Analysis of the August 17th Apologia

Good evening. This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

David Maraniss found these opening paragraphs predictably "rich with the subtexts of Clinton's life. Every sentence was in competition with itself over its meaning, a struggle between darkness and light." (p. 32).

Maraniss' metaphor of self-competition is astute. In repeated discussions of the paragraphs over the course of a semester, an undergraduate seminar that focused almost exclusively on the August 17th speech could not disambiguate the meanings of such key terms as "truthfully," "private life" and "complete responsibility." Nor could they arrive at a consensus as to what Clinton intended by these sentences and, more importantly, how they were likely to have been understood and evaluated by his listeners. A central question for this essay is whether this ambiguity and variability of received meaning worked for or against Clinton's interests.

Said Maraniss, "The first sentence could be interpreted as an admission of humiliation. (p. 33) But he added that for Clinton, it might also have been a message of defiance, a reminder that he was President, the first twice-elected Democratic President since Roosevelt, and that just as he had faced down endless challenges in the past, he was determined to face down this one. (pp. 33-4) A student added that, by his words and look of fatigue, Clinton was appealing to his audience to "cut him some slack."

The second sentence, according to Maraniss, reflected an internal contradiction. "The sentence in his speech did not say that he answered all their questions, but it left that clear implication, especially with the closing phrase about questions that no American would want to answer. Later in the speech, Clinton acknowledged that one of the ways he misled people in the Lewinsky matter was by withholding information--precisely what we was doing again in this sentence. (p. 34)

On Maraniss' reading, the second paragraph built Clinton's explanation for giving the speech "around one of the essential words of his political career--responsibility." p. 34 It had been a signal to the great middle class of his conviction "that anyone given an opportunity by the government would be responsible for meeting certain standards." (pp 34-5)

Leaving aside his Biblical allusions to the forces of darkness and light, Maraniss probably has Clinton about right in his readings of these two paragraphs. Maraniss might have added that, in taking "complete responsibility for all my actions" without specifying what actions, if any, he was apologizing for, Clinton was again being misleading and perhaps hypocritical. As CRTNET contributor Marc Newman complained, the acceptance of responsibility without corresponding redemptive action was essentially meaningless. (Newman, Aug. 27)

So how are we to take these evidence of ambiguity, vagueness, and apparent contradiction? No doubt there were many Clinton haters who saw through the duplicities and who now hated Clinton all the more. But for the mass of Americans who were revolted by Clinton's transgressions but who approved of his job performance, the opening chords of supplication mixed with gritty determination, of paradoxically untruthful truthfulness and irresponsible responsibility, might well have been the right chords. (As to wh ether or not Clinton should have pledged redemptive action, I turn to that issue later in the analysis.)

As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible. But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence, or to take any other unlawful action. I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.

The chief criticism of the August 17th speech is that Clinton appeared--and probably was--insufficiently contrite. (9)  Clinton's insincerity, it was argued, came through in the flatness of his tone and the anger on his face, but also in his words. Why a "critical lapse" in judgment when the affair had been longstanding? Why "misled people" rather than "repeatedly lied"? W hy the passive construction: "gave a false impression"? Why not "deliberately deceived"? McGee defended the choice of words "because Presidents ought not grovel." (McGee, Aug. 27) "'It was wrong' should be as good as 'I am sorry' in the apology department, and a lot preferable in the Presidential dignity department." But Clinton could have appeared more repentant without groveling, and on subsequent occasions he expressed more remorse for his wrongdoing. (10)  If we are to account for Clinton's persistent unwillingness to acknowledge fully the dimensions and depth of his wrongdoing, we will have to examine further the dilemmas he faced.

I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, ....by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration, too.

In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings 20 years ago, dealings I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago. The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much and hurt too many innocent people.

The appearance of insufficient remorse was reinforced by Clinton's retreat to legalisms and by his continued attack on the Starr investigation. Yet Clinton's insistence (in the previous excerpt) on legal accuracy and on his innocence as regards suborning of perjury or other possible obstruction of justice is eminently understandable given the directions the independent counsel investigation had taken and the very real possibilities that charges would be brought before the House Judiciary Committee, that Clinton would then be impeached or be forced to resign, and that, at the very least, he would be rendered more vulnerable to conviction for civil and criminal offenses once he left office.

Had Clinton the luxury of dealing only with those among his hearers who were raised on Dr. Spock, a confession of addiction to sex or to risk might have been in order, complete with a tear-filled narrative about the difficulties he and his mama faced at t he hands of an abusive husband and stepfather. (11)  But, while millions of Americans seek treatment for addictions, they tend not to vote for politicians who confess to needing psychological treatment (witness the Eagleton debacle in 1972), and especially not for addictions. As Francis X. Clines put it, "F or many veterans of the political wars, the merest hint of any psychological flaw is the ultimate taboo for a candidate and especially for the man occupying the patriarchal office of the presidency." (Clines, 1998)

Were this a purely political or moral crisis, Clinton could have confessed more forthrightly to the dimensions and depth of his wrongdoing while reminding Americans by word and by deed of the good that he had done. Republicans like Orrin Hatch who were eager to get on with the nation's business (and perhaps secretly fearful that their party would eventually get tarred by the same brush that had sullied Kenneth Starr's reputation) had pleaded with the President to come clean and express complete remorse in return for some measure of forgiveness from them. (12)  But in this context (and in the subsequent impeachment inquiry in the House and trial by the Senate), the offer had something of the quality of a Batesonian doublebind. Clinton would truly be damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

Instead Clinton opted for vagueness, ambiguity, and equivocation. Days later the news media carried stories of Clinton's political advisors complaining of having been "dissed" by Clinton in the preparation of the speech and dismayed by the President's continued legal hairsplitting. Said John Luton in a CRTNET post, "Framing the entire four-minute speech with a calculated legal structure only served to insert more distance between Bill Clinton and his public. Whoever structured and/or advised such a pathetically effete rhetorical performance has, in essence, misjudged an American audience that would have listened more receptively to a more penitent discourse." (Luton, Aug. 19)

Yet the legal team's prevailing logic proved sentient: Clinton could eventually earn the forgiveness of most Americans, but the independent counsel, and the Republican-dominated House and Senate, and the courts would prove more demanding.

As for Clinton's decision to press ahead with yet another attack on Kenneth Starr, this too was criticized by Clinton's political advisors, by the media, and by several CRTNET contributors. Psychologically, if not logically, it seemed inconsistent with hi s earlier expressions of remorse.

Arguably, then, the attack on Starr with its reminder of monies wasted on five years of fruitless investigations into the Clintons' affairs, should have been omitted from the speech. Perhaps it was time to leave that job to surrogates, as has frequently been done, according to Jamieson, in attacks on rival political candidates. (Jamieson, 1992)

But another approach suggests itself, one exemplified by retired Senator Dale Bumpers' memorable oration during the Senate impeachment trial. Conceding horrible wrongdoing by Clinton, of a sort that his good friend would never be able to live down, Bumpers was able in the same speech to deplore the excesses of the independent counsel's investigation. "The President suffered a terrible moral lapse," said Bumpers. His conduct was "indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless." But the President was also a victim of a "relentless, unending investigation" that had brought financial ruin to completely innocent associates of the Clintons as well. (Bumpers, 1999) Like Bumpers, Clinton could have turned the either-or of contrition versus attack into an acceptable both-and, but to do so he needed to find words and visible expressions of remorse far more powerful than those he employed.

Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most -- my wife and our daughter -- and our God. I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. Nothing is more important to me personally.

But it is private, and I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It's nobody's business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.

Said McGee in reference to the attack on Starr, "Context is the crucial issue here. W.J. Clinton's opponents want the context to be as narrow as possible, focused just on what they may be able to prove as wrongdoing. The President wants the context to be wider, to expose the sense in which the Lewinsky Affair is but the latest route of a politicized prosecutor whose four-year mission has been to manufacture a constitutional crisis." (McGee, Aug. 19)

Yet in claiming that what he did was a private matter, of no business to anyone except his wife, their daughter, and "our God," it was Clinton who was seeking to narrow the context and his opponents who labored to broaden it. The "public-private" distinction figured prominently in the months of contentious debate preceding the August 17th speech, with little agreement as to the meanings of "public" and "private" or of the boundaries between them. Social conservatives were outraged at Clinton's adulterous relationship and perplexed as to why most Americans apparently were not. Eventually the attack on Clinton focused on allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice--testimony, perhaps, to the rhetorical power of Clinton's claims to a right of privacy.

However, in framing the issue as a strictly private matter, Clinton undermined his earlier claims to remorse over having misled the American people. For Clinton diehards the privacy argument was compelling and sufficient. For those not much interested in politics, the "strictly private" frame may likewise have been the heuristic they needed to wrap up their thinking on the matter. But Clinton would need the support of others for whom the attempted cover-up was pivotal. The rhetorical situation therefore required something more than an insistence on a right of privacy. Clinton's earlier tack--of explaining without explicitly justifying his attempts at keeping the affair hidden--was far more credible. Especially credible was his expressed desire to avoid public embarrassment over a private affair. Having offered this "first" explanation, Clinton should have followed it immediately with words to this effect: "second, because I believed--and still do--that what I had done was a private matter." Not the right of privacy but the private nature of the original transgression was the "private-public" distinction Clinton needed to have emphasized. Many if not most Americans could then have been counted upon to supply for themselves the enthymematic premise on which they had held firm in resisting calls for Clinton's resignation or impeachment. This was the distinction between lying about a private matter and lying of greater consequence to the state, from which it followed that the punishments of resignation and impeachment did not fit the crime. (Hertzberg, 1998) But, in my view, Clinton could not have himself made the case for proportionality on August 17th, for it would surely have seemed self-serving and might have placed him in further legal jeopardy.

Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time -- in fact, it is past time to move on. We have important work to do -- real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face. And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century. Thank you for watching. And good night

Consistent with my proposed "rules" for the political apologia, Clinton closes with a plea for closure and a return to the "important work" of state. There is nothing terribly remarkable about this concluding excerpt; its transcendent appeals to repair and renew, its vague reminders of problems needing attention combined with optimistic rant about future promise and opportunities were entirely predictable. How the plea for closure went down was probably a function of prior attitudes and, more immediately, of reaction to the four minutes of oratory that preceded it. Had Clinton's speech earned him the right to closure?

In retrospect we know that the roughly two-thirds of Americans who opposed a protracted investigation by the independent counsel into the President's sex life held steady in objecting to a long investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, to impeachment of Clinton by the House, and to a full-scale trial in the Senate. (Kolbert, 1999). These were probably the same Americans who would have been predisposed toward closure on August 17th, with perhaps a reprimand from the Congress as a precondition for ritual termination of the case. Numbered among them were longstanding supporters of Bill, but they probably also included Americans who'd become tired of the whole affair, others who found the sex talk embarrassing or bad for their children to hear, and still others of varying political persuasions who never believed that the affair and subsequent cover-up were the big deal that the independent counsel's office had made of it, and who saw Starr and the religious right as the greater threat to America's well being.