Peggy Noonan

We are at the end of a great drama. It does not end entirely happily, but then some of the most important stories don’t.

Much has been said about the effect of the Clinton scandal on our children, and it is true that thanks to him fifth-graders now know that oral sex is not, as the few parents questioned on this before 1998 perhaps said, talking about sex. But the scandal has also highlighted a fact that we know and yet I think have not fully absorbed: There is really no escaping the American culture anymore, no escaping the big story, the current debate, the thing that’s happening. Once, you could live on a farm and raise your children with your own truths and information. Once not so long ago, in our lifetime, you could live in a big-city suburb and do pretty much the same. But now it’s all Phil Spector’s wall of sound.

There was no escaping Bill and Monica the past 13 months; they came at every parent and child who passed the racks at the candy store, they came from every newspaper headline and magazine cover, from every radio show in the car and TV show in the house, from every comic’s monologue and internet chat site. And from there to every school yard, and every kitchen table. Right into the heart of your family.

And so this scandal, which asked whether a president’s character has anything to do with his country, is the scandal that proved that a president’s character has everything to do with his country. Bill Clinton wanted to change America. “I am an agent of change,” he said in 1992. He was righter than he knew.

*   *   *

But life is funny, and often bad things get turned to good. A big storm comes, and after it’s over, neighbors find they’ve become friends, a young mother finds out she is brave. In this storm our children learned something. They saw that a big man did bad things, and then they saw that even though he was very powerful, a king more famous than Caesar, the laws of the common people were still applied to him. The crimes he committed were unearthed and investigated. He was impeached in the House, and his crimes were asserted and debated in the Senate, a great deliberative body. It could not find the will to convict him, but those senators who both were honest and had a heart for what had happened in the country stood up and called the big man’s actions what they were, low and cruel and wrong.

He was brought to the bar of justice, which is the way it’s supposed to be in a place where everyone is equal and nobody is better than anybody else. And even though the president kept his job, there was a thing that happened that we couldn’t see but a lot of people sensed: He was like an army officer stripped of his stripes and insignia in front of the troops. He did in some way get the slap of the glove he deserved. And our children know this, they know he was punished, they know that though he is still there, he also was brought down. This is not a bad lesson for children, especially children in an aging democracy, to learn.

*   *   *

Much has been made of the House managers’ valor, and much will be made, at least among conservatives, of the Senate’s failure to convict. Senators, by and large, did not seem to approach their work in a way that betrayed moral engagement. They simply managed a problem. “Does it matter that that is our constitutional role?” one asked me. Yes, the Founders intended members of the Senate to be men of property who would hold themselves aloof from passing passions. But modern senators are also princes of the city who love their high place; they understood the polls were not with this enterprise, did their best not to offend their base and kept walking.

A senator, an intelligent and thoughtful man, told me the great tragedy is that the American people have, through their support of the president, acquiesced in his abuse of the law. “This may well haunt us down the road,” he said.

But one might also, having witnessed much of the House and Senate debate, feel haunted by a sense that something is wrong with many of the people who are in politics in America now. You don’t get a sense with a lot of them that they actually put their country first; you don’t sense that they spend a lot of time asking themselves questions like, “Is this the right decision, or is it only the convenient one?”

It struck me as I watched these past few months that many of them seem, to some lesser degree, like the man whose actions they were discussing. They just—and this is almost too cornily cynical to be true, but it is—they just seem to want to be famous and powerful and successful and well thought of. They reminded me of what the political strategist David Garth said when I asked him if most of the politicians he knew and had known were driven by belief. “They start with a little philosophy and end with a little philosophy,” he said. “All the rest is hunger.” I am sure that in some ways it was ever thus, and yet I’m also sure that we can’t afford this modern political personality anymore.

*   *   *

Once a few years ago I talked to a man who was going to run for president. I asked, knowing that he had been facing some difficult questions on big issues, how he was doing. “Great,” he said, “we raised $250,000 last week.” True story. Some time back I traveled to talk to another person with national ambitions. He told me he was about to make an important statement about his thinking on a specific issue. I asked him what he was going to say, and he turned to his pollster and shrugged. The shrug said: What am I going to say? And the pollster told him.

A few months ago I watched the big ticker-tape parade that was held for the New York Yankees after they won the World Series. I was surprised to see New York’s then-lieutenant governor in the cavalcade, waving at the crowds from the back of an open car. The next day the papers had a story: She had arrived at the staging site, commandeered a car and told an aide to drive. “I am the second-highest elected official in the state,” she explained as they hit the gas.

More and more, politicians seem like weak egomaniacs, people so weak they let polls push them around and so egomaniacal they have to jump into the parade.

*   *   *

Last Thursday I went to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Presidents are always invited, and presidents always show, and I was curious about what Mr. Clinton would say to 4,000 Evangelicals, as the Senate at that moment considered the charges against him.

He looked gallant and attractive as he entered with Mrs. Clinton. He looks like a good man with that big open face and the small mouth and the big jaw, an imperfect and unclever face, in the sense that the elegant and refined features of a George Sands or a Ralph Fiennes are clever looking. He listened to the speakers with a flamboyant attentiveness, as if he’s sure he’s in every reaction shot. He nodded a lot of encouragement and threw back his head in laughter.

I was struck again that he has none of the diffidence of his hero John F. Kennedy, none of the occasional ironic shyness. Kennedy showed a detached amusement when he saw the nuns jump up and down as the motorcade went by. Mr. Clinton would think they had good taste.

When he rose to speak, it was with his usual confidence and casual intimacy. He said he had worked to “deepen the peace in Bosnia” and “guarantee religious freedom for those who disagree with us.” He told stories of peacekeeping in the Mideast and Northern Ireland. The text was peace but the subtext, revealed in anecdotes in which he played the part of the person who got the warring parties together, was: I am the indispensable man.

Other presidents have asked for prayers at this breakfast, and others have taken part in them, but Mr. Clinton decided to lead them. “I ask you to pray,” he said, nine times, to the Evangelicals. Then things got interesting as he asked them to pray “for yourselves,” that we all be “purged of the temptation to pretend that our willfulness is somehow equal to God’s will.” He told them to listen well to all that had been said this day.

I thought: He’s talking to us as if he is a moral leader and we are the nice people being led. He’s providing moral instruction to a room full of ministers.

Then I thought: And he’s Bill Clinton!

People say he’s shameless, and maybe he is. Certainly he fascinated the crowd, which stood for his words at the end but, after mild applause, silently. But lately when I see him—and lately when I watched the House and Senate debates—I found myself thinking of JFK’s words after he watched Richard Nixon’s sweaty self regard during the famous last press conference in 1962. “No class,” said Kennedy. “No class.”

In politics you show your class by not indulging yourself, by not being an egomaniac, by putting good philosophy and good people first. We will of course survive Bill Clinton and his many dramas, but one wonders if we will easily survive, in the coming decade, all the little Clintons who these days are drawn to politics, who are like him but less so, and some of whom, in the U.S. Senate, now decide his fate.

In the fiery years of Watergate, Jimmy Breslin wrote a book called “How the Good Guys Finally Won.” It was a spirited recounting of how people better than Richard Nixon brought him down. It would strike some of us as odd to remember those days as happy, but that’s how Mr. Breslin saw it, and for a lot of people they were. I know a couple who courted throughout the scandal, who fell in love as they shared inside dope about what Chuck Colson did today and what Martha Mitchell told her hairdresser.

Part of what they felt was the joy of the hunt, the excitement of being a little person able to stand on principle and overpower your big, powerful enemy. This no doubt is what Ben Bradlee was referring to when, during Iran-contra, he was quoted as saying, “I haven’t had as much fun since Watergate!”

There was no such joy in Mudville when Mighty Clinton struck out. There were the tears of Tom DeLay, and the sadness of Chris Shays, and, for those watching at home, this: the picture of the murmuring, milling floor of the House as the first article of impeachment got 218 votes and passed. You couldn’t tell anything had happened from what you saw; no one seemed to notice. I cleared my throat and said to my son, “They impeached the president,” and that was the only sound.

*   *   *

Now it’s Monday morning, we’ve all had time to digest and absorb the astounding Allan Drury novel that unfolded this weekend, and one should say it: The good guys finally won.

And it was moving, because they did it against the odds, and they stood on principle, and they didn’t let the polls rule them, and they acted in a way that may have put them in both short-term and long-term political jeopardy. But they did what they thought was right. And down the road Republicans may see these nerve-jangling days as the time when their party, long buffeted by doubt and confusion, began to find its soul again.

It was Henry Hyde, stupendous and tremendous Henry Hyde, who explained better than anyone, I thought, what was at issue. “The question before this House,” he said, “is quite simple. It is not a question of sex. Sexual misconduct and adultery are private acts and none of Congress’s business. It is not a question of lying about sex. The matter before the House is a question of lying under oath. This is a public act. This is called perjury. The matter before the House is a question of the willful, premeditated, deliberate, shameless corruption of the nation’s system of justice. Perjury and obstruction of justice cannot be reconciled with the office of the president of the United States. That, and nothing other than that, is the issue before us.”

He was followed by a series of Republicans who spoke soberly, factually. The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial.

It was strange and Druryesque that the most electric moment of the Clinton impeachment was the resignation of Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston, when he said of the president, “You, sir, may resign your post,” and the Democrats hissed, “You resign!” and he held up his hand, and looked at them, and told them he would. That breathtaking moment, the hooting and the hand and the announcement, seemed to me revealing of different styles, of almost characterological differences between Democrats and Republicans these days. The Democrats in Congress now are like the young Chuck Colson, partisan, ruthless and tough. The Republicans seemed like the young William Cohen, thoughtful and stricken.

*   *   *

Sunday morning, James Carville went on “Meet the Press” and did what his wife calls his nuclear winter routine, threatening the president’s foes and promising to punish them. You’d expect the president’s friends to be thinking, pondering, ratcheting down the rhetoric. Their man just became the first elected American president to be impeached. It ought to concentrate the mind. It would be more understandable if they were thinking, “If only . . . if only he had reacted differently.”

Their friend was the defendant in a sexual-harassment case. He got blindsided by an embarrassing question while under oath. He did a wrong but human thing, he panicked and lied. Then he went home. He had time to think. If only that day—or one day in the months afterward—he had said, “I was asked under oath if I’d done something wrong. I was surprised and ashamed and I lied. But I want you to know it is true, I had a relationship for two years that was wrong, I ended it, I was and am ashamed of it, and now you have this information and must do with it what you will. I’ll pay whatever fine and face whatever censure. But I can’t drag America through the mud any more over this.”

What would have happened if Mr. Clinton had done this? It would have been a five-day story, with jokes from Jay Leno and a busy buzz in the media and new attacks on his character from his opponents. And then: nothing. It all would have gone away. We could have gotten it behind us. And he would be a successful president today, the luckiest two-termer in all U.S. history, a victor shining in the lights.

Instead Mr. Clinton turned a private transgression into a public trauma. He burrowed in and continued to lie, with fervor and shamelessness, sometimes under oath and sometimes to the country.

That is why he was impeached on Saturday, because he didn’t put his country first, which still comes as a shock because it is the job of the president to put the country first; that’s what he was hired to do. It is strange that his people don’t seem to learn, that they still respond with threats and ugliness, that instead of hanging their heads they hold pep rallies at the White House, as if celebrating another jolly triumph.

It is hard to feel the full human sympathy for Mr. Clinton that one would normally feel for one who has paid a high price for his actions. Throughout the yearlong trauma he forced the country through, he smirked and maneuvered and muscled people. He acted as if he were still in Little Rock, still up against legislators in plaid suits who own the Chevy dealership. When Bill Clinton was governor and it was the Yalie vs. the yokels, the yokels folded when you leaned on them. But Washington is not Little Rock. This is why David Broder told Sally Quinn, “He trashed the place, and it wasn’t his place to trash.” And Lindsey Graham and Chris Cox and Bill McCollum are not yokels.

*   *   *

Richard Nixon was a strange man, gifted and dogged, self-pitying and morose, but even he at the end aroused sadness and sympathy. You could see that he was, as one of his close friends told me, “phony tough.” He wasn’t really a hard man, it just made him feel better to talk like he was. But Bill Clinton really is hard. That’s why it’s so difficult to feel sympathy for him, because when you look at him you see not the tears inside but the coldness.

Nixon’s people got their hearts broken by history. Pat Buchanan once told me they were close in that White House because they felt so under siege. Mr. Clinton’s people have never seemed under siege. They are attackers, aggressors. For a solid year they’ve been all over the tube, every day, 24-7, and they reflected the style of their boss: finger pointing, accusing.

I don’t recall anyone who works for him ever granting any decency or right spirit to the other side. I can’t recall one of them saying, “I understand the serious issues involved, I understand there are decent people on the other side who feel that important principles must be upheld here, I respect their views, but mine are different.” Instead it was all the smirking snarl, the snarling smirk, all “You’re partisan!,” “You’re far-right haters” leading a “right-wing putsch.”

Nixon’s people were phony tough, like him, and had hearts that could be broken. But Mr. Clinton’s people really are hard, and are proud of it. That’s why they called it the War Room.

But they hurt him with their toughness. They couldn’t help him speak to the country like a fully formed man with a fully formed heart, because Mr. Clinton surrounded himself with men like himself. They couldn’t give him what he needed, because they didn’t have it either. And that too is one of the reasons he was impeached.

But the final reason comes from Sam Ervin, the great old senator of Watergate fame. “God is not mocked,” he said. Mr. Clinton lied under oath after promising to tell the truth, so help him God. And God is not mocked.

*   *   *

A final image, one that I suspect will stay with me when I think of these days. One of the networks kept showing serial views of the White House as the debate proceeded, and you could see the Washington Monument in the background, that tall, dull monument that yet seems to mean something to people, to say something to them about the permanence and inviolability of our democracy. It’s still covered with girding top to bottom, being cleaned after years of getting dirtied by pollution.

It seemed to me the perfect metaphor for what had happened in the House this weekend. They were trying to take a grand old institution and make it clean again, make it shine like new. It was the right thing to be doing. It’s how the good guys finally won.

Newt Gingrich’s singular place in politics could be seen over the weekend in this: He got hundreds of sincere tributes from people who were sincerely delighted he was leaving.

He was right to go, right to take the election’s blame on his back and bear it away. His leadership had failed, his party had lost focus, and, as happens in politics, his friends had come and gone while his enemies had accumulated. His revolution had faltered, and by own standards. In 1995, near the end of the first hundred days of the 104th Congress, I asked him at what point he would know if this was an interesting moment in history, or the true beginning of something. “I’ll know two years, four years, six years from now,” he said. Meaning: when the Republican majority in the House and Senate either grows and settles in or doesn’t and dwindles.

But before he goes we should give him his due, and not only because he deserves it. In giving it we can see how far Republicans have come the past 20 years. We can probably see some lessons for the future too.

[Header] ‘Frisky Puppy’

Mr. Gingrich moved history. He both was shaped by his times and shaped them, and with genuine vision. “He knows where he wants to go,” Margaret Thatcher said of him in the summer of 1995. “And he has tons of guts.” Then she paused. “Bit of a frisky puppy, though.”

To say the least. Tons of guts is part of what got him to the speakership, along with an almost deranged optimism and imagination.

Maybe the last he needed most. Mr. Gingrich walked into Congress for the first time in 1978, in almost the exact middle of the 40-year reign of the Democratic majority. He looked around, saw their complete domination of the agenda, their complete control of the committees, their refusal to let minority views on taxes and spending and foreign affairs be debated or even heard. He saw their wild frustration of the Republicans, saw their leaders’ attempts to be players by “living with reality” and “accepting the hand you’re dealt,” saw that they had become low-budget liberals who’d grown comfortable with the status quo. He watched the only poll that matters in Congress, the one that comes every two years when the voters vote, and saw that even though they always told exit pollsters they didn’t like or respect Congress, 90% of the time they re-elected their own congressmen.

He saw the disrespect he got in the press when his ideas got any attention at all, saw the unreturned phone calls pile up, saw it all and said with the sunny optimism of the idiot or the visionary: We can change this.

We can change it. For 16 years that was his chant. I first him heard say it in 1984, when he dropped by to visit some of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters. We were known as optimists and we were on his side, but I didn’t think he could do it. I told him that in 1995, and he was surprised. He said, “Ten years ago I assumed I’d be here. I assumed I’d be helping to reshape the country.”

Why? I asked.

“Robert the Bruce. Robert the Bruce and the spider.” In the old story the great Scottish warrior, exhausted after a series of lost battles, sits on a rock in the forest and weeps. And he sees a little spider trying over and over to weave a strand to carry him upward. And a strand breaks and he falls and a strand breaks and he falls. And finally a strand holds, and he climbs, and builds.

“If you think about the spider, why wouldn’t you assume I’d eventually make it?”

This makes him sound charming. Would that he had been.

At the beginning of the hundred days I saw—anyone could see—what his problem with the public might become. He was speaking to members of the Republican National Committee in a Washington hotel. His famous book deal had just become public and he was under heavy criticism. He was furious at the attacks. Haley Barbour, then the Republican national chairman, spoke to him before he went on. Don’t talk about the book contract, he said; talk about the Contract With America.

Mr. Gingrich got up and quoted Mr. Barbour. Then he tore into his critics, saying their hatred of him was personal but not only personal. “I am a genuine revolutionary,” he said, “and they are genuine reactionaries.” He said they would do everything they could to stop him, but he would not be stopped.

The audience was rapt, almost frightened by the ferocity of his words and his delivery, which was one long blast of anger.

I thought at the time: It is good to see a political figure so uncontrolled by spin and its doctors, good to see one explain what he thinks is driving the political situation in which he is embroiled. But doesn’t his fury detract from the revolution? He makes the story himself, and not the merits of legislation.

His great virtue was his great vice: For 20 years he fought what seemed a losing fight with courage and aggression. Now he was where he wanted to be. And his spectacular aggression, which had lifted him up, also brought him down, and made the country turn away.

Mr. Gingrich in those days compared himself often to Eisenhower and Grant. But it was another general he put you in mind of. Patton couldn’t stop punching forward; thus was Sicily liberated. Then he slapped a soldier.

Mr. Gingrich was like Bill Clinton in that he didn’t really understand why you might not want him in your face all the time, on the tube, in the news conference, at the speech. He didn’t see why people in 1995 who’d experienced two years of Clintonmania might not see Newtomania as a relief.

He did not sense that an unshared thought can have power, that the face you have when you have an observation that you’re too circumspect to share is an interesting face, and an interesting face has a certain mystery—What’s he thinking?—and mystery has certain power.

His friends said it wasn’t Newt, it was the media. The media in Sam Rayburn’s day was Scotty Reston with a notebook. Now it’s 50 TV shows and 500 radio shows, a huge sucking maw that demands statements and sound, a thousand technicians with boom mike chasing him as if they were Ahab and he was the whale.

He should have dived deep, disappeared and now and then sent up a riveting, powerful spray. Instead he held news conferences every day, bickering with a hostile press. It was like the daily acting out of a bad marriage in which neither party likes or understands the other and both see no way out.

He rose of course not as a conciliator but as an aggressor. He wouldn’t dodge an argument, he’d start one; he wouldn’t shade a truth, he’d assert it, colorfully and memorably, often to the empty House, on C-Span. He felt he was reaching the American political class, the activists, the sophisticated couch potatoes surfing in the night.

He thought he was doing what the left said to do: Speak truth to power. And what he did in those days was part of the reason the Democrats hated him, and would hate him forever. And part of why the Republican establishment didn’t know what to do with him.

And they didn’t.

Lord Darby, born to royalty, once tried to explain to Queen Victoria the problem with her new prime minister. “Mr. Disraeli has had to make his position, and men who make their position will say and do things which are not necessary to be said and done by those for whom positions are provided.”

Many members of Mr. Gingrich’s party—the Danforths, the Heinzes, the Bakers—had come from comfort and were calmer.

Mr. Gingrich was an outsider, from the Army-brat middle class, his family was always moving, and he was always the new kid .He was an outsider as a college professor who was a conservative, as a House member who was a right-wing back-bencher. At the Reagan White House they saw him as a big mouth with no class. The Bush White House hated him for breaking with the president over taxes. He was the kind of outsider whose vision of himself was so shaped by his differentness, his outsiderness, that he couldn’t get it through his head that he was now an insider. He couldn’t feel comfortable about it because for at least 30 years, in the geography of his mind, insiders occupied a territory called Corruption, or Sold Out. Outsiders lived in a land called Decency. To be an insider was to move to a neighborhood with better houses and worse people.

But the leaders of his own party looked down on him in the 1970s and ‘80s, and it wasn’t lost on him. Talking about it once, he said, “Do I know that despite my best efforts to help Ronald Reagan, do I know that Jim Baker and Dick Darman thought I was a jerk? Sure.”

He looked at me challengingly. And continued: “Did I know that all during the Bush years, while I was trying to save Bush, that Darman was trying to destroy me? Sure. But that only tells me who I think I am. I’m a historic figure. What I was 11 or 12 years old a friend gave me an old clipping of Lincoln’s defeats. I carried it around for years. Lincoln lost five times between being a congressmen and winning the presidency. Five straight losses, all in the 1850s.

“So my attitude is, a lot of people who will go down in history as dumb, or interesting secondary figures like Baker, undervalued me when I was doing what I had to do to be me. It didn’t offend me. I didn’t really like it but it was not—it would have cost too much . . . to have noticed it.”

Michael Barone wrote an essay on Mr. Gingrich, saying, “Like Charles DeGaulle, he has believed from childhood that he has a great destiny, that he will reshape the nation. Like DeGaulle he has overcome setbacks, mistakes, ridicule and opposition, and has persevered in his stands until his confidence no longer seemed ridiculous. Like DeGaulle he believes that his nation has a special mission. And like DeGaulle he has heaped scorn on his opponents and cold bloodedly ended the careers of those who have stood in his way. Gingrich cannot be unaware of the parallels — in one of his [college] lectures he talks about DeGaulle and himself in the same breath.”

But as DeGaulle himself once said: The graveyards are full of indispensable men. And you cannot lose as badly as Mr. Gingrich did in the past few years and survive.

The lessons? Some obvious ones, I suppose. It would be good for Republican leaders to take a deep breath and remember how far we’ve come since the day Newt Gingrich walked into Congress. Good to remember that fierceness doesn’t always work, that the media is a steamroller that shatters and crushes big sharp rocks but leaves sturdy pebbles undisturbed. Good to remember to calm down, lead, act not as if you’re a minority member giddily thrust to the top but a majority member soberly leading. Stick to first principles, don’t distract with personal drama, be serious and not clever.

And probably good to see this: We’re at the end of a 20-year arc and the beginning of a new era.

In 1978, when Mr. Gingrich entered the House, the tax-cutting Proposition 13 swept California and Ronald Reagan lay in wait. The modern conservative movement, reflecting the will and wants of the people on taxes and spending and cultural issues and foreign affairs, began to fully emerge. The movement became a coalition, which yielded a realignment, and Mr. Reagan was twice swept into the White House. And, in 1994, Republicans won Congress for the first time in 40 years.

And now we’re in another time. Newt’s uncalm visage, the failed government shutdown, Oklahoma City and the releasing of the president’s grand jury testimony left the men and women who had long stood for middle America looking extreme, radical, strange.

And middle America itself has changed in 20 years, inevitably, perhaps profoundly. And we are all of us still catching up with the changes, which have been cultural, attitudinal, and can be seen most dramatically in the fact that a president whose behavior would a generation ago have resulted in immediate dismissal is today secure, unremoved and popular.

[Header] New Terrain

The new era brings its own new terrain. The former Bush domestic policy adviser Jim Pinkerton says the lesson to start with is this: “There’s the realm of politics and there’s the realm of morality, and sometimes they intersect and sometimes they don’t. Clinton will get whatever he deserves in the hereafter, but in the here and now he’s won. And those who wish to contend with him in 1998 must take that into account.”

And here’s another idea. It is the guidance and inspiration to be found in looking again at the life of Abraham Lincoln, a great moral and political leader who spent the years before he took the presidency being against slavery and speaking against slavery and inching the country along to see it his way. He sometimes frustrated his friends and delighted his foes, but he inched each day closer to the prize, through calm leadership and with a human, humorous, appealing face. Great personal qualities deployed politically: He made it hard to hate him.

That’s what Republicans must do. That’s what Newt Gingrich didn’t do, couldn’t do.

For seven months I have kept on my desk a picture from a tabloid. It is of two close friends of President Clinton, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and the actress Markie Post. They are laughing and holding hands in joyous union as they jump up and down at where fate has put them down. It had put them in the Lincoln bedroom. They were jumping up and down on Lincoln’s bed.

It seemed to me emblematic of the Clinton White House, a place where opponents’ FBI files were read aloud over pizza and foreign contributors with cash invited in the back door. I thought: Something’s wrong with these people, they lack thought and dignity. But most of all they seemed to lack respect, a sense of awe—not the awe that can cripple you with a false sense of your smallness but the awe that makes you bigger, that makes you reach higher as if in tribute to some unseen greatness around you.

That, it seemed to me last week, as the president spoke each day and the Starr report was published—that was Mr. Clinton’s problem, his real sin—a fundamental lack of respect for his country, for its citizens, for his colleagues, for all of us. The pollsters have it wrong when, seeking to determine whether he can continue to govern, they ask, “Do you respect the president?” The real question is, “Do you think he has any respect for us?”

I think he showed with a chilling finality last week that he does not. I believe he demonstrated that people and principles are, to him, objects to be manipulated. You can tell preachers you cherish scripture, tell Monica you cherish her, it doesn’t matter. The object, as Dick Morris says the president told him, is to “win.”

*   *   *

Never, in all of last week, did he explain why he put the country through eight terrible months of dissension and distraction, when he easily could have spared it the trauma (and spared his career too). Never did he explain why he sent his media generals out every day to lie for him with conviction, and to slime his opponents. It was telling that when he spoke to the evangelicals he said some people needed apologizing to, and that first, and “most important,” was his family. What followed was a litany of his friends and his staff. His country came in dead last in the litany, as it has in his actions.

In the report and in his comments it was clear that the most important thing to Bill Clinton is, now and always, Bill Clinton. But what was amazing is that he seemed last week to think that we feel that way too.

*   *   *

And so he spoke of the scandal as his “journey.” He said it has helped him grow. He said it may make him stronger. He said it has been an exhausting week for him. He said this has been the most difficult time of his life. But then, as if to comfort us in our concern, he offered context: It may turn out to be the most valuable, too.

He noted that his drama may make American families stronger. He said it provides an opportunity for healing. He spoke moistly, glisteningly of the early days of his first presidential run, “when nobody but my mother . . . thought I had a chance of being elected.” He talked of a little boy who told him “he wanted to be a president just like me.” The boy was “husky, like I was,” the president said moistly, glisteningly.

He compared himself to Mark McGwire. Would you want Mr. McGwire to give up now, he asked? But Mr. McGwire is a champion because he has shown himself the past 10 days to be what is now an amazing thing, a celebrity who is a good man. This is the exact opposite of what Mr. Clinton has shown. The weird solipsism, the over-the-top self-dramatizing continued in the Starr report. There Mr. Clinton was not Mark McGwire but, as he told Sidney Blumenthal, a “character in a novel,” a victim of a sinister force weaving a web of lies about Monica Lewinsky and him. He compared himself to the hero of “Darkness at Noon.”

He told evangelical ministers at a prayer breakfast that he had reached “the rock bottom truth of where I am.” He said he has “sinned.” He bit his lip, lowered his moist eyes, and said his “spirit is broken.” He then went on to a raucous awards dinner where he laughed gaily, waved and announced, “Hillary and I have been . . . just lapping this up!”

*   *   *

For all he seemed to be, in Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, a pious conniver. As he spoke to the evangelicals, I was reminded of his great learning experience in 1980, after he lost his re-election race for the governorship. Knowing the people of Arkansas had come to see him as different, as too liberal and too Yale, he immediately went out and joined the only local church choir that sang on TV every Sunday morning. People liked it. He manipulated them for gain, to win. And in 1982 he won.

The problem is not that he is an actor. As an actor he puts not only Ronald Reagan to shame, but Laurence Olivier. The problem is that he thinks people will believe anything, that if he says a thing it is true. He absorbs his lies, and becomes them. The country suffers for this.

Mr. Clinton seems—and this is an amazing thing to say about a president—to lack a sense of patriotism, a love of country, a protectiveness toward her. He dupes the secretary of state, who must be America’s credible voice in the world, into lying for him to the public and press. He fears his phone is being tapped by foreign agents, opening him to international blackmail. But he does not discontinue phone sex. Instead he comes up with a cover story. He tells Ms. Lewinsky they can say they knew they were being bugged, and it was just a “put on.” He sends the first lady to go on television, where she denies the Lewinsky charges and says, “This is a battle. . . . some folk are going to have a lot to answer for.”

It is similarly amazing to say of an American president that he is decadent—an Ozarks Caligula, as a placard he passed last week put it. While being sexually serviced he keeps the door ajar so his secretary can alert him to calls; while taking one from a congressman he unzips his pants and exposes himself so he can receive oral sex. He masturbates in front of his young lover in the bathroom near his study, and in a staff member’s office. When Ms. Lewinsky asks him about rumors that he’d attempted to molest Kathleen Willey, he is indignant: He would never approach a woman with small breasts. When the Lewinsky story breaks, he asks a pollster, a man newly famous for letting a prostitute listen in while he advised the president on strategy, if he should tell the truth. The pollster tells him no. The president responds, “Well, we just have to win then.”

*   *   *

It is interesting, by the way, that of the self-described hundreds and hundreds of women Bill Clinton has been involved with, it is Ms. Lewinsky who has done the most damage. The reason I think is that in picking her he made a crucial mistake: He chose someone much like himself. She describes herself as insecure as she makes demands. She learned to manipulate in this manner through the culture of therapy. Her wants are justified because she is, after all, burdened with fears, and can be comforted only by the meeting of her demands. He picked someone with as grand a sense of entitlement as his own. At the end of the affair she demands that he feel contrition; she also demands a job with these words: “I don’t want to have to work for this position. . . . I just want it to be given to me.”

And he picked someone who is, like himself, an exhibitionist. It never occurred to Ms. Lewinsky to be discreet about their affair, not to tell a dozen friends and family about the cigar, the nicknames. But then discretion has never really occurred to him, either. That’s how we know about so many of his affairs. He always leaves a trail, an open door. He wants us to know.

*   *   *

I once saw the president in one of those big Washington hotel dinners a few years ago shortly after he talked about his underwear on TV. He was in full self-deprecating mode, teasing himself for his mistake. But he went on a little too long; he talked too much about it, and the crowd seemed to be thinking what I was: Doesn’t he know that as he stands up there going on and on about his shorts we are starting to imagine him in his shorts? The poor man doesn’t know. And then I thought: Yes he does! He wants us to imagine him like that. And he has lived out his presidency so we can.

Caligula made his horse a senator; Mr. Clinton made his whoring a centerpiece. Both did so because they lacked respect and concern for anything but themselves. Ancient times could tolerate its Caligula, but Mr. Clinton is, quaint phrase, the most powerful man in the world, the leader of the free world, the chief executive of the United States, commander of our armed forces, the man who one day may be forced by history to unleash a nuclear missile. It is not tolerable that such a person be in such a position, and have such power.

Jesse Jackson once said, “God isn’t finished with me yet,” and it was beautiful because it was true. God isn’t finished with any of us. Maybe he will raise up Bill Clinton and make him a saint, a great one. Maybe he will make Bill Clinton’s life an example of stunning redemption. But for now, and now is what we have, Bill Clinton is not wise enough, mature enough, stable enough—he is not good enough—to be the American president.

In the therapeutic language he favors, an intervention would seem to be in order. That would be impeachment, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having no respect for his office, for his country, and for its people.