Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [376]
With a look of a puffy-eyed pugilist having survived fifteen rounds in the ring, President Clinton declared in a challenging voice, “Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”
Clinton’s speech was essentially a condensed version of his effective testimony earlier that day. Punching Ken Starr and his prosecutors in the gut during four hours of adversarial jousting had been effective enough. But lashing out at the Starr bogeymen in this different setting, during a prime-time presidential address, when the whole nation was expecting an apology, appeared petty, inappropriate, and unrepentant. Clinton had lived in the protective bubble of the White House for more than five years, addressing bigger-than-life issues and never second-guessing himself. For a tired and cranky Bill Clinton, what seemed like just another sit-down in front of a camera in a familiar room in the White House was in fact one of the biggest challenges of his political career. Millions of unseen television viewers were on the other end of this lens, watching carefully for signs of remorse and contrition. Instead, President Bill Clinton served up a giant-sized bowl of sour grapes. It was, the White House quickly realized, a bad ending to a day in which Clinton could have knocked the independent counsel out of the ring.
For most of Bill Clinton’s career, the stars and moon had aligned to provide cover to the “Comeback Kid.” Tonight, that magical luck had been eclipsed by rotten advice and poor judgment. One political adviser said that permitting Clinton to go in front of the cameras “was a big mistake on our part.” If his aides had insisted on calling a time-out until the following day, giving Clinton a chance to rest, catch his breath, and put the events into perspective, history might have played out differently. The angry draft speeches that his political people had watered down “maybe ten percent,” it was now apparent, “needed to be watered down eighty percent.”
Public opinion polls fluttered and remained relatively constant, still favoring the president after his bitter admission. Yet there were ominous signs that Bill Clinton’s pillars of support were beginning to crack.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who had ardently defended Clinton at a time when many women were standing on the sidelines warily, was now distancing herself from him. She stated that the president had betrayed her and dragged the whole country to this ugly place: “My trust in his credibility has been badly shattered.” Even some close friends of the president were having trouble forgiving and forgetting, particularly after he had looked so many of them straight in the eye and flat-out denied the affair. Betsey Wright, Clinton’s chief of staff from the governor days, felt that her former boss’s admission had come a day late and a dime short. “I wished that he had tried [making an honest confession] in the beginning,” she said.
Alice Starr, who watched every minute of the president’s speech, remembered thinking, “‘Whoa, I can’t believe he’s taking the attack to Ken.’” Her assessment as a citizen was, “If I were him, I would have been very deferential… and it would have probably slid through.” Instead, she was surprised to see that “he went on the attack.” This was a major miscalculation, she felt, because “it looks like you’re hiding something when you do something like that.”
WHEN the First Family left for their summer vacation the next morning, heading to Martha’s Vineyard via the presidential helicopter, the mood was anything