COMMENTARY: The human side of the impeachment controversy

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) UNDATED _ The current imbroglio over the possible impeachment of the president and its inevitable comparison with Watergate has caused me […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ The current imbroglio over the possible impeachment of the president and its inevitable comparison with Watergate has caused me to rethink the issues that led to each.


Not the legal issues, which continue to consume the Beltway crowd, but the human ones that ultimately led to the allegations of impeachable behavior.

I’ve been aided in my thinking by two books, one old and one more recent:”Blind Ambition,”John Dean’s 1976 cautionary tale of power and corruption in the Nixon White House, and”Primary Colors,”Joe Klein’s more recent anonymously penned roman-a-clef about the 1992 Clinton campaign. From these two works emerge parallels all citizens would do well to consider.

As the title of his memoir indicates, Dean’s story is the classic tale of an ambitious young man who sells his soul to reach the top of his profession.

In this case, the top is really the top _ the inner sanctum of the president, the world’s most powerful man. That the story is true makes it all the more poignant. Dean became White House counsel at age 31, epitomizing the dreams of every young-man-in-a-hurry.

Yet, as he puts it,”I soon learned that to make my way upward, into a position of confidence and influence, I had to travel downward through factional power plays, corruption and finally outright crimes.”…Slowly, steadily, I would climb toward the moral abyss of the president’s inner circle until I finally fell into it, thinking I had made it to the top just as I began to realize I had actually touched bottom.” Thus did Dean _ the self-described”linchpin”of the Watergate cover-up _ begin the long descent which, as a result of his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, ended with his imprisonment, the imprisonments of his co-conspirators and the resignation of President Nixon.

As depicted in”Primary Colors,”a similar thirst for power serves as the driving force behind the campaign for the White House of Jack Stanton, the novel’s thinly disguised Bill Clinton character.

Intelligent, personable and streetwise, Stanton combines, in equal measure, the self-deprecating charm of John Kennedy and the win-at-all-costs ethic of Lyndon Johnson. And, as with Watergate, there are personal and professional casualties left in his wake.


Take, for example, Libby Holden, the gender-changed Vincent Foster character in”Primary Colors.”A longtime friend of Jack and Susan Stanton, Holden remembers when the three of them were young, idealistic and ready to change the world. She describes how, like any true believer, she clung to their collective dream, covering up Stanton’s sins in the process while hoping his upward mobility would bring their vision closer to fulfillment.

In the end, however, she becomes disillusioned with Stanton’s expedient lies and fleshly self-indulgence. Her dream in ruins, Holden’s life no longer seems worth living. Feeling used and expendable, she ultimately commits suicide. The campaign, however, continues.

And so it does to this day.

Such, I believe, is the travesty of the current proceedings.

Regardless of whether Clinton’s deceptions constitute impeachable offenses _ and, in my opinion, they don’t _ the greatest damage must be measured in human terms.

Though he was voted into office by less than half of the American people, Bill Clinton nevertheless benefited from the prayers and good wishes of most of the people. Like Libby, we harbored our doubts, but were willing _ over and over again _ to be convinced of Clinton’s good intentions even against our better judgment.

Indeed, according to the opinion polls, most of us are still willing to believe _ if only because the economy remains strong. He may be a moral jerk, we rationalize, but times are good.

But are they? Is the bottom line the true barometer of our nation’s health? Or have we, like Dean and Clinton, pursued our personal agendas at the expense of our personal convictions?


I wonder.

DEA END ATCHISON

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