Scandal Without End : Lying Is All That Matters

WASHINGTON —  Controversy has erupted once again over the moral character of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. This time the accusations are more pointed and dangerous than before to the Clinton presidency. It’s not just that most of federal Washington has been crankily out of work for a month or that another gloriously vituperative presidential campaign has begun. Instead, the stubborn and escalating Hillary scandals tell us two other things: First, to judge by what envelops political figures in scandal today, the primary sin in politics, worse than ordinary old things like thievery and adultery, is failure to tell the truth about said offenses to reporters and other investigators. And second, there is a particular type of personality that is most likely to get into trouble under this rule--and Hillary Clinton has it.

The scandal trigger this time around was a memo by one White House staffer during Travelgate. You remember: The administration not only tried to replace long-time Travel Office employees with Clinton friends but sought to make it look as if the reason was incompetence and criminality by the Travel Office veterans.

Hillary Clinton has portrayed herself as being only tangentially involved, but the memo says she was central to the effort. The White House says the memo-writer had an ax to grind. No one is listening.

Second, those Rose Law Firm billing records turned up. Clinton’s firm represented her business partner’s bank, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, before then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s Arkansas state regulators. The first lady has said she acted only peripherally in the matter. Investigators sought Rose Law Firm time sheets on Madison as a source of evidence, but they seemed to have disappeared. Then a copy of the time sheets improbably materialized in the White House recently among some personal papers--with former White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr.’s handwriting all over them, no less.

It turns out Hillary Clinton billed Madison for 60 hours, mainly in phone calls and meetings. For some kinds of legal cases this would not be much--just as she contended. But in a regulatory matter, 60 hours of jawing by a big-name lawyer is the opposite of insignificant. If the billing was honest, her participation in the Madison matter was substantial.

Then, last week, came blow No. 3. Clinton has said she wasn’t the one who brought the Madison case to her law firm; it was an associate of hers. But this very associate has now testified before the Senate Whitewater Committee that he had little to do with landing the case.

Now, on reviewing this list, even a critic of the first lady might well ask, “So what?” If she wanted to put Clintonites in the Travel Office, she, as the president’s political advisor, had a right to. And if you expelled from public life every politician who ever got into a conflict of interest like Hillary Clinton’s alleged problem back in Arkansas a decade ago, you would decimate the national, state and local governments of the entire United States.

If these offenses are not earth-shaking, why is everyone in such determined pursuit of the first lady?

Ah, Clinton’s critics will answer, it has become much more than that. It’s not just her original deeds; it’s the cover-up afterward. Some of her lies, it is said, were told under oath--which makes them subject to criminal prosecution. And the lying gives us grounds to believe there are darker secrets lurking in the first lady’s past. After all, if there was nothing to cover up, there would be no reason to lie, right?

Maybe, maybe not. There are certainly people in recent American scandal history whose cover-ups turned out to be far more serious, legally and morally, than the original offenses they were trying to inter. But we have gotten ourselves a terrible habit: We rigidly focus our scandals on truth-telling--almost without regard to what the truth-telling is about.

During Watergate, the Nixon administration committed acts that were constitutionally problematic in the gravest sense. Yet these were not what did President Richard M. Nixon in. Instead, it was the procedural violations--such as the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the famous 18-and-a-half-minute tape erasure.

Budding political entrepreneurs everywhere took note. And ever since, most scandal debates have almost totally overlooked substantive issues to zero in on “What did the president-congressman-first lady-Cabinet secretary know and when did he/she know it?” With Clinton, the scandal machine is operating true to form.

And yet. If Clinton’s recurring scandals are about something more than her patronage practices or her Arkansas past, they also reflect more than standard scandal operating procedures. There seems a special pleasure in the twisting of the knife on this one. When columnist William Safire called the first lady a “congenital liar,” the phrase was reported everywhere--and there was silence from some quarters where there should have been protest.

There are certain kinds of public figures who seem to be just aching for that kind of finger in the eye--and Clinton let herself be one. She first appeared as the career woman, political helpmate, corporate board member and mother--without allowing that there were conflicts in these roles and their demands. In the White House, she exercised power without any seeming awareness that she had not been elected. Then she was bossy, bossy, bossy: Remember the schoolmarmish system her health-care task force proposed for the American people? Most of all, she was moralistic--excoriating people for making profits off the medical system while exploring the politics of meaning.

Worse, she can’t seem to stop doing it: Resolved to adopt a softer image, she does so by writing a book--just out--offering her wisdom on child rearing.

There are politicians who sport few moral pretensions and so are forgiven much. Take one of Clinton’s nemeses, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), chair of the Whitewater committee. Opponents have accused him of influence peddling. They’ve called him “Sen. Pothole” for what they say is his excessive interest in public works for his state. But the senator does not claim sainthood or deny he is a politician of the nitty-gritty sort; thus people tend to cut him some slack.

By contrast, if you are going to be a public person like Clinton, you to be really, really clean. You can’t be clever and sneaky, taking advantage of loopholes in reporters’ questions to evade honest answers. They will always be after you--and you will almost always get caught.

Today, when politics seems to care about nothing except what politicians knew and when they knew it, investigators have gotten too good at their art to enable anyone to escape them through superior brainpower. The pursuers will keep at it. They will not stop until they see Clinton somehow publicly humbled: Her only choice is whether to serve up the humility sooner or later.