Our Own Spanish Inquisition

by Alexander Cockburn

Bill Clinton, leader of the free world, couldn't engage in a furtive embrace of a women not his wife in the Oval Office because he thought the gardener would peer in the windows. For the pitifully few moments of semi-gratification he and Monica Lewinsky were able to indulge each other, the two had to seclude themselves in a windowless corridor, a love site without even the close excitement of a broom closet.

The Starr report on the intimacies of the president and the White House intern must surely rank as one of the most bizarre documents about the sex life a public person ever given to the world. A thousand years from now, cultural anthropologists will marvel at the insensate detail of its portrait of what happened when a president in his late 40s was seduced by a rich girl from Beverly Hills. The Starr report is Clinton's legacy, as striking a symbol of our time as was the scaffold of Louis XVI to the late 18th century.

This is not to undercut the demented nature of the Starr report, which has as eerie a feel to it as a proceeding from the Spanish Inquisition or one of those court sessions from the Middle Ages when animals were placed on trial for heresy. To us, in the late 20th century, it is unfathomable that serious people should have considered putting a pig or a goose through the rigors of the judicial process. A century from now, our descendants will surely marvel at an age -- ours -- when millions and millions of dollars were spent to determine that the president and Lewinsky enjoyed 10 bouts of oral sex in two years, attended by two orgasms per partner across that entire time.

Even adding in the bouts of phone sex, it certainly doesn't add up to a fulfilling relationship. The sparsity of sexual fulfillment makes a previous White House incumbent, Warren Harding, look like Casanova by comparison. Nor was Bill Clinton's comportment entirely gross. He was tempted. Infatuated, He told Monica he'd had hundreds of affairs in his youth but that now, after 40, he had been trying to commit himself more strongly to his marriage.

They exchanged gifts. In the words of the report, "He told her he enjoyed talking to her. She recalled him saying that the two of them were emotive and full of fire and she made him feel young." In the end, she turns into the spoiled girl from hell, storms the White House and spurns jobs secured for her by the president and Vernon Jordan. And, of course, she led him badly astray by swearing that she'd never, ever told a soul.

Editorial moralists have sprung to their high horses. The New York Times spoke of reading the Starr report with "a heavy heart and churning emotions." This is like saying one reads Judith Krantz with a heavy heart. The dalliance -- "affair" is far too serious a word -- between Clinton and Lewinsky simply won't sustain the burden of moral reproof being placed upon it. It's like treating Edward Lear as if he was Homer.

It's clear enough now that Kenneth Starr did Clinton a huge favor by confining himself so relentlessly to the president's sex life. Not even a whiff from the stagnant marsh of Whitewater riffles his pages. A report that is designed to evict a president by means of impeachment surely has to have some urgency to it -- some sense of great misdeeds of state, the boding darkness of "Macbeth." You can't send 'round to Congress a report in the style of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and expect those folks in Congress to muster the seriousness of statesmen and stateswomen pondering high crimes and misdemeanors. It just won't wash.

As things are, the American people once again seem to be displaying themselves as mature adults, endowed with a sense of realism, unlike the opinion formers who have been howling as though the president molested a child in her pram.

On Feb. 19, 1996, so Independent Counsel Starr informs us, the president was closeted with Monica in the Oval Office, telling her they could still meet but that there could be no more canoodling. In the midst of this tete a tete, he took a call from one of the Fanjul family, powerful Florida sugar barons who at that time were battling the idea that they should have to pay any money to compensate for the damage to the Everglades attendant upon their sugar-growing activities in Florida. Even as Clinton was talking to Fanjul, Al Gore was agitating for such a levy. By the end of the conversation, there was at least one satisfied party: the sugar baron. But Ken Starr wasn't writing about this happily consummated relationship, which is why Americans won't take this report seriously. They understand the difference between petty moral dereliction and political corruption.