T H E
C L I N T O N
C R I S I S

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BY ANDREW ROSS

Dear Mr. President:

This morning you told the American people to listen to you closely, and then you said: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never."

If any part of that statement is a lie, then it's time for you to go, and go quickly.

There will be no way out of this one, sir; no comeback this time for the comeback kid. Your senior advisors know it; people who have worked closely and devotedly with you -- people like Leon Panetta, your former chief of staff, and George Stephanopoulos, your most trusted strategist -- have said it. Maybe your wife will tell you to fight on, but it would be bad advice -- for her, for you, for your party and for your country.

It is true that the knives presently flashing are those of your sworn enemies, people of doubtful character who, if this will give you any consolation, will not emerge from this affair particularly well. But if any of this morning's statement is what used to be called "inoperative," then it is you, sir, who handed your enemies the weapons. In fact, the fatal wound will have been inflicted by you, and you alone.

In such a serious matter, the benefit of the doubt must be maintained. We do not know all there is to know about how you comported yourself personally while holding the nation's highest office. We don't know the full details of your various alleged affairs, gropes, blow jobs. We don't know how much Monica Lewinsky embellished her experiences with you. But what we are being told -- in the tapes; in the confirmed stories that your Mr. Fixer, Vernon Jordan, took her to a lawyer and also found her a job; in the reports that you admitted that you did have an affair with Gennifer Flowers after telling the nation that you did not; and in the reports that Kathleen Willey has not denied that you made unwanted advances on her in the White House -- are all deeply, deeply disturbing.

And whether or not you actually suborned perjury and obstructed justice is beside the point. If the allegations of your activities with Lewinsky are true, then this is what you have done: You have committed grave moral offenses, and you have lied about them -- to the press, to the public, to your cabinet. You have had people, like the American secretary of state, go before the cameras and swear their belief in you. Those acts and those lies -- if they are such -- make your continued position as head of state untenable.

And you should go quickly. You should go while there remains a reservoir of affection and respect for you and for what you have achieved as president in the last five years. The longer you hold on, lying, dissembling, with more revelations pouring sickeningly forth, that good will quickly evaporate. Eventually you will be forced to leave and your disgrace will be absolute.

No matter what you think, or what your wife tells you, this is not just about you. It is about the nation's ability to conduct its business, and it cannot do so as long as you are there, paralyzed by scandal. You will probably be able to get away with bombing Iraq; but anything more complicated, like trade talks or the Middle East peace process, will not be served by your continued presence in office. Already a leading member of Israel's ruling party has sneered that it is unnecessary to listen to an American president "up to his neck in scandal."

If you feel any obligation to your party, and to the political ideas that you hold to, then again, you must resign quickly. There is much to debate about your record as president, but one thing is for sure: Your election victories prevented the frightening forces of the extreme right from scaling the ramparts and waging religious and cultural war on the rest of us. If now it is shown that you have personally trampled on the issues you ran on -- "responsibility" and "family values" -- and you do not leave, then those forces will return with a vengeance, first in the midterm elections and again in 2000. Your party will be swamped, as the Republicans were by the "class of Watergate," and your chosen successor, Al Gore, will be drowned in the tide. That is why you have got to go quickly, in order to give the people who have supported you time to recover and put some distance between themselves and this horrendous business.

There are those who draw a distinction between the alleged sex, presumably consensual, and the coverup, which is likely criminal. I do not. I find your behavior, if the accusations are true, to be wholly repulsive. Had it been an affair with a woman closer to your own age, away from the White House, I might feel differently. Sure, it's an arbitrary line, but this is how I draw it: I do not want my tax dollars going to a president who gets blow jobs from one of his 21-year-old employees on the grounds of a public institution that I help pay for. I also ask myself, if that 21-year-old were my daughter, how would I feel? If it were your daughter, Chelsea, going down on a man more than twice her age in the Oval Office, how would you feel?

If you're lying, perhaps you justify it by believing you're doing God's work in the White House, that rules that apply to others don't apply to you, that talk of responsibility and family is just for chumps, that really and truly the most important thing to figure out is how to get a good blow job in a White House limousine. Frankly, I don't know what to make of you. How, if you did what you've been accused of, can you face yourself, your wife and particularly your daughter?

In the end, I don't care. If you did those things, I don't want you to be my president anymore.
SALON | Jan. 27, 1998

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ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL