Expel the Pretender. Eve Wiederhold
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PROSECUTOR: Okay. If Monica Lewinsky says that while you were in the Oval Office area, you touched her genitalia, would she be lying? And that calls for a yes, no, or reverting to your former statement.
CLINTON: I will revert to my statement on that.
Prosecutor: If Monica Lewinsky says that you used a cigar as a sexual aid in the Oval Office area, would she be lying? Yes, no, or won’t answer?
Clinton: I will revert to my former statement.27
The Prosecutor’s stated intent, to pose questions “for the record” in spite of his belief that Clinton would not answer, was, at the very least, strange for those of us unaccustomed to legalese. It suggested that his interrogation was a lawyerly, procedural one, meant to be reviewed in a future context in which “the record” would stand as a pristine document and allow for an objective evaluation of testimony by objective judges familiar with the conventions of courtroom proceedings. On the other hand, because Clinton’s Grand Jury appearance was eventually broadcast to citizens (the transcripts were released to the public one month later by the House Judiciary Committee), it was impossible to delimit how “regular folks” would react to the content of those questions. Given that audiences were promised evidence of perjury, some may have wondered if there were other reasons for this exchange. Perhaps the team of prosecutors organizing this inquiry thought that a verbal “probing” into details of intimate physical contact would exercise due diligence. Maybe they aimed to force Clinton to finally crack and admit what presumably everyone could already see. Or perhaps the prosecutor thought that Clinton would avoid the risk of being ridiculed for maintaining a representation of what happened that seemed to be at odds with the detailed picture that Lewinsky had apparently provided. Presumably, the repetition, the “frank” exposure of sexual terms aimed, through their explicitness, to both get to the truth and coerce an honest response from a known equivocator. Meanwhile, that same constellation of devices may have signified to audiences the designs of a too-ardent prosecutor who failed to consider that his version of how to enact a truth-seeking process might raise questions about its legitimacy. And yet, interestingly, many of us who remember the “is is” statement may not have remembered the specifics of this exchange and the ways in which it was contextualized in terms of adhering to representational formalities specifically aligned with the law.
Arguably, the Prosecutor’s brutal questioning could be called “neutrally legal” because of a play of appearances. One can appear to be responsible and ethical by adhering to discursive protocol that promises to represent reason and neutral analytical thought. One may deploy such protocol as if doing so is intrinsically responsible and ethical, and use that general regard for linguistic accountability via representational responsibility as a way of providing insidious cover for an abuse of power. Here, we might locate that abuse exactly in the space of an interpretive conversion where a spectacular act of representation in the form of prying questions got read, at least officially, as an enforcement of ruling methodologies and then officially classified as part of a “legal” inquiry. If any momentary surprise at the questions was forgotten and rendered unremarkable, then it is possible to conclude that the prosecutor’s adherence to discursive protocol superseded all other ways of reading what was significant to that exchange. (Hence, the commonplaces: “He was only doing his job.” “That’s what happens in legal proceedings. Lawyers ask tough questions that make witnesses uncomfortable.”) The particular viciousness encoded within his cross-examination was masked by the ability to read his purposes as being aligned with community standards. Meanwhile, Clinton’s “is is” response was belittled, in part, because it seemed to offer an insincere attempt to participate with community standards.
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