Saturday, January 31, 1998

Public's trust doesn't need more abuse

By Leonard Pitts

A word of warning first. This is about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. If by now you're sick of the subject, well, try a different planet, Paco.

Here on Earth, it's the inescapable story. Hide out in a bathroom stall on a mountain in Tibet, and it'll still find you and pump you full of lurid allegations -- semen stained dresses! oral sex! -- about the president of the United States and the 24-year-old former White House intern who claims she had an affair with him and was told by him to lie about it under oath.

The story is playing everywhere in every medium every hour of every day.

Me, I'm shell-shocked. Nearly deafened by the rumble and thunder of speculation, revelation and media barrage. All of it hinging on arguably the most frustrating word in the English language:

If.

If he did it -- and coming on top of Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, it's not so hard to believe he did -- then one can only marvel at the man's arrogance, hubris and capacity for self-destruction, even as we brace for the specter of a crippled presidency and impeachment hearings.

If he didn't do it -- and given that acquaintances describe Lewinsky as infatuated with the president, needful of attention and prone to lying, we must at least concede the possibility -- then one must be deeply troubled at the way a nation was roiled by partisan plotting and the needs of a callow girl.

Two ifs, which meander away in completely different directions, yet arrive in very nearly the same place: public paranoia freshly affirmed.

To understand what I mean, you have only to recall Watergate. The courts never punished any of the conspirators as badly as the conspirators punished us, inflicting upon the nation a season of cynicism and a legacy of distrust we still struggle to outgrow.

Evidence of the change is as close as your TV Guide. The hot TV drama in the days before Watergate was "Marcus Welby, M.D.", a saccharin medical show about a kindly old doctor and his hip young sidekick. Nowadays, it's "The X-Files," a dark-toned tale about two FBI agents unraveling the machinations of a vast, unseen power.

Or look at your newspaper and notice how media have metamorphosed from watchdog into attack dog over the last 20-something years. Like an overeager hound that barks without discrimination at squirrels, buses and clouds, we see in every scandal the ghost of the Big One. "Travelgate," indeed.

We have become a nation of conspiracy theorists and skeptics, doubters and disbelievers, too wise to the ways of the world to ever get caught believing -- much less dreaming -- again. If a president challenged us to think of what we could do for our country, we would speculate knowingly about his ulterior motives.

That's the legacy of that bungled burglary 26 years ago. Watergate left public trust shattered.

Now there's this. And it strikes me that we don't need yet another justification for cynicism, don't need -- at a time of prosperity and renewed confidence -- to be dragged back down a trail of debilitation and distrust.

In a very real sense, it doesn't matter how all of this comes out -- whether the president is guilty as hell or innocent as fresh-fallen snow. Either way, the allegations have already done their job, already reconfirmed us in our belief that somebody up there is always plotting, ever lying.

And yet something in us still seeks better than that, still wants to believe. I find it telling that most polls say Americans could forgive the president for having had an affair but not for lying to us. It's the lying we'd find unforgivable -- and who can blame us?

We've struggled mightily to mend the trust that Watergate broke, but even now, over 20 years later, that trust is still a fragile thing.

Moreover, a thing that has been banged up something fierce by the Clinton administration itself through six years of lawyerly denials and truth by increments.

Now public trust is under fire on a field of rumble and thunder.

For his sake and for ours, Bill Clinton had better be telling the truth.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.

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