could be one of them--may just require a measure of hypocrisy. That's another term for silence.

Clinton made the truest statement of his testimony when he was asked whether he had tried to keep his Lewinsky interlocks a secret. "I did what people do when they do the wrong thing," he said. "I tried to do it where nobody else was looking at it." We would all be better off if Starr had exercised his prosecutorial discretion and left the White House Kama Sutra a closed book. What the President did ranged from the silly to the squalid, but the investigation is worse, turning a private mess into a public eyesore. It's Starr, after all, who has given us the dirtiest paperback ever to top the best-seller list. And it's Starr who produced thousands more pages of clammy evidence, much of it devoted obsessively to proving that someone's mouth touched someone else's penis. And for all the assurances that now it's up to the American people, don't expect it to end soon. "Back to the touching of your breasts for a minute."