Sex may be the one thing everybody will lie about. But the very formulation reveals its weakness as a defense of Clinton. Clinton did lie about sex, but -- unlike everybody -- he lies about other things as well. Lots of other things. To put it another way, everybody is not the same kind of liar. Long before the Lewinsky matter, a general consensus had already formed that Clinton has an unusual predilection for shading truth, even for a national political figure. He scraped through the primary process after being exposed as a man who had lied to his draft board and lied about his lie, and then who had lied about inhaling marijuana. And now, we know, but only thanks to his legal entanglements, that he lied about having sex with Gennifer Flowers too. And his entire administration has been checkered by betrayed promises to friends, both personal (Lani Guinier) and political (the gay activists who helped to elect him). No small part of the animus of Republicans against Clinton, who after all enacted much of their program, is that he has falsely claimed credit for policies (the balanced budget and welfare reform) that he had ferociously opposed, and that it took them, and their majority in Congress, 30 years to achieve. In both the book and film "Primary Colors," which was produced by Clinton enthusiasts, heartfelt lying to friends and supporters, including elaborately fabricated personal histories, is displayed as a Clinton way of political life. This is a man who can't even tell the truth about his own golf scores and who has been publicly called "an exceptionally good liar" by a senior senator from his own party -- not out of bitterness, but in awe.

Unlike people who may lie only about sex, a pathological liar is an abusive, narcissistic and ruthless individual who does not really care about the hurt he inflicts on others. The lies about Billy Dale were both gratuitous and cruel. The seven months of lies about Monica Lewinsky, to friends and foes alike, were brutal betrayals of trust, abuses of party and country alike.

When Starr launched his inquiry into the Lewinsky affair, with the approval of Clinton's own attorney general, he was beginning a line of inquiry that touched the very heart of all his investigations. He was setting out to prove, conclusively and in a way that would stand up to the strictest test, that the president was not an ordinary liar but an extraordinary one, a man who had exhibited a pattern of lying not only casually to the public at large, but systematically to the court, under solemn oath.

Presidential lying was central to each of the investigations Starr was making into the abuse of presidential power: Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate and -- waiting in the wings -- the most serious potential abuse of all: the possible selling of national policy to foreign governments in order to reelect the Clinton ticket.

For three and a half years the president, the first lady and their political attack team had stonewalled investigators, manipulated justice and conducted a take-no-prisoners campaign against prosecutors, witnesses and former associates. The strategy was brutally simple. Deny, delay and destroy enough evidence, and the political realities would take care of the rest. The public would weary of the investigation and its mounting costs. If no smoking gun appeared in the White House, no matter how many other convictions Starr secured (15 so far, including an Arkansas governor and Clinton partner), the public would eventually force Starr to cash in his chips. The strategy was cynical, obstructionist, extremely damaging to the very fabric of the democratic process, but also effective.

Until, that is, a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky surfaced in the entrails of the sexual harassment case of Paula Jones. Clinton, who alone knew how guilty he was, realized that Lewinsky could deconstruct his story and take down his defenses. It was the investigation of Lewinsky that set the war between the White House and Starr ablaze. The appearance of Lewinsky was what provoked the first lady's outrageous attack on Starr as a political enemy and member of what she termed the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" that was out to "get" her innocent husband because of his political agenda. There was no truth at all, she told the American public, in the charges that her husband had lied under oath or had sexual relations with a White House intern, just as there had been no truth in any of the other charges that the special prosecutor had pursued. $40 million of taxpayer money had been wasted on the frivolous harassment of a sitting president, who had much more important things to do. The investigation was not really about the abuses of power. It was about a vicious campaign by right-wing zealots in search of a victim. If there was indeed a crime, it was the investigations themselves, however implausible at first that might seem.

And although some of the press and the public swallowed the argument whole, it was implausible. Starr did not create the special prosecutor's office, nor did he launch the investigation into any of these matters. The president's own attorney general, Janet Reno, did. By all accounts, until the White House started its savage personal attacks, Starr had been universally viewed as moderate and fair-minded and -- that rarest of breeds -- a Washington lawyer above reproach. As solicitor general under George Bush, he had even sacrificed a lifetime ambition to be appointed to the Supreme Court by defying his president and coming down on what was perceived as the liberal side of a legal matter. Starr was a prosecutor so above the political fray that Clinton's own presidential counsel, the very liberal Abner Mikva, assured the president (in the words of a New York Times reporter) that Starr was "a fine selection."

During the investigation into the Clinton White House, Starr was even to prove his professional detachment from its political outcome. In the middle of the case, before Lewinsky had surfaced, he announced he was leaving the case to take a job at Pepperdine University. He abandoned this plan only after a barrage of public criticism for being derelict in his duty. If Starr had any anti-Clinton agenda, this episode would be inexplicable.

For two and a half years on the case, Starr remained the moderate man of judicious temperament that his friends and associates had known for decades. Of course there were prosecutorial acts that his critics didn't like. What prosecutor is free from such criticism? Lawrence Walsh is a despised figure in conservative quarters because of his alleged prosecutorial abuses, reflected in the large number of cases that were thrown out of court after his targets' reputations were damaged and their pockets emptied. By contrast, Starr has 15 convictions and no reversals. But that was before the war, before the Clintons decided to make Starr the target of their scorched-earth strategies and personal attacks. Joe Klein, one of the most astute and best-informed observers of the presidential character, both in its prodigious talents and its grievous defects, reported in a recent New Yorker article on Clinton's "seething anger" over the continuing investigation: "Visitors to the White House say that when the subject turned to Starr the president couldn't stop talking. 'That man is evil,' he would tell friends. 'When this thing is over, there's going to be only one of us left standing. And it's going to be me.'"

As the Carvilles, Blumenthals, Begalas and Davises mounted their attack on Starr -- an absolutely unprecedented White House war on an ongoing judicial investigation -- the message was received. Suddenly, Starr and his prosecutors understood that they were in the fight of their public lives: Either the president would be shown to be a monumental liar and abuser or they would be professionally destroyed. If Starr today appears as a monster to Clinton, he is a monster the Clintons created. Asked by Times reporter Michael Winerip if Starr had changed in the course of the investigation, associates and observers like Mikva said that yes, he had. Asked by Winerip whether Starr had come to hate the president, former deputy independent counsel John Bates reluctantly volunteered: "I think Ken is very upset at how personal and political the attacks on him, the office and others in the office have become."

But hatred is not the appropriate description for what was going on inside a man as unemotional as Starr. It was more like the reflex of an instinct for survival. The most outrageous excess that Starr, as a prosecutor, is accused of committing was his subpoena of Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis. But if Lewis had not been subpoenaed, the stained dress would not have been obtained. And it was the stained dress that finally proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the president was a liar.

It took Starr seven months to nail down this crucial detail not because it represented only a "lapse in judgment" by Clinton, as the president has evasively claimed. It took so long to establish this truth because of a balls-to-the wall effort to stonewall prosecutors and the public to the end -- to deny the truth that would vindicate Starr, while at the same time attempting to crush him under a barrage of slander that the lie made possible. It was a campaign to snooker the nation with the message that Starr was conducting a political vendetta -- damaging the president at taxpayers' expense. It was the final, desperate Clinton effort to destroy Starr once and for all and to bury his case.

But the gambit failed, and the dress became the DNA of the Clinton apocalypse. It is Clinton who is the liar and Starr who now stands vindicated.

It is both Clintons -- husband and wife -- who are responsible for this crisis. In the latter days of the presidential crisis, the nation has lapsed into a kind of nostalgic sexism. As usual the White House masters are in control of the spin: Hillary didn't know; Hillary is a victim. Well, Hillary is no victim, and it is demeaning to the first lady, and everything we know about her, to consider her one. Maybe it is true that no one understands another person's marriage, as Hillary suggested. But one thing we can be pretty sure of is that Hillary knew in January her husband was cheating and that he was lying about it to the American people. Hillary is, in every way, President Clinton's collaborator and co-conspirator. Beginning with Whitewater, she has been the co-author of the schemes that led to the investigations, and the co-architect of the war against them. This imbroglio is not just about President Clinton's women. If it were, it would be over already. But it is far more serious than that.

What the crisis has come down to really is the narcissistic passions of two people who are apparently willing to take down everything -- from the judicial process to the office of the president -- and everyone -- from their political enemies, like Starr, to their most loyal supporters and pathetic instruments, like Betty Currie and Monica Lewinsky -- in order to feed their personal desires and to protect their political power. This is why they will not go until they are made to go, and why it is important for our nation's leaders, regardless of party, and the American people, regardless of politics, to see that they do.
SALON | Sept. 11, 1997