Jurisprudence?
No, Legal Prurience More
Kinsey than Kenneth  NOW
THAT I am temporarily not a guest of the
people of the United States, and back in
my home city, London, I can say without
fear of discourtesy that a lot of us have
never liked Bill Clinton.
Never
mind the impenetrable tangle of financial
and real-estate dealings in which he
evidently engaged as governor of Arkansas,
or the tawdry sale of favours to raise
funds for his party. Never mind the
granting of a plot in Arlington National
Cemetery, resting place of heroes, to a
dying friend, Ambassador Lawrence,
on that man's perjured assurance that he
had fought in the Arctic Convoy battles
(Lawrence escaped the WW.II draft as a
student in California. Perhaps Lawrence
was suffered from recovered-memory
syndrome; about which volumes can be
written -- but that is another story).
Bill
Clinton is many things - a
man so concerned with his looks that he
ordered Air Force One held athwart the
main runway at Los Angeles
International airport for an hour while
his personal hairdresser fixed the
bouffant hair:
- a
commander in chief who dodged the
draft, but was not squeamish about
ordering other men into battle:
- a
president who cited the name of Our
Lord and quoted from a Yom Kippur
prayer to curry favour from those he
asked for forgiveness.
 ALL
OF these things seem offensive to the
common man.
And
yet, deep down, all ordinary men
must be affronted by what the lawyers have
now done for a second time to a U.S.
president, indeed to the institution of
the presidency. The English have never
really understood Watergate, except that
it spun off the hair-thin tripwires that
provided sufficient purchase to pull down
President Nixon.  Thinking,
decent people understand the latest
manufactured scandals, about the White
House, the Oval Office, and Miss Monica
Lewinsky, even less.
It
is true, they reveal the president as
surrounded by the most appallingly
incompetent advisers. If
he had stepped forth earlier this year,
when the scandal first broke, and admitted
that there was substance to the
allegations but that, since a young lady's
reputation was at stake, he proposed to
remain silent; or if he had, later on,
admitted telling lies, but advanced in
self-justification the same reason, namely
he had wanted to protect her reputation
(rather than his) -- in effect whitening
the lies -- he would have proven
unimpeachable. As said, he is poorly
advised, and if he survives this crisis,
heads should surely roll.  WHAT
REMAINS after the millions have pawed over
the report by Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr is a very nasty
aftertaste indeed -- the dim perception
that all of this has been done less for
the purification of the presidency, than
for the entertainment of the masses; less
to advance the cause of democracy, than to
satisfy the sophomoric lingerie-level
interest of Starr and his fellow
inquisitors.
The
famous Starr Report has more Kinsey about
it than Kenneth. He could have saved the
American taxpayer the $40m allegedly spent
so far: he could have slotted a handful of
his own quarters into a machine at an
adult-video arcade and given himself the
same thrills in private. Instead,
armed with all the powers of the Grand
Jury, the threat of jail for contempt, and
the suited muscle of powerful teams of
lawyers, the insufferably smug Independent
Counsel and his gang, who would never
dream of taking up with a young and comely
office flirt themselves -- yeah, right--,
have put their collective lawyers' eye to
the keyhole, to take a long, lingering,
four-hundred-page peep at what one
consenting heterosexual man and a young
woman get up to when they, foolishly,
imagine themselves beyond the prying eyes
of outsiders. There
remains a historic lesson, which the
President of the United States (and his
advisers, who are now jumping the Clinton
ship in rat-like droves) will not like to
hear:- If
this had been the Third Reich, Starr, and
not Clinton, would have found himself in
hot water. Adolf Hitler would have
seen to that. In a Nazi regulation* that
is rarely quoted (it is in my
Hitler's
War),
one which Heinrich Himmler and the
Reich Ministry of Justice issued on
Hitler's orders on August 11, 1942, it was
forbidden to interrogate women under any
circumstances about their sexual relations
with men.  The
lawyer-hating Führer had gained the
impression, the new regulation said, that
prosecutors conducted such interrogations
purely for one purpose: their own sexual
gratification. This is an impression, sad
to say, which lingers around the whole
Starr Report.
*
German Federal Archives,
Reichsjustiz-Ministerium files, R22,
file 1085 vol. ii. |
write to David Irving