Commentary

23rd August 1998

Bill Clinton: Yesterday's man

By Mervyn de Silva

"The business of America is business,'' said Calvin Coolidge, American President. He may have neglected to mention that much of American politics was also business, show business, showbiz. And that included presidential politics..... with sex and scandal, more the better as a virile, aggressive media saw it.

In his autobiography Deadline, James (Scotty) Reston (his parents were Scottish migrants) wrote: "After the nomination of President Eisenhower at the 1956 Convention my wife and I returned from San Francisco by train and sat in the dining car with a minister from the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. He was a warm supporter of Ike and thought I had written too negatively about the President. As we were leaving the dining car, he surprised me by asking if I still read my Bible. I said I did occasionally. Well, he said, when you get home look up the Nineteenth Chapter of the Book of Luke, the first to the third verses. "What's your point?" I asked him. "Never mind,'' he replied, "Just look it up''.

"So when I got home I did so and then understood his meaning, for the passage read: 'And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho, and behold there was a man named Zachaeus. And he sought to see Jesus, and could not.... because of the press'".

And thus to Monica Lewinsky. Amid a media frenzy, wrote reporter Gerard Baker from Washington, Monica Lewinsky the White House 'trainee' at the centre of allegations surrounding President Bill Clinton began delivering her long-awaited testimony.

Lewinsky is a highly privileged witness. She has been granted blanket immunity from prosecution by Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor, in return for her truthful testimony. She has told Mr. Starr's team she had ''repeated sexual encounters''. But a White House senior staff member, Harry Toiv has poured scorn on these allegations.

But this is the sort of ''news'' that James Reston called garbage awaiting next day's dirt collection trucks.

And yet, Scotty Reston's own extraordinary career as a migrant is evidence of the vitality of American society, often advertised as 'the land of opportunity'. It was a fellow journalist who said of his home...." by sundown, the Cadillacs line up''. The visitors are senators, multi-millionaires, Ambassadors, perhaps a Mafia capo occasionally. The poor boy from Scotland became the conscience of America.

"Scotty Reston has been an invaluable public conscience and witness to history for much of this century....'' observed Henry Kissinger.

Now that Monica Lewinsky has told a grand jury that she and Clinton had sex, can we conclude that the Clinton years have ended, and Bill Clinton himself, his political achievements notwithstanding, yesterday's man? If so, what would be the immediate impact on American foreign policy. And all this at a time when the other superpower the Soviet Union is no more, President Boris Yeltsin is in poor shape, and Moscow, short of cash to pay its soldiers in Siberia.

The current debate, mainly in the media, has raised many controversial issues which could have an impact on the prevailing presidential practice of appointing ''independent counsel''.

We return to Watergate, a major crisis and a convulsive public debate which attracted not only the American political elite and intelligence but the average voter, regardless of party loyalties, as well.

The bitter debate did produce, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. The Act expires next year, on the threshold almost of a new century. Once again both the New York Times (all the news that's fit to print) and the Washington Post have promoted debates on their own. A broad parallel, I guess, is the Act which allows governments to appoint independent Commissions of Inquiry. ''The former counsel were unanimous on one point. All were glad to have served. But a majority also said that as currently written, the law covered too many officials and too many potential acts of wrong-doing and left the Attorney-General too little discretion about when to invoke it.''

But how does the world, friendly, neutral or hostile, members of the United Nations, respond to the embattled, elected leader of a country often introduced as The Superpower?

Ever since the Shah of Iran, the American Shah ''as Islamic radicals called him, was forced to flee his country Iran has been firmly anti-American. So, the commentary in the leading English language newspaper, the Tehran Times may have taken President Clinton's staff by surprise, a happy surprise.

The journal is known as the spokesman of the influential Iranian clergy. The investigation in the White House, the paper claimed, was ''a melodrama written by Zionists'', meaning the orthodox Jewish activists that support the right-wing regime of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Mr. Clinton's only crime, the paper declared, ''was to put pressure on Israel's Zionists to honour Israel's commitments on peace with the Palestinians''.

Finally, the loneliness not of the long-distance runner (the title of an American novel) but the man in the White House.

"A French traveller in early nineteenth century India, when there were both British and French colonies there, shrewdly observed that a French administrator, when he was the only European among ten million of his fellow human beings, would boast he was the first among ten million; the Englishman in the same situation would lament that he was alone.

Increasingly (American) presidents, once first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of their countrymen, now find themselves simply alone,'' wrote Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist who served the Sunday Times and the London Observer in the 1970's.

"All Things To All Men" is the title he chose for a study'' on the false promise of the modern American presidency - from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

The Jungle Telegraph

Editorial/Opinion Contents