The Death of Outrage

Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals

William J. Bennett

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780684864037
• eBook ISBN: 9780684864907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Today we see little public outrage about Bill Clinton's misconduct. With enormous skill, the president and his advisors have constructed a defensive wall built of bricks left over from Watergate: diversion, half-truth, equivocation, and sophistry. It is a wall that has remained unbreached. Until now.
In The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, former cabinet secretary and bestselling author William J. Bennett dismantles the president's defenses, brick by evasive brick, and analyzes the meaning of the Clinton scandals: why they matter, what the public reaction to them means, and the social and political damage they have already inflicted on America. For, despite Bill Clinton's position in public opinion polls, the most persuasive public arguments made by the president's supporters wither under the clear light of moral reason and common sense. The Death of Outrage exposes the fallacious and demeaning logic that argues our economic well-being is the only important measure of presidential performance; torpedoes the deep but wholly unexamined respect for European sophistication about "private matters"; and explains why the president's troubles are not the result of a "vast, right-wing conspiracy, " but are the result of his own doings. The Death of Outrage shows

• How the president's actions, far from being irrelevant to the conduct of his affairs, have severely restricted his ability to govern.
• The unprecedented recklessness of the Clinton administration in everything from influence peddling to sexual misconduct to alarming tactics of intimidation.
• How the president and his defenders have exploited the natural tolerance of the American people -- and made a mockery of the rule of law.
• Why the Clinton scandals -- from the Travel Office, to Filegate, to the Rose Law Firm billing records, to the Lewinsky Affair -- are neither a creation of the tabloid press, nor independent of one another.

Bill Bennett explains why presidential character matters; why allegations of sexual misconduct need to be taken seriously; why reasoned judgment is the mark of a healthy democracy; and why the ends don't justify the means.
Explosive and hard-hitting, powerful in its logic, carefully reasoned in its conclusions, The Death of Outrage is directed at a shameful chapter of American history. It is an urgent call for American citizens to repudiate the deep corruption of Bill Clinton, and the corrupting arguments made in his defense.

Chapter 1

Sex

Defense of President Clinton: One of the most often invoked defenses of President Clinton is that this case is only about sex. In the words of CNN’s Crossfire co-host Bill Press, “With … one admission, Monica Lewinsky exposes the total absurdity of the entire Starr investigation: it’s about sex.” From there, the argument becomes: a president’s private sexual behavior is none of the people’s business.

Geraldo Rivera, host of a CNBC program, says he is “sure something probably happened” between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but even if the president has done everything he is accused of, at worst “he’s a hypocrite. So what? Get over it.” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory writes of “the simple truth that has been apparent to the man and the woman in the street from day one: reprehensible is not impeachable. American’s would prefer a monogamous husband. But … they are not going to insist on it. Monkey business in the Oval Office just doesn’t make the constitutional standard of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’” And feminist commentator Susan Estrich, the campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, asks, “Should allegedly finding comfort, release, satisfaction, peace in the arms of a beautiful twenty-one-year-old count for more than balancing the budget?”

The constant refrain is, “If the president’s wife forgives him, why shouldn’t we?” Feminist author Wendy Kaminer put it this way:“Why should we hold the president to standards of moral behavior that few of us meet consistently? … I’m not suggesting that the president’s lies and infidelities don’t matter. They must matter alot to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. But why should they matter to voters?” A Republican entrepreneur in Naperville, Illinois, told the Washington Post, “If he harassed Paula Jones, well, that would be a bad thing, but that’s for the two of them to work out. Likewise, and Hillary to work through. I don’t think any of that is among the more pressing issues of the day for the American people.”

These beliefs give rise to the conviction that because adultery is none of our business, the Starr investigation into the Lewinsky matter has been illegitimate from the get-go. The real scandal is the Starr investigation’s zealous, thinly disguised moral crusade. Former South Dakota Senator George McGovern, the Democrats’ 1972 presidential nominee, refers to Judge Starr as “prosecutor-at-large of presidential sex,” and says he has 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.”

Others argue that there are lies—and then there are LIES. In this context, there are some things—i.e., sexual matters—we should lie about. To the National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch, a thoughtful observer, “the one sort of lie that a civilized culture not only condones but depends upon [is] a consensual lie about consensual adultery…. The only way to insist that adultery is in tolerable while actually tolerating it is by hiding it in the closet.” While conceding that the president of the United States should obey the law and not cheat with interns, Rauch implores us to understand “this is the real world, not The Sound of Music.” Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, writes that “there may be a case, in the name of privacy and decorum, for the president to deny a scurrilous charge even if true, provided it has no bearing on public responsibilities.” And Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says we should distinguish between “pernicious falsehoods calculated to cover up crimes against humanity and, say, feeble fibs aimed at wiggling out of some horribly embarrassing and essentially victimless but legal piece of human stupidity.”

Clinton supporters argue that the public’s apparent indifference to the Clinton scandals, as supported by the polls, is a sign that we are becoming more tolerant and grounded—a sophisticated sensibility long ago achieved by Europeans. Actor and sometimes political adviser Warren Beatty put it this way:“Maybe America is becoming less reluctant to sweep it [sex]under the rug, more accepting of its own sexual difficulties. America is becoming more like the countries that America came from.” In other words, the ho-hum reaction to possible presidential misconduct reflects a wiser understanding of human nature and the ways of the world, a welcome liberation.

Response

The core of this argument is that independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation is merely about sex, and sexual misconduct is none of our business—even if it involves a married president and a young intern—because it is victimless and tells us nothing of relevance. If sexual sins were considered disqualifying, many good past presidents would not have served in office—and of course privacy and civilized culture demand that we lie about sex. The Starr investigation itself is nothing but an anti-sex crusade, and America should be less uptight and more sophisticated and European about sexual matters. I will respond to each of these claims.

I

The notion that President Clinton’s sexual activity is the object of the investigation by the independent counsel is false. At the heart of the Lewinsky scandal is Attorney General Reno’s finding that there exists credible evidence of criminal wrong doing by the president of the United States. The independent counsel did not decide arbitrarily to rummage around the president’s sex life and then happen to come across possible wrongdoing, as some suggest. It is not, as lawyer Gerry Spence argues, a “panty raid.” Serious allegations of perjury, obstruction of justice, and job offers for silence—not accusations of presidential philandering—were the investigation’s trip wire.

Whenever possible, however, the president’s defenders turn the focus away from criminal conspiracy and toward matters of sex. This is a dishonest, though not unintelligent, strategy. Apologists for the president are attempting to tap into a new attitude in the country toward sexual relations, one that has been deeply influenced by the sexual revolution. The manifestation of this “live-and-let-live” sentiment can be seen vividly today, when it is widely asserted that sexual relations between consenting adults—even when they involve a married president’s relationship with a young White House intern—are a personal matter that we ought not judge whatever the context. The strategy is to render this a debate about “purely private sexual behavior,” and, once that beachhead is established, to portray the president’s critics as intolerant Puritans.

Listen to the typically measured words of presidential adviser James Carville: “These people [the office of independent counsel] are obsessed with sex. This thing is totally out of control… He’s [Ken Starr] a sex-obsessed person who’s out to get the president…. He’s concerned about three things: sex, sex, and more sex. That’s all that man’s about…. It’s about sex.” And Carville mocks Judge Starr because Starr let it be known he is a Christian who sings hymns on morning walks along the Potomac River. “He plants a story, he goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing waters of the Potomac go by, and we are going to wash all the Sodomites and fornicators out of town.”

All the president’s men do this because they know this is their most fertile ground; they must attempt relentlessly to portray their opposition as bigoted and intolerant fanatics who have no respect for privacy. At the same time they offer a temptation to their supporters: the temptation to see themselves as realists, worldly-wise, sophisticated: in a word, European.

That temptation should be resisted by the rest of us. In America, morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe, and precisely this moral streak is what is best about us. It is a moral streak that has made America uncommonly generous in its dealings with foreign nations (in matters ranging from the Marshall Plan, to the sending of peacekeeping troops, to disaster relief, to much else); liberated Europe from the Nazi threat and the Iron Curtain; and prevented noxious political movements like fascism from taking root at home. Europeans may have some things to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on the matter of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe.

In this chapter I am going to take the bait offered by James Carville, and speak for those allegedly intolerant Puritans who have the effrontery to believe that a president’s sex life is, or can be, a matter of public consequence.

II

In much of modern America, there seems to be a belief that anything that involves sex is, or ought to be, forgotten; here we see a River Lethe effect permeating our culture. In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the rivers of Hades. The souls of the dead are obliged to taste its water, so that they may forget everything said and done while alive. Today, many Americans feel we should drink the water and forget. The sentiment is one should simply respond to sexual misconduct with that watchword of our time, “Whatever.” Sex becomes a No Accountability Zone. However, “what’s at stake in the Lewinsky scandal is not the right to privacy,” conservative writer David Frum has pointed out correctly, “but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it’s consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.”

But that posture does not withstand scrutiny; upon close examination, it is finally indefensible. What we need are commonsensical and principled standards in order to decide which private behaviors are subject to moral scrutiny, and which are not.

The right to be left alone about sexual matters is an admirable American sentiment. Sex is the most intimate of all human acts; it is fraught with mystery, passion, vulnerability. On this issue more than any other, we rightly insist on a large zone of privacy. Nobody wants state-sponsored voyeurism.

Throughout history, however, most societies have known that sex is a quintessentially moral activity, and they cannot therefore be completely indifferent toward it. Societies have long recognized that sex affects us at the deepest level of our being. As John Donne wrote, “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow.” And here is President Clinton’s favorite, Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass:

Sex contains all,
Bodies, Souls, meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk;
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals,
All the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,
These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

Poets and philosophers, saints and psychiatrists have known that the power and beauty of sex lie precisely in the fact that it is not just something you like to do or don’t like to do. Far from being value-neutral, sex may be the most value-laden of any human activity. It does no good to try to sanitize or deny or ignore this truth. The act of sex has complicated and profound repercussions. To deny this, to consider it to be something less special and powerful than it is, is a dodge and a lie.

Sexual indiscipline can be a threat to the stability of crucial human affairs. That is one reason why we seek to put it under ritual and marriage vow. In the military, for instance, sex between superior officers and underlings is destructive not only of order, but of the principle of merit that underlies our presumptions about why rewards and punishments are meted out. Acts of infidelity in the military or in the workplace can result in special treatment being accorded to some individuals rather than others, lead to jealousies and competitions that are disorderly, introduce irrationality into the process of decision-making, and render individuals vulnerable to blackmail or bribery. And when a sexual affair ends, passions may be present that are destructive to both parties.

Much, perhaps most, of the public commentary about President Clinton’s adulterous relationships makes them seem unimportant, trivial, of no real concern. Sex is reduced to a mere riot of the glands. Susan Estrich, for example, breezily excuses the president’s adultery (“finding comfort … in the arms of a beautiful twenty-one-year-old”) in a way that one assumes she would not excuse in her husband. Hendrik Hertzberg considers it stupid to get caught but not wrong to commit adultery, an “essentially victimless” activity. An aggrieved spouse might take exception to that characterization; even Bill Clinton admitted to—note the words carefully—“causing pain” in his marriage.

In extramarital affairs, there are victims. In marriage, one person has been entrusted with the soul of another. That power, freely given, is unlike any other human relationship; so, too, is the damage that can be done. This ought not to be made light of, shrugged off, made fun of.

It is culturally telling that the president’s adulterous relationships elicit yawns, while Linda Tripp’s secretly recorded phone conversations of Monica Lewinsky elicit rage. Geraldo Rivera urges us to “get over it” when the issue is the president’s betrayal of his wife, but because she has “decided to betray her young friend,” Linda Tripp is guilty of a “violation … of ethics, decency, and loyalty”; she is “treacherous, back-stabbing, good-for-nothing.” This despite the apparent fact that Ms. Tripp was pressured by Ms. Lewinsky to lie under oath; her truthfulness was challenged after Tripp said she saw Kathleen Willey leave the Oval Office after Ms. Willey fended off (according to Willey) unwanted sexual advances by the president; and Tripp knew this White House has made a habit of destroying the reputation of women who might implicate Mr. Clinton in wrongdoing. A fair-minded person might disavow what Linda Tripp did even while conceding that there were compelling reasons that would justify her actions. What similar justification is there for adultery?

But assume for the sake of the argument that there were no extenuating circumstances to help explain why Ms. Tripp did what she did. Assume it was the betrayal of a friend. Why all the venom directed at Ms. Tripp, and at the same time justification for the president? Why are people so quick to censure Tripp’s actions, and so willing to excuse the president’s? Why would the secret taping of a co-worker be considered magnitudes worse than the betrayal of a spouse?

It is time to acknowledge in public what we know to be true in private: adultery is a betrayal of a very high order, the betrayal of a person one has promised to honor. It often shatters fragile, immensely important social networks (made up of spouses, children, extended family, and mutual friends). It violates a solemn vow. When it is discovered, acute emotional damage almost always follows, often including the damage of divorce.

One reason society needs to uphold high public standards in this realm is because sex—when engaged in capriciously, without restraint, and against those in positions of relative weakness—can be exploitive and harmful. Civilizations understand that we need to construct social guardrails to protect the vulnerable against the rapacious. And these social guardrails are not simply the products of the law; they are built as well by moral codes. Leaders who flout moral codes weaken them.

There is a broader point to be made as well. While high standards and good conduct are reinforced by just laws, a crucial role is played by public sentiment. It is axiomatic that social mores are shaped by public approbation and disapprobation. So we should ask: are we better off with a public ethic that is indifferent toward adultery?

Some (like the writer Jonathan Rauch) are in favor of a public ethic that condemns adultery but that also permits us to lie about it. Rauch’s reasoning is that if we begin “outing” adulterers, we will no longer be able to stigmatize adultery itself because the act is just “too common.” And so, instead of changing adulterous behavior, we will end up causing people to become indifferent to it. Adultery will therefore be excused morally. Or so the argument goes.

First, an important empirical point. Adultery is not nearly so common as Mr. Rauch and many others think. The most comprehensive study of American sexual patterns comes from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. According to the NORC survey, 21 percent of men and 11 percent of women have committed adultery at some point in their married lives. Within the previous twelve months, 3.6 percent of men and only 1.3 percent of women reported an infidelity. And the data suggest that only a small percentage of those who commit adultery are serial adulterers.

Second, Rauch says we should “wink” and lie about consensual adultery and, in effect, do all we can to keep adulterous affairs quiet—for “civilized culture not only condones but depends upon” keeping such things quiet. Notice, however, that Rauch ignores the logic of his own argument. Rather than helping the president keep his “consensual lies” quiet, Rauch declares very bluntly, very openly, very publicly that “it is beginning to look approximately 99.87 percent certain that Bill Clinton has done bad things.” Why doesn’t he keep quiet about Bill Clinton’s “bad things”? In the end, Rauch asks of his readers what he cannot demand of himself: moral, civic, and legal blindness. (Leave aside the fact that, as I have already noted, this investigation is not driven by consensual lies or adultery but by questions of criminal cover-up and obstruction of justice.)

And even if it does serve a common social good to keep adultery “in the closet,” that still doesn’t provide guidance on how to deal with the situation President Clinton has presented us: namely, how to react when a sexual affair is forced in our face, on the front page, by the president’s own irresponsible, self-indulgent conduct? Once that occurs, what collectively do we have to say about it? Do we serve the cause of marital fidelity by winking at publicly known acts of a leader’s adultery? Surely not. Yet that is exactly the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Women above all will reap the consequences of this squalid national drama, one of whose ironies is the rock-solid support for President Clinton shown by the feminist movement. In the wake of Kathleen Willey’s testimony under oath that she had been groped in the White House by President Clinton, Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine and perhaps America’s most prominent feminist, took to the op-ed page of the New York Times.

According to Ms. Steinem: “The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”

Is this what the feminist movement has come to? To make the world safe for gropers and fondlers? To make socially acceptable a “no harm, no foul” rule? To give a green light to the sexual predator, so long as he stops short of rape and eventually takes no for an answer? To countenance the advances of a man in a powerful position who is ready and willing to take advantage of a woman? And to applaud Hillary Clinton, the wife of a chronically unfaithful husband, for standing by her man? These are the real-world signals being sent and, as night follows day, these are the real-world signals being received, by aggressive young men and vulnerable young women across America.

III

Many Clinton supporters contend that before we measure Bill Clinton’s score on the adultery meter, we should first consider other presidents who might be disqualified on similar grounds. Franklin Roosevelt. John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson. Warren Harding. Probably Thomas Jefferson. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower. Maybe others. Brown University Professor James Morone writes that fourteen out of forty-one presidents “set off whispers” of infidelity, and television pundit (and zeal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Sex
• Chapter 2 Character
• Chapter 3 Politics
• Chapter 4 Ken Starr
• Chapter 5 Law
• Chapter 6 Judgment
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Postscript
• Appendix