11/01/00 2:35 p.m.
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What will Clinton do?

By NR’s Editors

n his way out the door, Bill Clinton gave an interview to Esquire magazine, which ran it with a Monica's (and media's) -eye-view portrait. The cover art is a keepsake, in case anyone forgets, of the Clintonian style. The interview answers the question, what will Mr. Clinton — a young ex-president — be doing for the next 30 years? He will be justifying himself, as cleverly and as assiduously as Richard Nixon.

Since Arthur Schlesinger Sr., historians have been sending each other questionnaires designed to rate the presidents. All these exercises try to slice it too fine. Except for the perennial winners — Washington, Lincoln — and the perennial dogs — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson — most presidents, from stars like Jefferson to the forgotten bewhiskered Republicans of the late 19th century, deserve solid Cs. America is a large and self-propelled country. Most of our presidents don't get in its way. Clinton's policies net out in this broad middle range.

His personal example, though far more negative, was still well within the middle range of his time. Because contemporary presidents are so visible, we tend to grant them an influence they do not in fact possess. One Clinton critic, Russ Smith of the New York Press, even blamed him for casual Fridays. But America was becoming coarse and weepy without Bill Clinton. The Supreme Court speaks of prevailing community standards; Bill Clinton reflected them. Dostoevsky described Fyodor Karamazov as "evil and sentimental." Bill Clinton is gross and sentimental, but then so is much of his country's entertainment.

He did, however, leave one public mark, unique to himself. In the Farewell Address, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton collaborated on a famous paragraph about the role of religion and morality in national life. Feeling the need to give an example of religion's utility, they did not cite family values, or keeping kids off drugs. They cited legal oaths. Without "the sense of religious obligation," they wrote, the oaths that are "the instruments of investigation" in courts would lose their force, thus putting property, reputation, and life itself at risk.

Both men were moral realists. They knew, as Ken Starr was accused of not knowing, where babies come from. They knew where illegitimate babies come from (Hamilton was one). Hamilton had also been the star in a political sex scandal, the nation's first. Washington's watchword was that "we must take men as we find them." But certain things, they believed, could not be tolerated, and lying in court was one of them. Bill Clinton's time of troubles began when he lied in court, and in public, not to protect some vision of national security, but to secure his own power. He was under threat because of his casual, and compulsive, gratification of personal desires. Most presidents have wrestled with questions of morality and law. Eisenhower lied about the U-2. McKinley prayed before declaring war on Spain. Jefferson worried that buying Louisiana violated the Constitution. Bill Clinton, uniquely, subverted the institutions he was pledged to uphold to serve his whims and save his hide. It was, properly speaking, a royal offense — something Charles II might have done for a mistress. Royal offenses were one of the reasons Americans wanted a republic.

Happily, he came late in our history, when our traditions are so settled that rotation in office gives us a chance to regenerate. Also happily, he was base enough to attempt nothing worse (the main difference between Bill Clinton and Aaron Burr, the founder he most resembles, is that Burr was brave as well as suave and intelligent). He did the worst he could, which was greater than his best. Yet he is fading and shrinking even now, and we have reason, if we work, to hope.