White House struggles to keep cool

AS MONICA LEWINSKY was answering the questions that could determine the fate of a presidency, a dozen blocks further up Pennsylvania Avenue, at the White House, an air of stoicism prevailed.

The President, past master as ever of "compartmentalising" his life, gave a scheduled address in the Rose Garden on gun control. Not a word passed his lips on the question that was dominating the airwaves across America: his relationship with Ms Lewinsky.

In the relative cool and calm of the Rose Garden he was presenting moves to defend and strengthen the Brady Law - named after the former press secretary to Ronald Reagan seriously injured during an attempt on the former President's life. That calm, however, belied what was said to be the extreme nervousness of advisers inside the White House.

Responsibility for yesterday's first official statement was passed from the White House spokesman's department to the lawyers. Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for the White House counsel's office, said: "We are hopeful that Ms Lewinsky's grand jury appearance is a sign that this four-year investigation may soon be coming to a close."

The usual attempts by the White House to convince the outside world that it was not distracted by the Lewinsky affair seemed at most half-hearted. President Clinton is now reported to be spending a portion of every day preparing for his own testimony to the grand jury on 17 August.

One Senator, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat sympathetic to the Clinton Administration, was quoted as saying: "Half the White house staff is distracted by this ... The people we need the most are constantly preparing for grand jury testimony."

Mr Clinton himself is apparently concerned enough about the testimony of close White House aides to try torevive his judicial claim for "executive privilege" - the right of the president to keep certain conversations private for national security reasons.

Now that a succession of court rulings have forced Secret Service agents, presidential bodyguards and White House lawyers to testify in the grand jury investigation, executive privilege may offer Mr Clinton his last chance.

Lanny Breuer, a White House lawyer who testified to the grand jury earlier in the week, reportedly refused to answer a number of questions on the grounds that they were covered by executive privilege. If the White House persists in that fight, the whole question could be taken to the Supreme Court in the autumn.

The return of executive privilege as a possible presidential escape route suggested that another option, widely canvassed by supporters and self- appointed advisers to the President over the weekend, was losing favour.

This was the idea that Mr Clinton could best save his presidency by offering a full confession to the American people and pleading for mercy. This "sinner who repents" scenario has precedents in the United States, where coming clean and starting over has benefited many, including, most famously, disgraced preacher Jimmy Swaggart.

Leading Republicans, fearful of protracted and salacious impeachment proceedings and the premature accession to the presidency of Al Gore, joined leading Democrats in appealing to Mr Clinton to confess.

If anyone could bring off such a coup, they argued, it would be Bill Clinton, with his southern Gospel upbringing, his boyish sincerity and long acquaintance with political apologies. The American people, argued Orrin Hatch, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, would be prepared to forgive and forget.Opinion polls tended to support the view that Americans wanted to keep the President in office and thought that a man's sex life was his own business.

The confession option, however, always had two considerations against it. It meant that Mr Clinton would have to go back on his repeated denials of an affair, closing forever the option of toughing it out.

It also exposed him to the charge of perjury - an offence which attacks the very basis of a judicial system. If he admitted that he had lied under oath, the prosecutor and then Congress would have the difficult task of deciding whether perjury was divisible into "serious" and "non-serious", and whether a President could be allowed to get away with something an ordinary citizen could not.

The risk is that, presented with so stark an argument, the hitherto benevolent American public might change its mind.

Ten

Questions

for Monica

1 Did you have sex with President Clinton?

2 Which is true, your sworn denial or the confessions on tape?

3 Why were you logged as visiting the White House 37 times after you stopped working there?

4 What did you do during those visits?

5 Why were you transferred to the Pentagon in April 1996?

6 Why did the US ambassador to the UN come to interview you at your apartment complex in Washington, instead of you going to New York?

7 Why did you keep `that dress'?

8 Whose idea was it to send back the presents?

9 What did you talk to Vernon Jordan (the President's `fixer') about?

10 When did the President first notice you?