The question that won't go away

President Clinton's failure to address Juanita Broaddrick's charge of rape is indefensible.

By Christopher Hitchens

Mar 16, 1999 | In James Baldwin's account of the Atlanta murders, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen," he recalls a dreadful earlier moment from 1965. The swamps and creeks of Mississippi were being dragged for the bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (done to death by the political ancestors of Bob Barr), and the search parties kept turning up corpses. Examination proved that these were not the cadavers that the authorities were seeking. It took a while for the subject to change, or at least for it to change enough for someone to exclaim: Wait a minute! What are all these other bodies doing in the swamp?

It's one thing to say, with reasonable confidence, that the Oval Office is currently occupied by a war criminal, a rapist and a pathological liar. It's another to ponder the full implications. If half of the many allegations about Clinton's business deals and date rapes are even half-true, then he has been going through political life for years, aware or quasi-aware that any or every telephone call might be the one he has been dreading. That's more stress than most of us could take: Only a certain kind of personality could be expected to endure it. You can look this up under the simpering liberal media description of "Comeback Kid," or you can check it under an entry of an entirely different kind, where the key phrase is "Threat to self and others."

In the last taped conversation between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, the two women are heard wondering how Clinton will explain away a two-hour telephone call to "Juanita." Investigation shows that this Juanita is not Juanita Broaddrick. But then who is it? What else is in the swamp? And is this man a stone-cold rapist or isn't he?

It seems to me morally feeble, as well as intellectually slack, to split the difference between Clinton and Broaddrick, or to characterize her allegation as unprovable. The feeblest summary of this compromise is contained in the lazy phrase "he said, she said." In the case of the "he," we already know that he is a hysterical, habitual liar. We also know that almost no allegation ever made by a woman and denied by him has proven to be untrue. And we know that ex-girlfriends have been subjected to extraordinary campaigns of defamation, amounting in some cases to intimidation, merely for speaking about "consensual" sex. What allegation could be more horrific than that of rape?

And yet, "he" hasn't said anything yet. If I was accused of rape, and the woman making the charge was a lady of obvious integrity, I would want to do better than have a lawyer make a routine disclaimer. (Especially a lawyer, in this case the pathetic figure of David Kendall, who had not even met me at the time of the supposed crime.) Asked by NBC to say where Clinton had been on the morning in question -- a fact easily established in the life of a state attorney general -- the White House declined cooperation. I would have wanted to do better than that, too.

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