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Show The Salt Lake Tribune Clinton Looks or BMA a Tolerable Ye F:xit A202 CALE’ From the Jones Legal Quagmire WASHINGTON -~ At this latestage in the game, PresidentClinton seemsto be suddenly worrying about appearaaces. Heis refusing to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit, everyone is being told, because JACK GERMOND JULESWITCOVER dmission to a helied about Lewin: in the een in the civil case. They aresaying that if Judge Susan Wright had known the deposition was false, she would not have dismissed thecaseentirely. Howeverthelegal case turns out, Clin ton cannot avoid further damage to his eemsa bit of a stretch Butteers arealso legal considerations that go far beyond whatever political damage the Weare might suffer from « settle- Inroe first instance, the sticking point would be seen as an admission of guilt that he did indeed make a crude sexual Thursday. October 22, 1998 appeals courtin St. Paul, Minn., to argue the terms might appear unseemly. is the $1 mitlion Paula Jones has de. manded. Clintonandhis lawyers apparently believe that a payment thai large OPINION an attempt fo influencethe federal gov : pursuit ofthe case Thepresident seemed out of the woods in the Jones matter last April 1 when a federal judgein Little Rock dismissed the case on the groundthat even if Clinton made the sexual advance,there was not enough evidenceof damageto Jones to support a claim she had been sexually harassed But now Jones has gonetoa federal personal reputation from the Paula 's matter. Because he now has con- ceded lying abouthis relationships with TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES both Gennifer Flowers and Monica plicated bythe offer of Abe Hirschfeld, a Lewinsky, his insistence heis telling the while he was governor of Arkansas. But Clinton already had cffered Jones $1 million from his own funds if truth in this case maybe a hardseli. The ultimate irony is that Clinton $700,000, an amount most people would consider substantial enough to lead to the conclusion that he was admitting wrongdoing. If, as he has insistedfor the last four years, he never made such an sawan opportunity to get the moneyto payoff hervarious teams of lawyers and still waik away with a substantial amount herself. She was even willingto drop her previous insistence that any payment be advancein that Little Rock hotel room advance to Jones, why wouldhe pay such a large sumtosettle her suit? The aaswerfromhis lawyers seemsto bethat simplysettling the suit once and for all mightlessenClinton's vulnerabi ty in the House Judiciary Committee im- New York parking lot magnate, to pi she would dropthe suit. Jones suddenly by statementof spology But the president and his lawyers visely decided that Clinton could not be in the position of accepting such help fromHirsehfeld, a man he doesn’t know peachment preceeding that is al and, equallyto the point, one with a reputation in NewYorkasa political gadfly jeopardy who can be a lease cannon. Even if Hirschfeld’s reputation were not so well established, the millionaireis under indictment in a longstanding tax evasion case. That could mean that the underway. If the suit were out 0 way, the president could admit to thefalsity of his deposition about Monica winsky without adding to his legal Thesettlement negotiations were com- payment to Jones might be pictured as might havesettled the Jones case long beforehe was ever summonedtogivethe deposition abort Monica Lewinskythat became the heart of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s case against him. That settlement could have been reached early in 1997 for $700,000 and a statement upholding Jones’s character But Clinton rejected the opportunity because he was unwillingto lend anycred to the Jones case against him. He vas concernedit would look bad — that is, that he would look guilty Now,with the admissionthat helied to the nation for eight months on the Lewinsky affair, that concern has be come an academic matter. The onl is whether there will be legal as wellas political consequences When You’re This Slimy, Stuff Just Refuses to Stick BY ROBERT RENO crook. D'Amato isn’t even hinting he has documents to prove Schumer voted for early release of Holocaust war criminals It's hardto believethat six years ago, this same Senate race hadrisen to such Olympian heights that the main debate was over whether D'Amatowasa drooling fascist or whether New York Atior- neyGeneral Robert Abrams wasa snivel- take seriously as a town councilman, this can’t heip feelingthis campaign has ended up unworthyof both candidates, that genius. ing toad for havingcalled him one. I Whoin a million years would have imagined the Senate race in New York would bythis time have degeneratedinto a mincing contest between two cream puffs, a tiresomepillowfight on — yuk, gag, wretch, yawn — the issues? This could end up being the most ex pensive battle in Senate history, and Democratic Rep. Chuck Schumerhasyet to call Republican Al D'Amato 2 miserable little worm of an opportunist and we haven't seen either man at his best until we seen howeffectively they can hurl pond slime It is not just that issues ae smothered this contest. It's that anes sink to the level of a standoff Am: Schumer an absentee oar: man. Schumersays he has a 92 percent attendance record. bloodracing? Does that get your This is the sort of rubbish getting dumiped on us in what we'd all looked forward to as a historic referendum on the 16-year record of one of the most vulgar embarrasstents ever to inhabit the Senate. He maydrive them nuts, but his detractors cannot take this away from him: The man so manyof us didn’t parvenu no one gave a chance in 1982 against the legendary Jacob Javits, isa Who else could make Switzer- land an ce in Breoklyn? Meanwhile, locked in a Capitol safe. frozen from public stench and putrefaction, are secret records of the Senate Ethics Committee that, if we could but read them, wouldtell us in excruciatiag detail why it conciuded D’ Amato had run his Senate office “in an improper and inappropriate manner” and why he was “negligent in failiug to establish appropriate standards.” This was the unani- mous opinion of the committee’s three Democrats and three Republicans. Asked whyhe blocks release of these documents, the long-suffering D'Amato patiently explains to us ethical morons that it’s “not customary procedure.” theLiberty Bell ee whenit was rung onJuly Humans useonly 10% of their_brain Ken Garff Imports 575 SouthState Street (801) 521-6111 Al5 Americans Are Re-Examining Nation’s Original Sin: Slavery WASHINGTON — It was not enough for Oprah Winfrey to do a movie about CLARENCE PAGE slavery. Shefelt she necdedto liveit too. At least alittle So, she took off into the Maryland woodstoparticipate —- blindfolded! — in a reenactment of what it iiketo be a slave on the UndergroundRailroad. ax I was tempted to ridicule Oprah for her brief woodland adventure(Did she wear her designerhiking boots? Did her personalassistant tag along? What was her pager number? 1-800-TIC-BITE?) But I resisted, partly because I feel her pain 1 s tryingto escape, and I just lost ” shetoldE!, the entertainment cable alanuel ‘Tw terically. I felt these incredible shock waves of pain Then the guy who was my owner, my master, found meandsaid, 'Nigger. you helenato me till Oprah Winfrey, and Feoula take off the blindfold any timeI wanted, but the reaction to beingcalled a nigger wasjust visceral for me. | wanted to quit. but I didn’t. I wanted to feel it all I touched a dark, hollow piaceof hopelessness that I'll never forget. It was a transforming experience for me. | came out fearless because I truly learned whereI camefrom ae ves many other fet Ameri. ry Everybodyin the family knew that my great-grandparents were born in slay ery, that they workedcotton fields in Al- avamaandthat our fainily somehowendured, survived and, after emancipation, prospered Yet, those years before emancipation were4 fog. Our elders remained oddly tight-lipped about them. “Letthe past ury the past,” they would scold us, if slaverywas, at best, too horrible to re. count or, at worst, a humiliation we should try fo forget So, if Oprah couidleaveher limousine far enough behind to make the experienceof slaverymore deeply and person- ally meaningful to herself, more power to her, I am sureit helped her performancein her current hit movie adaptation of Toni Morrison's slave-era novel, “Beloved.” Perhapsit also enabled her to convey moreeffectively the ravages that the peculiar institution of slavery inflicted on slaves, their masters and America’s sense ofinnocence Media interest inslavery happensto beonits biggest upswing since the mania that surroundedAlex Haley’s “Roots” in the 1970s. First there was Steven Spielberg’s movie “Amistad,” about a real slave rebellion. Thenthere's “Beloved,” which cameout at the sametime as the CHICAGO TRIBUNE PBS-TV series “Africans in America America’s Journey Through Slavery Histori ‘a Berlin also has released Many Thousands Gon which de- scribes slavery’s first centuries in colo- nial America as “the foundation on which the social order rested.” Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. also has announced his planned publication of the long-awaited “Encyclopedia Afri cana,” which was envisioned a century ago by W.E.B. DuBois As America faces its most multiracial multicultural century yet, this renewed interest in America’s original sin could not come at a more appropri Yet, this areaof inquiry still ha: to go in makingsense out of slavery Watching thefirst episode of Afri cans in America,” for example 1 was hooked, yetalsofrustratedin ways I am sure Oprah would understand. Techni cally superb and emotionally gripping, it was also intellectually frustrating Strongasit is on the who, what, when whereand howof slavery, it was aggra vatingly weak onthe why of slavery It showed quite persuasively how the first blacks arrived in thecolonies as in dentured servants, just like many Euro: pean whites did. Many earnedtheir free Some bought land and Unequal treatment and full-biown slavery came onei one law and one state at a time begin ningironically in the North. Massachu. setts in 1641 became thefirst English colony to recognize slavery Why, given the choice white Americans, unlike, say, white Canadians chooseto draw stark legal lines between the races long before it was in the eco nomic interests of whites to do so? Theanswer, I suspect, is racism. That's a touchysubjectto today’s Americans, as illustratedbylast year’s f' er the nation should ery. Yet, if we do: 1 Tr wheth for slav the horrors and the banality of racismin this nation’s past, we can only move blindfolded intothis nation’s fulure |
