Remember How the Salem Witchcraft Story Ended

Three centuries ago, a cluster of overly imaginative girls created the Salem witchcraft epidemic when they publicly swore that they were being harassed by bewitched neighbors. After executing a number of prominent citizens so accused, the authorities belatedly decided that the youthful accusers, not the accused, were the problem.

It has always seemed strange to me that this outbreak of witchcraft hysteria took place in Massachusetts, the cradle of American independence and freedom--even of Harvard--to say nothing of its singularly rational voting judgment in the 1972 presidential election. And now the only other voting entity to support the losing presidential nominee of 1972, the District of Columbia, seems to have fallen to the affliction that seized colonial Massachusetts.

Perhaps more than other parts of the country, the national capital has been caught up in the epidemic of charges, countercharges, media frenzy and round-the-clock gossip all focused on the sex life of the president. The speculation about sex in the White House didn’t slow even as the president hosted the leader of Britain, our most treasured ally, while grappling with Saddam Hussein, our most troublesome enemy. Claiming we don’t care about the president’s sex life, we Washington residents then proceed to exchange the latest rumors about it.

A short time ago none of us had ever heard of the key players who set off this sexual frenzy. We knew nothing of Paula Jones’ reputation until she set out to save it by suing the president for $2 million. Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp also are new figures on the capital stage. I confess to having at least heard of Lucianne Goldberg, who apparently thought up the idea of getting Tripp to tape her unsuspecting friend Lewinsky as the former intern described her alleged affair with the president. Goldberg was one of the Nixon spies who was assigned to the press corps accompanying me during the 1972 campaign. She was exposed by the Watergate investigation afterward, but is now back taping and plotting for yet another cause dear to her heart--and good for her pocketbook.

I’m skeptical about the motives and charges (perhaps the generous exercise of bragging rights) of these women. I’m much more concerned about the independent counsel who seems to be officially trying to bring down the president based on the sex stories of these and any other women he can draw into his net.

Having been appointed to look into the Whitewater matter, a minor real estate venture during Clinton’s Arkansas governorship, Kenneth Starr seemingly ran into a dead end despite the expenditure of millions of investigative dollars. By a process too complicated for me as a non-lawyer to comprehend, Starr now seems to have been transformed into prosecutor-at-large of presidential sex.

I wonder if at some future date historians will look back on the Washington of the late 1990s and see a throwback to the Salem witchcraft frenzy of earlier times. Much of the rest of the world reportedly believes we have taken leave of our senses.

As a longtime Methodist, I am not permitted to countenance illicit sex, no matter how much the wicked Europeans try to minimize it. But we Christian communicants are at least warned: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

We also are told not to lie, and certainly not to perjure, which is one reason the great King David was forgiven only after he publicly confessed to sending one of his captains into battle to get him killed so that he, the king, could continue his affair with the ill-fated captain’s wife. No one has yet thought of leveling this charge against Bill Clinton.

We do not know how much forbidden sex, if any, is involved here. Nor do we know who, if anyone, is lying. But if the president has been intimately involved with any of the women now after his scalp, it is not too difficult to understand any reluctance he might have to admitting it. After all, such an admission would cloud not only his word but his taste in special companions.

In all this speculation and uncertainty over the president’s sex life, I have come to one conclusion: Even if Bill Clinton has yielded to an occasional attack of lust and is too embarrassed to tell us all about it, those sins have done far less damage to the American public and our democracy than is being done by a federal prosecutor rampaging across the land year after year like some Javert in search of Valjean.

We can tolerate a night of witching at Halloween time, but with the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington as well as St. Valentine’s Day passing under this spell, and now with St. Patrick’s Day approaching, how about a little more compassion and a little less persecution. Perhaps the American people with their currently reported high approval rating of the president have a better sense of the human condition that do some of the investigators and commentators.

If it turns out that we will all have to face our Maker at some future day of judgment, I suspect each of us will be a little nervous about the verdict. This prospect used to scare the daylights--if not the devil--out of me as a child. But if such a day comes, I had rather be standing in the shoes of Bill and Hillary Clinton with their record of hope and disappointments, success and failure, than to be in the shoes of some of their loudest and most exalted detractors.