Politics: Moment Of Truth

By Michael Kramer

Let it never be said that Bill Clinton does not understand the game and how to win it. As a strategist and tactician, the Arkansas Governor is as thoughtful a student of politics as has ever held office. It is not surprising then that Clinton has developed a bottom-line theory for achieving the ultimate office. "When you are running for the presidency at a time when you are just coming into people's lives," Clinton told TIME two weeks ago, "when you're a relatively unknown challenger rather than an incumbent, and the public has to judge whether you can defend the national security, they want to see how you deal with trouble, how you handle yourself when things blow up."

Clinton is in the midst of answering that question -- for himself, for his supporters and for those he is asking to put him in the White House. The test of his political life is upon him. He has planned for the presidency for decades; with a historian's intensity, he has gone to school on the defects of all the failed Democratic contenders for the past 20 years. That a problem of zipper control might be his undoing cannot have struck him unawares. Rumors of his womanizing have been around for years. The stories were so widespread that at a 1988 Gridiron show in Little Rock, two lawyers portrayed themselves as | Clinton and Gary Hart and sang To All the Girls We've Loved Before.

Last fall, before the whispers became a crescendo, Clinton, with his wife by his side, shrewdly pre-empted the buzz by telling reporters that his 16-year marriage to the former Hillary Rodham had been less than perfect. Whatever it was that he was admitting -- and he refused to be specific -- he said he was proud of still being married. As to the exact nature of his problems, Clinton asserted they were no one else's business. The revelation was received as a welcome exercise in truth telling, and the issue faded from view.

Until last week, that is, when the supermarket tabloid Star printed allegations by an Arkansas state employee and sometime cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers that she and Clinton had a 12-year affair. Never mind that Flowers herself was already on record as denying the relationship. In a Jan. 30, 1991, letter, Flowers' attorney threatened legal action against a Little Rock radio station for "wrongfully and untruthfully ((alleging)) an affair between my client" and Clinton.

The Star bought Flowers' story for an undisclosed sum (Clinton says it was $50,000). In graphic detail, Flowers recounted the alleged affair that she said lasted from 1977 to 1989. Accompanying the tale were partial transcripts of about a dozen conversations Flowers taped of herself and Clinton over a 14- month period that ended in mid-January 1992. The Star has refused to let other journalists listen to the entire tape, but in an eight-second fragment made available last week, Clinton can be heard saying that "as long as everyone hangs tough" there will be no problems. "If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on." Snippets of the conversations published by the Star do not record an admission of sexual contact, but the tabloid's editor insists they confirm an illicit relationship and indicate that Clinton was urging a cover-up.

Nonsense, Clinton said last Thursday: "Local Republicans are behind this." And Flowers' "story is just not true." Clinton said that after consulting with his wife, he returned Flowers' calls "every time she called me" because Flowers was "frightened . . . she felt that her life was being ruined by people harassing her . . . and offering her bribes to change her story." Clinton says he urged Flowers to "just tell the truth." He is not surprised that those words do not appear in the Star's transcripts: "Well, I'm sure they didn't put that in there. I told her several times." -

Whatever the truth, Clinton realized that his denials of Flowers' charges were not enough, so he agreed to appear with his wife on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday night. How to effectively stem an anticipated "bimbo du jour" problem had become a tactical consideration because Clinton was dissatisfied with how his denials played through the print media's filter. "Too little control of how it goes over," explained a Clinton aide. "The only way out is through television." With 60 Minutes' post-Super Bowl audience expected to approach 100 million people, the state of the Clintons' union was certain to command a greater viewership than George Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday, a speech sure to be one of the most politically significant of his career.

The 60 Minutes segment was taped in Boston in a suite at the Ritz Carlton late Sunday morning, with a fire roaring the backround. Dressed conservatively as they sat on a small sofa, the Clintons were calm and collected. They held hands intermittently. At one point Hillary Clinton gently rubbed her husband's back, but there was none of the fawning gaze Nancy Reagan affected every time her husband performed.

As for Flowers' charges, there was no wiggle room. The allegations are "false," said Clinton. The governor said he had met Flowers in the '70s and he described their relationship as friendly but limited.

Clinton did not admit to any infidelity, whatsoever. Hillary Clinton said the real danger for politicians -- and for society at large -- is that "there is no zone of privacy." Clinton's basic line echoed his stump statements: We think the American people are more interested in what's going to happen to them in the future than what happened to us in the past. If perfection was the standard, I couldn't meet it and I don't think anyone else could. Should we be disqualified because we aren't perfect and have had our troubles?

What is the probable fallout from Clinton's approach?

If he's lying, he's finished. If Flowers' allegations are true, or are perceived as such, the question moves from infidelity to veracity, and Clinton can return to teaching law. He may even be finished if he eventually confirms Flowers' charges, since he has already denied them. A second potential pitfall is the possibility of Flowers-like charges by the three other women Clinton has explicitly denied sleeping with, or others. A third problem could concern Flowers' current employment as a $17,520-a-year administrative assistant at the Arkansas Employment Security Department. A Clinton staffer "steered" Flowers to the agency, a referral described as "routine." If it turns out she was placed in her job in order to secure her silence, Clinton's troubles will mount.

If Clinton's denials stick, what might the voters' reaction be? On the night before Gary Hart's 1987 withdrawal from the Democratic race, a TIME poll found that by a ratio of roughly 10 to 1, people were more troubled by Hart's lying than by his extramarital relations. How many people would reject Clinton if he were seen as telling the hard truth is anyone's guess. Some, perhaps too many for Clinton's sake, will apply a double standard that forgives adultery generally but still determines that a President is a role model from whom perfection should be demanded -- no matter that many of America's leaders have strayed without diminishing their effectiveness.

Some negatives have already been identified. One of the reasons Clinton leads in the polls is that Democrats are buying the notion that his centrist policies render him electable against Bush. Now, says Maryland Democratic chairman Nate Landow, "some inside the party are worried about what the Republicans would do to him with this issue in the general election."

Another problem concerns Clinton's gender gap. According to a recent Times Mirror survey conducted before the Star's assaults, women are 10 points less supportive of Clinton than men. A Clinton adviser concedes that the gender gap will increase, "at least in the short run." But "up here," says New Hampshire state senator Mary Nelson, "we're hurting so bad economically that I don't think Clinton's personal life will matter much. I don't like infidelity, but we're talking about the presidency, and other issues are more important. This is a test for him, but it's also a test for us. We shouldn't judge Clinton after he and his wife have resolved their problems."

A few months before Gary Hart challenged the moralistic conventions of political behavior and paid the price for his apostasy, he wrote a mini- autobiography designed, apparently, to portray himself as normal. The last paragraph read: "The immortal Yeats wrote, 'Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with.' As usual," Hart concluded, "Yeats put it right. A man would be a fool to take his luck for granted." Thus, in his own words, the fallen candidate's political epitaph: Gary Hart -- fool.

/ With his performance on 60 Minutes Clinton may avoid Hart's fate, but he well knows the perils that would attend any further allegations of womanizing. As Clinton himself told TIME before the first Star story appeared, "The problem with peripheral stuff is that it can cause people to erase you from their minds. It's a way of their not having to make a firm judgment. They've got other candidates to consider, and it's easy for them to say, 'I don't know what to make of Clinton, so I'll look elsewhere.' If they say that, you never get them back."

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Little Rock