The Truth Could Have Spared the Nation Pain

The president told a whopper.

His eyes glazed over, his lower lip trembled, his index finger wagged at the camera and then he said:

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman--Monica Lewinsky.”

Had he told the truth, the Year of the Scandal might have ended right there. Instead he lied, and for the next 13 months he paid the price.

By year’s end--December 1998--just in time for the holidays, the House of Representatives passed a historic vote impeaching President Clinton on two counts in the Lewinsky escapade, one for lying in a deposition and the other for obstructing justice.

His fate was sent into the well of the Senate, and there he was tried on the charges of hiding his Oval Office sexual romps with White House intern Lewinsky.

Specifically, he was accused of trying to keep the Lewinsky matter out of a federal civil lawsuit brought by another woman, Paula Jones. She was alleging he sexually assaulted her while he was governor of Arkansas.

Ultimately he paid a price in the Jones case, too--$850,000 to settle the lawsuit and $90,686 for being in contempt of court.

But Clinton was not the only one hurt in this Washington stomach-turner that flipped fortunes around and back again.

For even as the president beat the rap when the Senate failed to muster the two-thirds vote needed to oust him, many other national political leaders collapsed all around him. The Republican majority on Capitol Hill seized on the Lewinsky scandal as a way to show that Clinton and the Democrats had lost the country’s moral soul.

The strategy boomeranged, and the public turned against them in poll after national poll that showed the GOP’s popularity numbers nose-diving while Clinton’s ratings held strong.

Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who started with the Whitewater investigation and ended up with the Lewinsky prosecution, released his infamous report on the president’s dalliance, with all of its salacious addenda, but he never got his man, Bill Clinton.

Instead, Starr left office under criticism that he was acting more like a black-masked inquisitor than a white-plumed knight crusading against immorality.

Lewinsky ultimately was paid a hefty sum to have someone else write her memoirs in “Monica’s Story.”

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) resigned and took to the lecture circuit after his House Republicans openly expressed fears that his handling of the impeachment case had endangered their majority on Capitol Hill.

Gingrich, a self-proclaimed defender of the nation’s moral base, saw his second marriage crumble after he started up a romance with a congressional aide.

His successor-to-be, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), revealed on the floor of the House on the morning Clinton was impeached that he too was resigning, because he too had sinned.

“During my 33-year marriage to my wife, Bonnie,” he announced, “I have on occasion strayed . . . “

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Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), the general leading the House managers’ case against Clinton, was outed by an online Internet magazine and forced to admit that he had in the past carried on a lengthy affair with a woman while both of them were married to others. Hyde, who was in his 40s at the time, tried to dismiss it as “my youthful indiscretions.”

Linda Tripp was prosecuted for secretly taping Lewinsky’s confessions about her presidential promiscuities. Her trial has been set for Jan. 18.

And First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, viewed as a martyr by some, a fool by others, took Bill back and then promptly launched a “listening tour” in a possible Senate bid all the way up in New York.

If only her husband had told the truth, he and all the rest of them, and the nation too, might have been spared the Year of Scandal.

What would we have missed?

The black beret. The navy blue dress. Presidential phone sex. Presidential cigars. Presidential apologies.

We might have been spared the president’s attempt to redefine the meaning of the word “is” as he tried to show that he had not lied under oath.

We might never have heard Linda Tripp tell us: “I’m you. I’m just like you. I’m an average American . . . “

But there’s one thing the impeachment process didn’t teach most Americans. It didn’t teach them that Clinton had lied about Lewinsky.

Most of the nation already had that figured out.