["I Wish I Could Love You Like I Do To You"]
So something of a Machiavellian, but I would take my hat off to these guys anytime.
I mean, David Kendall, if we'd had him, Nixon would have survived the impeachment.
Tonight, the president and Monica Lewinsky. Does it really matter?
From ABC News.
This is Nightline.
Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
If today's New York Times had it right, the president has been discussing a strategy with his inner circle of advisors that would have him admitting intimate sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, while still denying that he ever had sexual relations with her.
The purported value of such an approach lies in a technicality. It would, some of the president's advisors appear to believe, allow Mr. Clinton to claim that he did not commit perjury in his deposition before Paula Jones' attorneys last January.
Why would such a story appear in the Times in the first place?
Here in Washington, it is commonplace for a tentative strategy to be lofted up on a trial balloon, so that its author can gauge the measure of approval or ridicule that it generates.
After all, the president goes before the Monica Lewinsky grand jury on Monday, and to the degree that he needs to take refuge in technicalities rather than simple truth, time for designing them is running out.
Here's Nightline correspondent, John Donvan.
Three days from today, Bill Clinton will swear to tell the truth.
And can Star will try to catch him in a lie?
If Star fails, then Clinton is off the hook. But if Star succeeds, then Clinton is, well, maybe still off the hook.
Consistently, opinion polls have shown that most Americans believe Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky went well beyond the famous hug.
And yet his approval ratings have remained strong ever since the story broke.
That means most Americans also believe the president told us a bald-faced lie when he said...
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
This is a remarkable thing. Americans don't like it when their leaders lie.
When Richard Nixon said this...
Because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
Many of us instinctively took that as a lie and never forgave him.
But a Clinton lie, at least one about sex, that just doesn't seem to raise the national dander.
We went to Gary Langer, who does polling for ABC News, and asked him why not.
People are unhappy with what they hear about Clinton's behavior or alleged behavior.
They think less of him personally because of it, but they don't see how it's relevant to the presidency and to his performance in office.
And that seems to be the issue.
It might be different if Ken Star were about to make a case on something more than Bill Clinton, an intern, and a tryst.
Something safe from the mountain of material his investigators have spent $40 million and four years digging through.
Remember these Clinton scandals as the media gave each one a label?
Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, the Vince Foster suicide, hush money for Hubble.
Star investigated them all, exhaustively.
Move back! What did I tell you guys? We're not coming back. Move back!
But a source familiar with his investigation says that only the Lewinsky matter gives him evidence that could impeach the president.
And if the Lewinsky stuff does not bother us, is it because we've become, as they say, more European in outlook?
We checked with foreign journalists at the National Press Club after reading that 79% of the French, 80% of the Danes, and 81% of Italians said Bill Clinton should keep his job even if he lied.
The fact that somebody would lie about an extramarital relation is something that we sort of accept as a natural.
I think most people just think that the president shouldn't be asked in the first place about these matters.
It's kind of ridiculous from the point of view of many Europeans, I'm sure.
But wait. Up until now, all of us have been dealing with a hypothetical.
No one's proven that anything illicit happened between the president and the intern.
But what if in the near future these allegations are proven undeniably true?
What then? Would Americans still give Mr. Clinton a pass on sex in the Oval Office?
In truth, it is not just Ken Starr who fixated on the sex.
It's been all of us, the Monica-centered media.
The viewers pumping up the ratings for all those cable talk shows.
The weekend tongue waggers always carving out time for a dress.
Let's talk a little bit first about the dress.
Alinda has seen that dress.
Let me go back to the dress.
And time for a stain.
The supposedly stained dress.
There is DNA evidence on that dress.
Seeming on the dress.
Obviously at some level, the sex does matter.
Do you have sexual relations with the president?
In the past, it has mattered enough to destroy careers.
Senator Bob Packwood, talented, well regarded, well intentioned,
he found no forgiveness from his constituents when the facts came out about his hitting on women who worked for him.
Or Senator Gary Hart.
It was not sexual harassment, but adultery that brought him down.
Sex between consenting adults.
Once the facts came out, he cut short his run for the presidency.
And recall what Hillary Clinton herself said last January when asked a carefully phrased hypothetical question.
If an American president had an adulterous liaison in the White House and lied to cover it up,
should the American people ask for his resignation?
Well, they should certainly be concerned about it.
Should they ask for his resignation?
Well, I think that if all that were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense.
But there's a difference between adultery and the charges that Ken Starr may ultimately bring against the president.
Adultery is a sin and many can forgive it.
But perjury, intimidation, obstruction of justice, those things are crimes that may be ruled on by Congress,
where forgiveness can be a much more complicated matter.
I'm John Donvan for Nightline in Washington.
When we come back, an interview we recorded earlier this evening with two men who were at the center of the last presidential crisis.
Chuck Colson, special counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973.
And John Dean, White House counsel to Mr. Nixon from 1970 to 1973.
This is ABC News Nightline.
...of prison ministries.
He joins us from his home in Naples, Florida.
And in our Los Angeles bureau, now investment banker John Dean, who was the White House counsel to President Nixon.
Let me begin by giving away both of your fundamental positions here.
One of you, John Dean, believes that it is not appropriate, really, or fair to analogize between
what's happening now with President Clinton and Watergate, and Chuck Colson feels it is fair and is reasonable.
If each of you could succinctly make your case, Mr. Dean, you first.
Well, I just think that the circumstances in which this has arisen, for example,
I had one of the Watergate prosecutors once tell me that, John, you give me enough time, enough money, and I can nail anybody.
I'll get an indictment, if not a conviction.
I think that's what's happened here.
The underlying events of Watergate were very, to me, distinguishable.
These involve private activities of a president while he happened to be in office.
In Watergate, you really were dealing with the functions of the president, the president's behavior,
and they involved illegal wiretapping of newsmen and White House staff, even the president's brother.
They involved illegal burglaries.
There were misuses and abuses of agencies of government like the IRS, the FBI, and the CIA,
and then a cover-up of all those activities that involved hush money and clemency
to make sure that the people who were involved remained silent.
And I think that is, first of all, the width and breadth distinguishes it,
and the fact that you have government activities and government functions involved as opposed to private activity.
That's the case against. What's the case for, Mr. Coulson?
Well, first of all, Ted, this is not a sex scandal.
This is about if Judge Starr sends a report at all to Congress,
it will be on the question of obstruction of justice and perjury.
And we don't know yet what he's going to send.
I don't think he'll send a report if it's only Monica Lewinsky and it's only something arising out of that.
I think what you have is the possible pattern here of FBI files.
I went to prison for giving out one FBI file.
These fellows had 900 of them in the White House and used them for whatever purposes they chose to.
They prosecuted Billy Dale. That was a politically inspired prosecution.
They have released the information.
He was the head of the travel office.
Travel office, right. And a jury took two hours to throw the case out.
Then you have Linda Tripp, who testifies against the administration.
Suddenly, inexplicably, her personnel file is released publicly, illegally.
There's been no sanctions against that.
I don't remember anybody in Watergate that was hush money paid to the defendants who broke in.
That's correct. But I don't remember anybody who got indicted who was close to the president,
who suddenly found himself with a half a million dollars in legal fees and consulting fees.
I mean, when I was indicted...
You're talking here about what?
We're in public.
Forgive me. I just want to point the arrows to who you're talking about, right.
So what we've got is John Dean's analysis of Watergate, which is a correct one,
but we have an unknown until Judge Starr makes his report to Congress.
I don't know if the two cases are parallel.
If everything that we have heard is part of a pattern of conduct,
then the two cases will be very parallel because, remember, in the bill of impeachment against Mr.
Nixon, the first and several subsequent accounts in that bill of impeachment were on the question of
obstruction of justice. That's precisely what's being dealt with here, I believe, in this report.
I think you are absolutely right in terms of your enumeration of the areas that Mr. Starr
investigated and of the pattern that he was trying to demonstrate.
Now, we're left with a lot of stuff that we don't know, but the Washington Post the other day had a
major story in which it said, quite plainly attributing it to someone familiar with the
goings on in Judge Starr's office, that they had reached a decision not to include any of those
other areas that you've enumerated, but rather to focus only on the Lewinsky matter and any areas
of perjuries, suborning of witnesses, and so on, connected to that. Would you still feel the same
way if that is so? If it's just the Lewinsky case, the two will not be parallel. But I don't believe
a 300-page report deals only with the Lewinsky case. I don't think he's going to send something up
to Congress at all unless he has a case which does raise impeachable offenses. The only thing
that would raise an impeachable offense, it isn't the sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
It is a pattern of conduct showing a misuse of office. And if that's the case, if that
report goes up, then I say there are going to be distinct parallels with Watergate.
One aspect, Mr. Dean, that clearly is analogous is the sort of lack of public interest for the
run-up to all of this. And I go back now, I mean Judge Starr, after all, has been investigating this,
he and another independent counsel for the better part of four years, and as the White
House never tires of reminding us to the expenditure of $40 million, we sort of tend to think now
that back in the days of Watergate, oh, everybody was interested in that from
72 on. Not true, is it? Not true. Not true at all. In fact, if you'll recall, as I well do,
the only really attention it got was from the Washington Post and Woodward and Bernstein who
pressed on the story. The rest of the national media, other than CBS occasionally, paid very
little attention and through, that was pretty much through the election. In fact, I once talked to
Bob Woodward who told me when he, after the election, he didn't think he'd write any more
Watergate stories. And it wasn't until the next spring in April of 1973 when Watergate fell apart
of its own weight that the national media really picked it up and it really became an intense story.
And what, of course, that leads to is the ability of a White House, any White House,
to stonewall. Let's take a short break and when we come back, let's talk about that.
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Coming up. What should he say? What is your advice to the president? What should he say? What do you
think he will say? Lie, lie, lie like a rug. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, coming up on ABC Late Night.
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And we're back once again with John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, and Charles Coulson,
former special counsel to Mr. Nixon. You were both on the inside during those early days of Watergate,
and each of you, I'm sure, could testify to volumes of how easy it is from inside the White House
to shut investigations down, or at least to Stonewall. Let me just hear about that a little bit,
first of all, from you, Mr. Coulson. Well, what I can't understand about this whole thing, Ted,
is that Bill Clinton has not learned the lesson that Richard Nixon should have taught him.
And that is, six months ago, had he come forth and said, at the height of his popularity,
look, here's what I did. It was a mistake. I never should have done it. I want to be forgiven.
It would have been over with, ended. And I think he's gone too long now because the presidency itself
has been hurt. And I don't want from our previous discussion for anyone to think that I don't think
the sex scandal alone has been serious and dangerously eroded the presidency. The moral
authority of the presidency has been hurt by all this. But he could have gotten rid of it a long time ago,
just as Nixon could have. And I remember those discussions with the Nixon White House,
and it's pride. It's what the Greeks called hubris. No politician wants to admit he was wrong.
So I have a feeling of the agony that President Clinton is going through this weekend.
But even at this point, if he would have stepped forward and said, here's what I did,
I think you'd shut this thing down very quickly. Mr. Dean, you spoke a few moments ago about your
prosecutor friend who told you, give me enough money, give me enough time, and I'll indict anybody.
The same thing is also true, however, if you're inside the White House. You've got access to a lot
of levers of power, and you can make it very difficult for prosecutors to get their hands on material.
Well, that's true. And it was a lot easier two and a half decades ago than it is today, though,
I must say. Chuck really wasn't that involved in the day-to-day operations of the cover-up.
He was smart enough to duck and get out of the way, and that more was something that was on my desk than his.
And there were things you could do, and particularly when you had an FBI and a Department of Justice that was
cooperating and telling you what was going on, where a grand jury was headed. You did have privileges then
that hadn't been tested. It was a lot easier to cover up. Today, those have, because of Watergate, been peeled away,
and this president is really pretty much laid bare. But what you do have, I mean, let me just put it to you,
that to a certain degree, you still have the irresistible force and the immovable object.
And if it takes as long as it has taken, that is usually because it's a very tough job to get through that White House fence, isn't it?
Well, this White House has done a tremendous job, Ted. In my pre-conversion, pre-Christian days,
I considered myself something of a Machiavellian, but I would take my hat off to these guys anytime.
I mean, David Kendall, if we'd had him, Nixon would have survived the impeachment. This guy's a pit bull,
and they have turned this whole investigation around so that the bad guy is the investigator.
We never attempted anything like that with Leon Jaworski. You wouldn't have dared to, and I disagree with John.
Well, of course, that was after you got rid of Archibald Cox and realized what a mistake that was.
Of course, but we also didn't attack Archibald Cox until Mr. Nixon made the mistake of the Saturday Night Massacre.
The fact of the matter is that this White House has been very aggressive. It has used every privilege.
It has used it up, as a matter of fact, which has probably done damage to the future of the presidency much more than Nixon did.
Nixon resisted one subpoena, which was the tapes, and when the court decided eight to nothing against him, he turned them over.
I answered every subpoena I received instantly. There wasn't any question about records being held for two years
or people forgetting where things were kept. I don't agree. I think this White House has done, from its own standpoint,
professionally, about as good a job as you could possibly do in resisting this investigation
and in making the investigators look like the bad guys. It's been an extraordinary performance.
Mr. Dean, perhaps the most memorable quote for which you will forever be remembered is,
Mr. President, there is a cancer on the presidency, and I ask you, in the context of what Chuck Colson has just said,
has the presidency been weakened by the activities both of the prosecutor and of the president's White House defenders?
Well, I was thinking, as Chuck was talking, I sort of feel like there are a couple old tarnished pots sitting here talking about the kettle,
and I'm not sure we're not cracked pots to even offer our judgments on these things.
Let me give you an anecdotal answer to that, Ted. I was in England a couple of weeks ago.
Black tie dinner. After the dinner, the senior British official student said to the queen, and everyone echoed to the queen.
The senior American student said to the president of the United States, and half the crowd laughed.
Yeah, but I think a lot of people would hold folks like me and the rest of my colleagues in the media responsible for that.
There's no question the president has been made a laughing stock.
The question that we're dealing with now, as we come up to this final weekend before his appearance before the grand jury,
is whether all of this is serious enough that it can, will, or should lead to an impeachment.
Mr. Dean, you're going to get one of the final words here.
Let me say this. I see one big difference. I think that the activities relating to Watergate, to me, suggested more activities that were founded in hate.
The current activities I see and hear about seem to be more grounded in love. Big difference.
I would just say this, Ted, in closing, that in a republic, we depend upon virtuous leaders.
I think there's been a pattern here which shows a lack of virtue on the part of the president.
This is a dangerous president. I don't know how I'm going to tell my grandson that he ought to tell the truth all the time,
and that there are consequences if you don't do the right thing.
That's what I worry about. I worry about the future precedent of this, whether he's impeached or not.
How do we tell people that it pays to be virtuous and to do the right thing?
Mr. Coulson, John Dean, thank you both very much. Appreciate you coming in.
Thank you, Ted.
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No one seems to doubt that damage has been done by the Lewinsky matter.
It may be some time before we can fairly judge by whom.
But certainly plain speaking appears to have been a victim.
Language is really nothing more than a code.
Using that code we convey information, feelings, emotions.
We can modify the impact of language by tone or facial expression, but for language to work,
the person speaking or writing the words and the person hearing or reading them
needs to be operating with a common understanding of what those words mean.
In simpler times, a man's word used to be his bond.
Officers who surrendered to one another during the Civil War, for example,
would give up their swords and promise not to join the fight again,
at which they were permitted to go home.
That sort of confidence seems almost quaint today.
These days language seems as devoted to the cause of avoiding truth as communicating it.
Contracts apprised as much for their loopholes as for the mutual commitments they would seem to assure.
Ambiguity, it's true, can be a useful device for avoiding friction and conflict,
but when it becomes the centerpiece of how we deal with one another,
it will lead only to mistrust, pain and confusion.
That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington.
For all of us here at ABC News, good night.
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