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Clinton's Sorry Ending

Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2001, at 4:54 PM ET

Is there any hope left for the Clinton presidency? At the end of the impeachment saga, I held the unorthodox view that the former president's personal failings would eventually be viewed as footnotes to his significant accomplishments, rather than the other way around. In fact, this turnabout happened much more rapidly than I anticipated. Most of the assessment pieces written at the end of the Clinton presidency cast the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a sorry episode in a masterful politician's largely successful presidency.

This time, however, I don't know that a comeback is even possible. The Marc Rich pardon and several of the other ghastly pardons have, it seems to me, come perilously close to ruining the Clinton presidency once and for all. There's not much point in speculating about what historians will think decades hence. They may conclude that Chester Arthur was our greatest national leader. But for the foreseeable future, Clinton has nearly blotted out any hope of widespread public respect or of having a productive ex-presidency. He could have been Carter. Instead, he looks to become Nixon.

The pardons are less easily written off than the Monica scandal for a couple of reasons. The first is that they can't be excused as personal peccadilloes. Flytrap could be forgiven as the private squalor of an incontinent man who was also a remarkable public servant. The Pardoner's Tale, on other hand, has no "personal" dimension--or at least I hope it doesn't. It's purely about the abuse of public office. Even Clinton's Stalinists aren't saying we shouldn't care about this one. Secondly, Clinton is at this point a recidivist. Through his tenacity and implicit promises of good behavior, he secured a kind of parole after impeachment. Then he betrayed all the people who gave him a second chance. Under those circumstances, I don't think Clinton gets a third.

If Clinton does have a prayer of regaining our respect, it's to grovel. He might be able to win back a measure of public esteem by apologizing for his mistake. But for such an apology to be effective, Clinton would have to mean it sincerely, or at least sound like he meant it sincerely. Clinton needs to convince the country that he now understands that pardoning Marc Rich was the wrong thing to do. He ought to say it was wrong mainly because it harmed public confidence in our legal system. Pardoning Rich sent the message that you can't get justice from our courts, but that if you're wealthy enough, you can always buy your way out of trouble later. Even at this late stage, it would be useful for Clinton to disavow that message. "If I could undo the decision, I would," Clinton might say. "Unfortunately, I can't. So I must try to make amends in other ways."

That's the easy part of the apology. The hard part is explaining what he did without sounding like he's making excuses. Moreover, Clinton has to explain his mistake convincingly enough that people who don't want to buy into Rep. Dan Burton's more fevered imaginings about explicit corruption will have a persuasive, alternative explanation. What we have right now is a bunch of theories that don't solve the mystery.

Some of the reasons Clinton might give for the mistaken pardons are straightforward and relatively benign. He wasn't sleeping much in his final weeks, so he was exhausted and rushed. He let people he shouldn't have trusted, namely Jack Quinn, take advantage of him. Unusually, he didn't do the basic homework of getting both sides of the story. To some extent, he was responding to appeals from Israeli politicians and Jewish leaders. As Leon Wieseltier argues in this week's New Republic, these people were themselves doing something improper in lobbying Clinton on Rich's behalf. But Clinton didn't think that through, and the calls and letters from people he respected had some effect on him.

But then Clinton needs to explain what's even more difficult to admit: how he became so embittered at federal prosecutors and the Justice Department that he took satisfaction in doing something behind their backs and against their wishes. Of course prosecutors do sometimes abuse their power and might conceivably have done so in the Rich case. But the proper remedy for the abuse of prosecutorial power is the institution of the fair trial, not the avoidance of one. And to make his story credible, Clinton also needs to acknowledge that money did play a role in his decision, as it almost always does in Washington. There was surely no quid pro quo. But people with resources are able to buy access. And access in the end equals influence. The system in Washington corrupts us all, Clinton might say, taking a cue from John McCain.

Such an apology and explanation could have a cathartic effect. By taking blame, Clinton would permit the people who are so angry with him now to forgive him. By explaining why he did what he did, he would satisfy those fascinated by the mystery. Assuming that those reasons really do explain Clinton's bad pardons--as I think they most likely do--such a mea culpa would probably cause the current scandal to wind down. Deprived of shocking new revelations, Dan Burton would marginalize himself once again. The press could turn its attention to the remainder of George W. Bush's first term.

But will Clinton say he's sorry? History suggests that he is capable of recognizing the political value of apologizing. Clinton went on television in Arkansas in 1982, after losing a re-election campaign for governor, to say he'd erred in raising a car license tax. That statement, engineered by Dick Morris, is credited with making possible his return to the governor's mansion. During the Gennifer Flowers scandal in 1992, Clinton went on 60 Minutes to accept blame for causing pain in his marriage. In August 1998, after he testified by video camera to Ken Starr's grand jury, Clinton went on national television to acknowledge that he misled people about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He copped to a "critical lapse in judgment" and "a personal failure on my part."

But Clinton's apologies also tend to be grudging and defensive, sometimes so much so that they backfire on him. In 1998, Clinton turned what was supposed to be an abject apology for lying to the American people into a diatribe against Starr's office. "It's time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life," he said. Portraying himself as victim provoked his enemies further and fueled the drive for impeachment.

Clinton's op-ed piece in the New York Times on Feb. 18 sounded this bitter, counterproductive note. He took "full responsibility" for his decision to pardon Marc Rich but sounded no note of remorse. His article was mainly concerned with offering legalistic defenses for his decision and putting the onus for it on others, such as Republicans who'd been attorneys for Rich in the past and the Israelis. As Christopher Caldwell writes in this week's Weekly Standard, Clinton's argument amounted to the lame excuse that "the Jews made me do it." The self-righteous nonapology bought Clinton no leeway.

Will Clinton offer a more convincing sort of mea culpa in the weeks ahead? Sources tell me that some of his advisers have been recommending he do just that. They also say that Clinton is in no mood to say he's sorry for anything. I would predict that ex-POTUS will end up making some kind of statement of contrition for his pardons, mainly because there's nothing else he can do to try to turn the story around. But his words won't go far enough and may even make matters worse. The problem is not that Clinton doesn't recognize the political need for a compelling apology. It's that he's psychologically incapable of making one.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.

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Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: All the posts below provoked interesting discussions. And a good (and star-studded) thread with the clear title "Pardons/Constitution/Interest Groups" starts here.]

Jacob Weisberg writes of Marc Rich's pardon that "money did play a role in his decision, as it almost always does in Washington. There was surely no quid pro quo. But people with resources are able to buy access. And access in the end equals influence."

Well, how do we know that there was no quid pro quo? How, exactly, does money transmogrify into access, then access into influence, then influence into action, in today's Washington? Did those steps all take place in this instance? And if so, how (if at all) can or should this sequence be distinguished from outright bribery? It's not enough to write, as Weisberg does, that "the system in Washington corrupts us all"; if we're not simply to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to rampant graft (pending his cherished sweeping campaign finance reforms), then these crucial distinctions need to be made.

The recent epidemic of solemn, disappointed headshaking over the Clinton pardon-fest among Weisberg's colleagues in the Washington press corps is merely the sentimental flip side of its reflexive, fawning protectiveness of the man during the last six years of his presidency. All this breathless psychologizing about politicians-cum-soap-opera-stars hardly serves the public interest. What the public needs (and what Weisberg once provided--but apparently no longer) is a dry-eyed accounting of the complicated lines that are drawn and crossed in government's back rooms, so that the voting public can then enforce those lines (or others of its choosing) through the discipline of the ballot box. Such enforcement, after all, offers the only hope of reining in the less creditable tendencies of brilliant and skillful but dissolute and irresponsible politicians--of whom the most recent former president is surely not the last.

--Dan Simon

(To reply, click here.)

The presidential pardon power is an absolute power. If the congress and the media are not willing to accept that, then change the Constitution. Otherwise, move on. I for one am tired of hearing republicans saying that Clinton pardons drug dealers and all these felons as if Bush the elder and Reagan only pardon choir boys. Prisons are where you find mostly felons and presidents do pardon criminals, unless it is to keep themselves from becoming a criminal, and many of those pardons go to drug dealers because its a "non violent crime". I have not found people in my office huddled around the water cooler talking about the shame of Clinton's pardon of Rich. Rather I am hearing people say enough! Clinton has left office, let's get on with our lives.

Please do not insult my intelligence by implying that justice is equal for the rich and poor. It did not take a Clinton pardon to point out that it is not. Also, do not claim that every accused person gets a fair trial. I see nothing unreasonable in Mark Rich's belief that he would not receive a fair trial

--Laura Smith

(To reply, click here.)

Weisberg's estimation that Clinton "might be able to win back a measure of public esteem by apologizing for his mistake" is dead wrong.

You could equate Clinton s relationship with the American people to that of a son and his parents. Basically, the son is a mischievous one, who has broken the rules, lied about it and been caught red-handed on numerous occasions. His father (a Republican) has always been the point man in bringing to light the son's transgressions. His mother (a Democrat) has played the apologist, tempering punishments and focusing on what is good in their son.

Over time, this dynamic has served to wear down the mother, not only in feeling betrayed by the son's transgressions but also in the sense that he makes her regret all of those times she went to bat for him, defending him against the father and the draconian punishments he would have doled out if not for her efforts. The father on the other hand is energized with each new revelation, evidencing them as justification for the punishment that he would have exacted long ago, but was denied.

Now, faced with the pardon debacle, the father tears his gaze from the son and looks to the mother. The son looks to the mother also, but to the son's shocked surprise and the father's predatory delight, the mother crosses her arms, looks to the father and says, "You deal with it."

--Ender

(To reply, click here.)

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