Lack of judgment should
By Richard Halloran
force Clinton to goTHE operative and most accurate statement in President Clinton's address to the nation on Monday evening was this: "It constituted a critical lack of judgment." The inoperative and least accurate statement was: "It is nobody's business but ours."
The president's conduct in this sorry affair should be scrutinized on three interlocking levels: Political, legal and moral. All are important but the vital element for America is the political, for that goes to the heart of governance or the competence and manner in which we govern ourselves.
We elect a president for many reasons: personality and character, policies on domestic and foreign issues, positions on controversial questions such as abortion. We give him enormous power, more than the most totalitarian ruler because of the great strength of America, and we require that, above all else, he exercise that power with good judgment.
We give the president the authority to put his finger on the nuclear trigger or to send our sons and daughters into battle, as he did on Thursday, or to fly around the world to negotiate on matters of war and peace with the Chinese and the Russians. We give the president the responsibility for proposing our tax laws, for maintaining our Social Security system, for leading the way toward better medical care, for finding ways to improve our education, and for a thousand other things that affect the life of every American.
All demand that the president display extraordinarily sound judgment in every aspect of our national life, for a failure in judgment can mean, literally, that hundreds of millions of people could die in a nuclear holocaust or that hundreds of thousands of people could die in armed conflict or tens of thousands of Americans could be deprived of decent medical care or education.
It is in this realm of judgment that the president has shown himself to be flawed and incompetent. To carry on an illicit sexual affair with a young woman of his daughter's age and in the White House, a public office, did indeed demonstrate "a critical lapse of judgment."
If the president could not exercise judgment in so fundamental a matter, we Americans can no longer trust him to exercise sound judgment on anything else.
As Arthur Miller, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, has been quoted, "Isn't it unfortunate that the president now cannot do his presidential duties without constantly being asked whether this is something he has contrived so as to better his own personal situation?"
Note the immediate reaction of skepticism to his decision to attack alleged terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan. At first glance, it appeared the right thing to do but that did little to quiet the cynicism.
This shows that the president is wrong on his second statement, about whose business this is. When the president shows that he is incapable of using good judgment in what he terms his private life, that is no longer just his business but it becomes the business of all Americans. The president has shown that no longer has he earned or does he deserve the trust of Americans.
On the legal level, the president's testimony has raised the question of whether he lied in a court proceeding and whether he sought to obstruct justice. In this, the nation should wait for the special prosecutor to present his evidence to the Congress and for the Congress to decide whether the president should be censured or impeached.
At the end of the day, we require that the president uphold the law of the land himself and to see that the rest of us do the same. Otherwise, the rule of law on which our nation rests becomes a shambles. Some Americans have asserted that all of us lie at one time or another, even if only white lies to spare someone else's feelings. Maybe so, but if we lie in a legal proceeding and get caught, we go to jail. This is a serious offense under any circumstances and all the more serious for a president.
ON the moral or ethical level, the president is right in saying that is a matter between him and his family and their God. But the defense propounded by many of his supporters, that many other men cheat on their wives and therefore the president should be forgiven, is false. It is no more a defense in this instance than it would be for a traffic violation: "Everybody else was speeding, too, officer."
In the House of Commons before World War II, after Neville Chamberlain had appeased Hitler and made a roaring hash of things that led to a vicious war, a member of Parliament rose to exclaim: "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."
To Bill Clinton, we say: "Depart, because you have shown that we cannot trust your judgment. Go, before you get the nation into worse trouble."
Richard Halloran, former New York Times correspondent
in Asia, is a freelance writer based in Honolulu.
