Saturday, August 15, 1998

Perry Mason meets Monica and Bill

By Martin Schram

As America's most historic case of trappings of power creeps toward the president's day of grand jury reckoning, the news media have dished virtually every scenario of how the future of Bill Clinton's presidency may hinge on the FBI testing of Monica Lewinsky's dress.

Every scenario -- except one.

For a novel scenario about what could actually be happening, even as we speak, consider how this case might look today if the distinguished private attorney who was chosen ages ago to be independent counsel was not that pal of Republicans with the too-too-Hollywood name of Kenneth Starr, but was instead the more traditionally named pal of Erle Stanley Gardner: namely, Perry Mason.

Consider the problem that may indeed have been facing Independent Counsel Ken Starr in the run-up to the scheduled Aug. 17 made-for-TV grand jury testimony by President Clinton -- and then consider how Independent Counsel Perry Mason might have handled it.

Consider The Case of the Tell-tale Dress.

There was Monica Lewinsky, proffering testimony to the grand jury that (contrary to what both Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky said in sworn depositions in the Paula Jones civil suit) there had been one type of sexual act in which she participated with the president, on a number of occasions, in the White House.

Faced with the prospect of yet another he-said, she-said impasse that has characterized most of our juiciest prime-news scandals, the independent counsel would surely have asked Ms. Lewinsky, either directly or through her attorneys: What about all of those news reports that you have a dress that contains a stain caused by presidential exuberance during an incident of sex during the past two years -- a stain that can be traced to Mr. Clinton through DNA testing, providing the dress wasn't dry cleaned?

As we know, Ms. Lewinsky indeed handed over a dress to the real-life independent counsel, who sent it out for FBI testing. But consider the possibility that Ms. Lewinsky may have told the independent counsel (perhaps via her attorneys) that in fact there was no such stained dress -- she had just said that to Linda Tripp, her Et-tu-Brutus friend who she learned too late was secretly tape-recording their heartfelt chats in order to trip-and-trap the naive Ms. Lewinsky. Or that, yes, there was a dress that was once stained with presidential exuberance, but it has been dry cleaned so there may no longer be any discernible, testable tell-tale evidence.

At that point, Independent Counsel Perry Mason would calculate that, of course, the president would remember his moment or moments of exuberance, which occurred during the pleasure of Ms. Lewinsky's company. And the president would not know whether the evidence of those moments, on her dress, were preserved for posterity.

So Independent Counsel Mason, a master at baiting legal traps to ensnare witnesses, might well have granted Ms. Lewinsky the most sweeping immunity the law can provide -- transactional immunity -- in exchange for her promise to: (1) testify truthfully and (2) give the independent counsel's office a dress, whether or not it contained any discernible, testable evidence of any stain and (3) agree that neither she nor her attorneys would say anything publicly about the dress.

Meanwhile, Independent Counsel Mason would leak unto the world the scoop that the FBI was testing the dress, but withhold from the world and especially from the president the news about what the FBI's DNA testing could or could not prove.

And lo, back in the real world that passes these days for nonfiction news, what happened was that Ms. Lewinsky got the unusually sweeping grant of transactional immunity in exchange for her truthful grand jury testimony that one type of sex did happen. And, in a flash, it seemed like just about every person who has a press pass had no difficulty in getting the scoop, attributed to unidentified "law enforcement" sources or "legal" sources, that Ms. Lewinsky had given the office of Independent Counsel Starr a dress, and that the FBI was testing that dress for DNA evidence that could link it to Mr. Clinton.

And in what Henry James might call the final turn of the screw, the president has been left to twist slowly in the wind in his hermetically sealed Oval Office pondering how he would phrase his own grand jury testimony. Perhaps he knows his past encounters with Ms. Lewinsky produced evidence of presidential exuberance, but surely he does not know if the FBI tests have detected any evidence that might contradict him, if he chooses to once again deny, deny, deny.

He is a president tripped by his own vice, trapped by his tormentor's vise. As are we all, as we are forced to endure America's tawdriest tale of the trappings of power.

Scripps Howard News Service