The Confession Game: Assuming It’s The Truth,

Lance Morrow IF HE MUST, DO IT WITH FLAIR

Don’t ask an American citizen to try to imagine what he would do if confronted by the squalid and surreal choice facing his President: stonewall or confess. One person–one only–made the disgusting mess: Bill Clinton. Let him find his own way out.

But since the confessionalist camp advises truth telling rather than continued lying (though truth telling of a manipulative kind), I think that option deserves deeper exploration. The confessionalists have not made their case with sufficient imagination, envisioning only one way for Clinton to confess–staring at a camera in the Oval Office, reading a TelePrompTer. The dramaturgy is flat. Even Richard Nixon in his 1952 Checkers speech–the prototype of aggressive self-defense through televised “confession”–used poor Pat as a studio prop and, of course, conjured up the adorable, absent dog.

There are all kinds of interesting ways to confess. Long ago, Jimmy Carter startled America by admitting, in a Playboy interview, to “lust in my heart”–not a confession at all, really, but coy, juvenile exhibitionism. Playboy would not be a good forum for Clinton. Jimmy Swaggart wept and chewed the furniture on the soundstage of his TV ministry. Without the gnashing of teeth, Clinton might at least entertain the idea of a group format. He is good at the Oprah-type give-and-take. If confession becomes inevitable, best to take control of the drama and stage-manage it to your advantage. Errancy and repentance and redemption have become one of our most exciting forms of public theater. Catharsis by celebrity: intimate hells of divorces, drugs and bulimias metamorphose before our eyes into miracles of recovery. Trauma turns into Camelot.

There is something to be said for Clinton’s playing the race and religion card, in a modified Swaggart mode. Risky, but consider: Clinton appears on TV flanked by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Billy Graham, the reverends arranged like pastoral bookends in full supportive body English. Clinton, voice husky, sincere, speaks to the camera about the weekend of soul searching he has just spent with Jesse and Billy; speaks about his brother’s drug addiction and about (here goes) his own long troublesome addiction, which is sex; subtly blames his childhood, the alcoholic home; implies the sins are venial anyway, nothing to do with his marriage and love of his loyal wife (squeezes her hand; close-up of Chelsea); apologizes to women he may have offended over the years; fights back tears; asks forgiveness; points to Administration’s accomplishments; vows to go back to work for American people; thanks Americans; asks them to pray for him.

Not bad. But would Clinton want to plead not guilty by reason of addiction? Doubtful: it concedes too much. Which leaves this scenario: Bill and Hillary Clinton sit down with Barbara Walters in the White House family quarters. Barbara is empowered to hear confessions and grant absolution–the priestess of high colonics for the troubled celebrity mind. Her sacramental touch, her extreme unctuousness, is the very thing to preside over the tonal subtleties of this encounter–the faux intimacy, the clucking censure, the wet sympathy. Clinton and Walters might make beautiful music together, a harmony of ineffable falsenesses.

The Baba and Bubba format takes the focus away from semen stains and oral sex. Walters would be constrained by being in the presence of the valiant and wronged wife, and being in the couple’s house, the White House, no less. Instead, after some dignified deflection (the old “there has been trouble in our marriage; we’re working it out”), the interview would come to focus on the marriage itself. The public is sick of Monica and all that anyway; the real remaining mystery is Hillary: What’s her true feeling about all this? How does she stand it? Saintliness? Some Faustian bargain?

Much hand holding. When Hillary is seen to forgive Bill, in Barbara’s presence, why then, 7 trillion viewers (the largest audience in history) not only forgive Clinton en masse but also dare any politician to mention the word impeachment.

The moment, a perfect distillation of a surreal time, is Clinton’s greatest performance and his greatest triumph. He has done it again!

Margaret Carlson NO, THERE’S A TRAP WAITING

I don’t know anybody at the top of the system…who really wants to see the President hurt,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, who could inflict some of that hurt. “[If] he does come forth and say, ‘I made a mistake…'[to] protect his wife and daughter…and then ask for…some sort of consideration, I think we would bend over backward to try and give him that consideration.”

That’s so sweet, but so unlikely. I’ve heard those words many times. Come to think of it, I’ve said those words many times, even though I’ve hardly ever seen it work out. The best example in my life came when my parents heard about a bunch of 15-year-olds who had talked their older friends with licenses into letting them drive around the local shopping-center parking lot after hours, creating havoc. “Just tell me if you’ve ever been down there,” my mother urged. “It will be worse if I find out from the security guards or other parents.” So I fessed up to that heady, behind-the-wheel spin from rows A to N. It’s possible things would have been worse if an independent counsel had forced the truth out of me. But for copping to that escapade willingly, I wasn’t allowed to get my learner’s permit until I was 17.

Although everyone talks about the perjury trap that Ken Starr’s grand jury holds for the President, the confession trap is just as big a hazard. Still, Hatch’s offer has been gaining steam in both parties all week, so much so that the White House put some questions into its weekly poll to test it. Fruitlessly, I suspect, since those polled will inevitably overestimate their capacity for forgiveness.

This doesn’t mean coming clean isn’t the right thing to do–just that it isn’t the panacea some make it out to be. Imagine if Clinton were to confess, reversing his finger-wagging denial and replacing it with a tortured definition of sex to help explain his earlier claims of innocence. Even if he said he did it to spare his family, the support he enjoys among a majority of Americans would sink like a stone. It’s one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered it up (and to have that leak from Starr’s grand jury). It’s another to hear it from his own mouth, to have the fig leaf of doubt removed and be forced to confront our own moral laxity in being willing to overlook it.

The press has long favored confession. The implicit bargain struck with the Comeback Kid was that in exchange for his one get-out-of-jail-free card on the Gennifer Flowers business, he would never, ever fool around in the White House. If he has broken that bargain–and who in the press thinks he hasn’t?–forget some mealymouthed I-caused pain-in-my-marriage explanation. Now that he has caused pain in the country, nothing will suffice short of a full Jimmy Swaggart. The noninhaling, I-didn’t-get-an-induction-notice escape artist must give a detailed accounting on prime-time TV. After that, who would be “bending over backward” with consideration for the President?

The press often talks like a spouse owed an explanation by a cheating husband, but in real life many marriages rely on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: Please don’t have an affair, but if you do, please shield me from it. Some marriage counselors advise keeping a hurtful fling to yourself if you want to make it to your silver anniversary, which, by the way, Hillary seems set on doing, no matter how much we want her to throw the bum out.

For drama, it would be hard to top a mea culpa. Just for Monica’s appearance last week, white canopies sprang up outside the courthouse to shade hundreds of reporters and their coolers of soda and takeout food, their lawn chairs and boom boxes. Add a few prize bulls, and it could have been a county fair; add a bride and groom, and you could have thrown a wedding. Journalists may not relish seeing a President brought down, but what will we do for excitement once the biggest scandal of our time ends?

The only confession that works without fail is the religious kind, the bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned sort. So far, Ken Starr hasn’t challenged the priest-penitent privilege, and for five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, you get absolution. Confession and forgiveness really are divine, not human, and certainly not political. That’s why it’s called a sacrament.