Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [388]
Many doubting Thomases found an element of political theater, if not hypocrisy, in Clinton’s use of clerics to pull him out of his cesspool of sinfulness. Yet President Clinton himself would take issue with those who pooh-poohed the sincerity of his apology. “You know, most every Sunday when Hillary and I were in Washington, we went to Foundry Methodist Church,” Clinton later said. “And when we were at Camp David, we went to the chapel to services; this was a big part of my life. The ministers that I asked to come meet with me after this whole thing broke were people that I knew well and admired enormously. And they weren’t about to be used as pawns in political theater. They were going to, you know, work with me in a spirit of love, but also, you know, toughness and accountability. It’s more insulting to them than it is to me. I mean, I don’t care what they say about me. But it was very real. And it was a very important part of my life and my family’s life for the next year or so.”
Even as ministers filed out of the prayer breakfast prepared to lend absolution to Bill Clinton, the House of Representatives was debating whether to release the unexpurgated Starr Report so that the fullest details of his sins could be made public. By an overwhelming 363 to 63 vote that transcended party lines, the House decided to release the entire Starr Report—that afternoon—to be followed by the publication of the massive evidentiary record, unless the Judiciary Committee determined otherwise within seventeen days.
Representative Barney Frank, the fiery, openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts and one of the few stalwarts to defend Clinton publicly after the president admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky, saw trouble brewing on the horizon. As Congressman Frank read the tea leaves, the lopsided vote in the House reflected the sentiment, even among Democrats, that “this guy’s in trouble. He did bad things. We’re angry at him and he was stupid. Starr may have more. We don’t know what else Starr’s got. We haven’t even really fully digested this. And we think the public’s going to be mad at him.”
At approximately two o’clock in the afternoon, the House clerk posted the 452-page Starr Report on Congress’s intranet site. With the simple click of a PC mouse, the document was made available to major media sources and millions of Americans were soon reading the startling report online, the first time a government document that might change the course of history made its debut on the Internet.
In college study carrels and law libraries from West Coast to East, students huddled around computer terminals to scroll through the Starr Report, alternately guffawing and gasping at the president’s sexual exploits with an intern the same age as many of them. Web servers were crushed with so many hits that they experienced “online traffic jams.” Readers cut and pasted the juiciest portions for friends and family members who might appreciate the explicit details, transmitting these via e-mail; most interest focused on the episode involving the president inserting a cigar into Monica Lewinsky’s vagina and tales of kinky phone sex as the president lay alone in bed in the White House wearing blue undershorts.
The next day, newspapers printed the entire text of the Starr Report in fat inserts, simultaneously captivating and repulsing the American public. Hundreds of papers posted the voluminous document electronically on their Web sites, many including warnings like that of the Denver Post: “The following report contains material that readers may find offensive or objectionable.…”
The White House was nearly rocked off its wheels. One high-level staffer described the frenzy to obtain copies of the salacious Starr referral as similar to “giving away Rolling Stones tickets.” Eager readers lined up to grab copies of the report at newsstands and at workplace computer printers which swiftly ran out of ink.
David Kendall released a seventy-eight-page “preliminary rebuttal,” calling the Starr Report