A JUDGMENT OF QUESTIONS

All through the various trials of Bill Clinton, I could not help but think
of an old joke: One man asks another, "Why do you always answer a question
with a question?" The second man ponders a moment and then responds, "Why
not?" In the end, this saga of American history, both painful and comic,
has not been about answers. It has been about questions.

It was answers, though, that preoccupied the Republicans in the House and
the managers they sent over to the Senate to prove a case that, really,
needed no proving: The president had lied. He lied about not having had a
sexual relationship, about not being alone with Monica Lewinsky, about how
the gifts got retrieved, about what he was doing with Betty Currie that
Sunday when he pretended to refresh his memory.

Clinton lied about what Vernon Jordan was doing, and he lied to Sidney
Blumenthal about how Lewinsky had stalked him and he lied, finally, to the
American people when he looked us all in the eye and said he "did not have
sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Washington was obsessed with those lies. They were supposedly of a piece
with other Clinton lies: How he had not inhaled, how he got out of the
draft, how Gennifer Flowers's tapes of their conversations were a splice
job, and how he could not even remember meeting Paula Jones. He remembers
her now, that's for sure.

But it was not the answers to those questions that concerned the rest of
the country. It was the questions themselves. They were more alarming than
the answers. The questions were invasive, intrusive, shockingly personal --
an interrogation so personal as to make Freud blanch. In the end, we all
knew more about Bill Clinton's sex life than we know about our best friend's.

Conservative Republicans, accustomed to making no distinction between
private and public morality, pressed on with their inquisition, oblivious
to its effect on the country. They kept thinking that if only they could
elicit just one more answer, just one more fact, we would all have a eureka
moment in which we would exclaim, "I get it: The president's lying." But
that moment occurred more than a year ago when the story first broke. The
president had an affair and lied about it. Nothing much changed after that.

It has become almost a cliche to say that the impeachment of Bill Clinton
is the last battle of the cultural wars that began in the 1960s. I think
there's something to that. But cultural conservatives and others miss the
point if they think that Clinton's supporters consist of people who approve
of his behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If the '60s were about one single thing, it was personal freedom. A person
ought to be free to not fight an unjust or inane war. A person ought to be
able to buy and use contraceptives. A person ought to be able to take
college courses that made some sense. A person ought to be able to ride in
the front of the bus. A person ought to be able to have an abortion or use
innocuous drugs and not -- and here's the point -- always have to account
to some higher authority such as the government.

This supposedly radical movement was weirdly conservative, an attempt to
limit the authority of authority (the government, in particular), and this
is why it appealed to so many people. But here was the government years
later demanding that Clinton account for his sex life, his most intimate
moments -- erotic fantasies played out in the Oval Office. That voice of
the unseen questioner on Ken Starr's videotape was the in loco parentis
voice of Big Government. Clinton was being shamed. The president was being
infantilized.

The man who said the government had no right to send him to Vietnam, to
make someone sit in the back of the bus or to tell a woman she could not
have an abortion was on some inquisitor's rack, being told he had to answer
for his sex life: Did you touch her? Did she touch you?

Clinton's inquisitors respected no boundaries. The personal was public.
This also has been the creed of right-wingers, extreme feminists and
opportunistic journalists. There was always a tax dollar to justify an
invasion of privacy. The Oval Office was public. Go for it!

Most of us didn't see it that way. We knew what Clinton did, and we didn't
approve. But we approved even less of how we came to know what we now know.
In the end, Clinton was exonerated not because of the answers he provided,
but because of the questions he was asked.