September 22, 1998

THE DEPOSITION

Nation Views Clinton, Furious and Sad, Testifying Before Grand Jury

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

ASHINGTON -- In an extraordinary and grueling display, President Clinton's grand jury testimony was broadcast to the nation Monday as a centerpiece in his possible impeachment, with Clinton alternately argumentative and contrite, furious and crestfallen as he dueled with criminal prosecutors over perjury allegations in the White House sex scandal.

"I'd give anything in the world not to have to admit what I've had to admit today," the president declared dolefully in his four-hour video-taped testimony. Even so, he repeatedly rebuffed prosecutors' attempts to have him discuss in detail his sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern, and the seven months of denials that followed.

THE PRESIDENT UNDER FIRE

Today's Times The Videotape: On Camera, President Shows His Many Sides The Four Hours: With Shame and Sympathy, Nation Watches Clinton The Reaction: America's Pro and Con to All That Q. & A. The Networks: Hesitantly, TV Executives Decide Show Must Go On Critic's Notebook: Clinton's Role of Lifetime Breaks Cinema's Rules News Analysis: Clinton Video Provides Evidence to Back Every Viewpoint The President: With Nation Glued to TV, He Sticks With Peers The Evidence: A View That Starr's Report Is Not Backed by the Facts The Letters: Lawyers Showed Mutual Distrust Suspicion and Resentment in Letters From Lawyers The Intern: Grand Jury Sympathized With Distraught Lewinsky Lewinsky's Testimony on Love, Friend and Family News Analysis: Next Step for Congress: Impeachment Decision The Prosecution: Starr's Team Hammered Hard to Catch the President in Lies Germany: Kohl Says He's Disgusted by Release of the Tapes The Governor: After Watching Testimony Tape, Whitman Calls for Resignation Clinton's Grand Jury Testimony Video and Text Excerpts Complete Video of Clinton Grand Jury Testimony Documents Supporting Documents to the Starr Report Highlights of Clinton Testimony Text of Starr Report Text of Clinton's Rebuttal Issue in Depth The President Under Fire

Clinton's words echoed through office warrens and family rooms as a team of prosecutors led by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr aggressively bored in on the chief executive in the Aug. 17 White House testimony in seeking grounds for Congress to remove him from office.

"We have seen this four-year, $40-million investigation come down to parsing of the definition of sex," the president complained in a broadside at Starr, who used his original Whitewater mandate to branch out into the sex-and-mendacity allegations of presidential misconduct.

As the nation was transfixed by the televised spectacle of Clinton's being the first president to testify as a criminal target, the scandal inquiry moved apace on Capitol Hill. The House Judiciary Committee released thousands of pages of additional evidence, notably the full grand jury testimony of Ms. Lewinsky.

"Nobody ever asked me to lie," said Ms. Lewinsky, who delighted Clintonites by testifying that at different points she had told lies to Linda Tripp, Ms. Lewinsky's erstwhile friend who furtively taped her tales of a presidential affair. Ms. Lewinsky said Ms. Tripp also had encouraged her to keep the notoriously stained dress as evidence of her interplay with the president.

"Stabbed her in the back," the president said in his own testimony, speaking of Ms. Tripp's behavior.

For his part, Starr's report has noted that the FBI found some of the Tripp recordings are duplicate tapes, raising the possibility that "she has lied under oath" in testifying that all were originals.

With additional material expected within the week, there was no immediate measure of how the public airing of the presidential testimony might affect House members who have been predicting a formal impeachment inquiry. Many of them have already concluded Clinton lied but are pondering whether that merits impeachment.

Clinton admitted to "inappropriate intimate contact" with Ms. Lewinsky, but he adamantly resisted attempts to prove that he had misused his office, suborned perjury or lied in the earlier Paula Jones civil lawsuit deposition in which he denied having sexual intercourse with Ms. Lewinsky.

"These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse," the president maintained, denying that the instances of oral sex described to the grand jury by Ms. Lewinsky amounted to evidence of perjury. He contended there was a "common understanding" among Americans that sexual relations must include intercourse.

"I'll bet the grand jurors, if they were talking about people they know, and said they have a sexual relationship, they meant they were sleeping together; they meant they were having intercourse together," Clinton declared looking directly at the camera in facing the grand jury and, now, the nation.

As it developed, grand jurors sent back word from the panel room down Pennsylvania Avenue that they were not satisfied and wanted him to answer more directly and specifically. But the president politely refused to accommodate them.

"I do not want to discuss something that is intensely painful to me," he declared in refusing to venture beyond his careful admission of "inappropriate intimate contact." The issue is crucial, for an admission to outright perjury in the Jones suit would feed the mood of House Republicans to open an impeachment inquiry and eventually present charges for Clinton's trial in the Senate.

The president's testimony filled a 3,183-page book that was instantly on sale across the nation, replete with photographic evidence of the Lewinsky assignation dress. Even more, the testimony produced countless moments of embarrassment for Clinton, who at one point denied any knowledge of Ms. Lewinsky's assertion that he had once talked to her of leaving the first lady.

For all the hard-eyed adversarial stakes, Clinton managed at times to smile and be genial in answering, as when he declared he was unsurprised that Ms. Lewinsky told people about her dealings with him. "She couldn't help it; it's part of her psyche," said the president who last January denied he had sex with "that woman."

In an avuncular tone, he maintained he only tried to help her find a job out of friendship, not anti-prosecutorial intrigue at the White House. "She's a good young woman with a good young heart," he said.

Elsewhere, the city was awash in partisan post-mortems, with Democrats noting the prosecutors did not pursue such once headlined issues as the "talking points" memo. Republicans insisted that, even allowing for Clinton's qualified definition of sex, Ms. Lewinsky testified clearly that he had touched her intimately, even by the Jones suit definition. Michael McCurry, the president's spokesman, said the testimony mainly showed how prosecutors sought to "browbeat and badger" Clinton and that its release by House Republicans was steeped in "rank partisanship."

The president attempted a course in which was he alternately apologetic for his personal behavior and firmly defensive of his national stewardship.

"I did what people do when they do the wrong thing," Clinton summarized of his sexual misbehavior and his attempts to keep it private. "I tried to do it when nobody else was looking."

Prosecutors, delving into ever deepening levels of embarassing detail -- even mentioning the use of "sexual aid" -- took turns in trying to budge the president from his defense of his actions. While he appeared to seethe at that detailed description from Ms. Lewinsky's testimony, he held to his previous denial.

"I will revert to my former statement," Clinton said, offering a steely glare, but not following the prosecutor down that path.

"I am not going to answer your trick questions," Clinton added sharply when a prosecutor, his tone dripping with doubt, asked whether the president was fulfilling his oath to "tell the whole truth."

Even as he fenced with questioners over the precise meaning of such words as "is" and "alone," Clinton's demeanor seemed to strengthen and he complained that, from the first, his problem was rooted in political enemies aiming "a wrecking ball" at him.

"You're dealing with, in some ways, the most mysterious area of human life," he said of sex, attempting to draw Rashomon-like parallels with his problem and the clash of allegations seven years ago between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas as Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court. "I'm doing the best I can to give you honest answers."

Of the Hill-Thomas clash, Clinton said, "I think they both thought they were telling the truth."

But Starr prosecutors pressed him with the physical evidence of his own predicament.

" Mr. President, if there is a semen stain belonging to you on a dress of Ms. Lewinsky's, how would you explain that?" asked prosecutor Robert Bittman.

In reply, the president, noting he had volunteered a DNA blood test, declined to discuss any details. "That's a question you already know the answer to," he said. "Not if, but you know whether."

At the heart of Clinton's problem in facing Starr was his six-hour deposition on Jan. 17 before lawyers for Ms. Jones who, unbeknownst to the president, had heard detailed allegations about Ms. Lewinsky from Ms. Tripp.

"My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful," Clinton told the grand jury when asked about the initial denials of a Lewinsky relationship. "I deplored it," he said of the Jones suit. "But I was determined to walk through the mine field of this deposition without violating the law. And I believe I did."

His questionners pressed him most particularly on his declining to answer detailed questions about his argument that oral sex was not part of sexual relations. A grand juror's question was relayed to him: "What legal basis are you declining to answer these questions?"

The president, who throughout the scandal has declined any suggestion that he would resort to his Fifth Amendment right not to answer incriminating questions, replied that he did not consider himself required "to say and do things that I don't think are necessary, and that I think, frankly, go too far in trying to criminalize my private life."

To another juror's question about oral sex, the president underlined the distinction in the Jones suit listing several erogenous zones in the definition of sex. "Because that is," said the president, "if the deponent is the person who has oral sex performed on him, then the contact is with -- not with anything on that list, but with the lips of another person. It seems to be self-evident that that's what it is."

In trying to build a case that the president abused his office, prosecutors asked about his denying misbehavior to his key aides so that they defended him daily in public until his qualified recanting to the nation after his Aug. 17 grand jury testimony. He replied that he tried to tell them a story "that would be true, even if misleading."

"I said I have not had sex with her, as I define it," he said. "So I said things that were true. They may have been misleading, and if they were, I will have to take responsibility for it, and I'm sorry."

Of his meetings with Betty Currie, his White House secretary, Clinton said he was only to trying to freshen his memory about Ms. Lewinsky's visits, not illicitly coach Mrs. Currie in advance of Starr's investigators. "I wasn't trying to get her to say something that wasn't so," he declared.

Clinton did not hesitate to use his considerable skills as a polished public speaker and lawyer, and even presented the argument that history itself impelled him to be sparing in discussing the lurid sexual details of his misbehavior that have consumed much of the nation.

"I would say this to the grand jury: Put yourself in my position," he said, noting how unusual the proceeding was and how he had already suffered "a breathtaking number of leaks" from prosecutors.

"I think I am right to answer all the questions about perjury," he continued in his testimony, which was sealed as he spoke. "But not to say things which will be forever in the annals of the United States because of this unprecedented videotape and may be leaked at any time. I think it's a mistake."

At various points, the Starr prosecutors appeared thoroughly frustrated by the president's performance, particularly when they sought to pin down his attorney's flat-out denial last January of any sex with Ms. Lewinsky. "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' means," he replied. "If 'is" means 'is and never has been,' that's one thing. If it means, 'there is none,' that was a completely true statement."

The president made no apologies for his language. As he concluded, he made sure to include a summary worthy of a career campaign speaker, in which he said he had to "contend with things no previous president has ever had to contend with," including the Jones lawsuit, now dismissed, and the lengthy, costly Starr inquiry that has dogged his days of incumbency.

"And during this whole time, I have tried as best I could to keep my mind on the job the American people gave me," he declared, looking squarely into the grand jury camera.