Bob Levey Dan Murano for The Washington Post

Friday, January 30, 1998

Good morning and welcome to a special edition of Levey Live. I’m your host, Washington Post columnist Bob Levey.

Levey Live normally appears each Tuesday from noon until 1 p.m. Eastern time. It’s a chance for you to discuss major news stories and issues with key newsmakers and with Washington Post reporters and editors.

Today from 10 to 11 a.m., our guest is historian and author Michael R. Beschloss.

Beschloss is a specialist in the American presidency and has written extensively about presidents at times of crisis. His most recent book is "Taking Charge," a study of the early months of the Johnson presidency as seen through tapes that were made of LBJ’s White House telephone conversations. Beschloss’s previous books include "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963," and "Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance." Beschloss lives and works in Washington, D.C.

Among the questions we will consider today are: How do President Clinton’s current troubles compare with the troubles of previous presidents? How will Clinton preserve his "place in history?" How will history judge the Monica Lewinsky story?

Your questions and comments are welcome throughout the hour. Because we expect a large volume today, please file your questions and comments early.

Friendswood, Texas: Mr. Beschloss: Although this current "crisis" is in its infancy, I already see something of historical noteworthiness happening. I am encouraged that this scandal has really opened the much-needed examination and debate of the typical American's viewpoint regarding morality. I cannot, however, predict whose morality position will prevail (left vs. right), but I feel instinctively that this is a critical moment in time as the model for moral principles will be formed. In my opinion this event should decide the moral compass we as Americans will follow. Albeit overdue, can this be the moral lesson we've unknowingly longed for? How pivotal do you regard our current discussions of morality shaping ourselves for our future?
...your #1 fan, Deborah

Michael Beschloss: The problem with talking about a crisis like this when it is still unfolding is that it is impossible to make lasting judgments on the basis of facts that may quickly change or become outdated. This certainly has the possibility of causing us Americans to think a lot about the relationship between morality and politics and between character and presidential leadership, however this crisis ends.

One issue we've all discussed in recent years is, Is it important for Americans to believe in a president's character for him to be effective? Most historians before the 1990s would have said that that's essential because the president is not only a political leader but also a chief of state who is expected to be a role model for little children and for us all.

Nishinomiya, Japan: Mr. Beschloss: Why is it that presidential historians have been reluctant to contextualize Clinton's alleged sex scandal with his very public policy on trying to improve life for American children and women and the family? It just seems incomplete to compare Clinton's situation with past presidential problems. Could [you] help clarify the confusion I have trying to understand how a president can push for so many government programs to protect American children while Mr. Clinton is possibly conducting an affair not only in the public White House but also a very short distance from where his ... child and wife were living?

Michael Beschloss: The main reason we presidential historians are reluctant to opine freely on that is that the entire idea of history is that you wait 20 or 30 years or more until you can be fairly certain of the facts you have, and also fairly certain that you have most of the facts that you need to have to make a judgment. So that might be one reason that I and my colleagues have been very cautious on this one. You not only need much fuller information than we now have, but it also helps to have decades of hindsight in order to weigh the kinds of things that you're suggesting in a serious way.

Raleigh, N.C.: The president – in fact all public officials today – are subject to much more "coverage" than their counterparts and due to the increase in media options, we the citizens have more than a dozen ways to access real time info daily.

Here's the question: Are President Clinton's actions that different from other "active" Presidents, or is the coverage just better?

Michael Beschloss: One thing we have to keep on repeating is that everything we now know could look very different even two months from now. And the result is that it is impossible to know how much is true and how much is false.

One thing that we can say for sure is that there has never been a time in American history when a president was subject to serious charges about his private life in a way that endangered his presidency.

Columbia, Md.: I wonder, has there ever been an investigation like this? There have been other independent counsel[s] assigned to investigate allegations of executive abuses, but has anyone had the free reign that Kenneth Starr seems to enjoy? Isn't he accountable to the American people, just like any other public official?

Michael Beschloss: Certainly he is. And his mandate has been fairly carefully circumscribed. But one can never say too many times that this is the first time that this kind of investigation has involved so much of a president's private life.

Nashville, Tenn.: Mrs. Clinton says that her husband's problems are the direct result of a "right-wing conspiracy." Have conspiracies, either from the right or the left, ... ever brought about this magnitude of problem for a previous administration?

Michael Beschloss: No, [they] have not. And, from the information we now have, it's awfully hard to imagine that this is the result of collusion among a lot of different organizations, media and otherwise.

Alexandria, Va.: Having lived within the Beltway during the Watergate scandal, I distinctly remember that it took a considerable amount of time for President Nixon's popularity to erode with the American public. Do you think that President Clinton's high approval ratings will take a precipitous drop should any of the allegations regarding his relationship be found to be true, or will it take months or even years for this to take place?

Michael Beschloss: One impressive lesson from the Watergate experience is that Americans did not rush to judgment. They were willing to go through a 17-month period of disclosure before reaching the conclusion that Nixon must resign. However, his popularity was much more battered after the country fell into recession in late 1973 than it had been before, suggesting that performance can have something to do with the way people evaluate the evidence they're hearing about.

Bob Levey: Often, presidents take on a different reputation once they leave office. As you've pointed out yourself, JFK is widely viewed as a hero, even though he didn't accomplish all that much in office. Could Bill Clinton eventually be seen in the same sort of way?

Michael Beschloss: The amazing thing is that most of the presidents of the last half of the 20th century have one thing in common: They were viewed very differently by historians and later generations of Americans than they were by their contemporaries while they served in office.

Truman's popularity was in the 20s in public opinion polls when he left office, for example. Now historians rank him very high, and for many Americans, he's a folk hero. The reason for this is that we now have a lot more information about Truman's leadership than we had in the early 1950s – letters, diaries, records of private meetings – that showed the heroic side of Truman that were not visible to Americans while he was in the White House.

Furthermore, with the hindsight of 45 years, we can now see how heroic it was for him to make some of the decisions he did, such as those that ended World War II, reduced discrimination against African Americans, and set in place the strategy that ultimately let the United States win the Cold War.

Brunswick, Maine: Mr. Beschloss, In response to a question posed here yesterday concerning the scrutiny future presidents may have to endure, Dan Balz responded that he believes that "we are in an era of greater partisanship and more polarization." Do you believe that future presidents (and their political parties) will fear an onslaught of bankrupting litigation? And do you think that future appointees to the post of Attorney General may well be more partisan in light of AG Reno's decisions concerning the appointment of independent counsels?

Michael Beschloss: On the issue of future presidents, I think it could go two ways. One could be that this is the new state of life for an American president – that he will have to undergo more scrutiny than ever before, even to the point of possibly fearing that Secret Service agents may testify on his private behavior while he is still in office.

American history suggests that there could also be a turn of the wheel which will cause us to say that, except in cases of suspected wrongdoing, it is better to give our leaders a bit more of the distance that they used to enjoy before the 1990s.

Fairfax, Va.: Are we not now seeing the true legacy of Watergate, i.e, investigative journalism taken to new lows, as well as a lowering of our expectation of the presidency to the point where we appear to accept behavior in the White House that we would not condone in our own house?

Michael Beschloss: Watergate had a number of very big effects on American life. One was that, ever since that scandal, Americans have been rightfully skeptical about presidential character. Before Nixon, there was a general assumption that if a person had managed to get himself nominated by a political party and elected president that this could be taken as an assurance that the leader was of good character.

Before the Nixon period, you very rarely saw efforts, for instance, by journalists to unravel the secrets of a presidential candidate's character or psychoanalyze him. Since Nixon, that has been almost constant, and the reason for that is that we are now a lot more sophisticated about the influence of character on presidential leadership. Had we been more sophisticated about Nixon in 1968, we might have foreseen that if Nixon as president felt politically threatened, he might resort to widespread lawbreaking.

Another large effect is that, in order to understand presidential character, we have a new culture of investigative journalism and real-time analysis that didn't exist before.

Seattle, Wash.: Do you think the latest Clinton "scandal," and Americans' statements in opinion polls that they are tired of hearing about the whole business, signal that we as a nation are finally growing up in the area of sex?

Michael Beschloss: I think you can't make a judgment like that in real time. The president's troubles began only nine days ago, and I think what is more evident is that the public doesn't quite know what to think. And I think that's a good thing, because it would be much worse news if people reached definite opinions on the basis of information that seems to be changing hourly.

Richmond, Va.: Regarding the public's patience with the Nixon investigation, isn't it true that when Watergate was unfolding, people in general did not have the mistrust of political figures that they do in a large sense have today, precisely because of Watergate? In light of this, don't you think the Clinton's current favorability ratings must be viewed in a different light, ie., this has nothing to do with patience?

Michael Beschloss: Well, the suprising thing is that this seems to be at the moment a case of man bites dog. Clinton's poll numbers have gone up somewhat since the State of the Union. What one might have expected in the post-Watergate era is that Americans would be less likely to be patient in judging a president.

Bob Levey: Half an hour left with our guest, historian and author Michael R. Beschloss.

Bob Levey: I'm not aware of any taping system within the Clinton White House, similar to the one that formed the basis for your Johnson book. Does this mean that future historians will have to be content with this President's spin on the Lewinsky story? How would a future historian protect himself against such spin?

Michael Beschloss: Good question. We will probably never have the kind of private, behind-the-scenes sources on an American president that we once had. In the case of Lyndon Johnson, we had not only secret taping throughout the White [House] and on the LBJ ranch, but people around the president wrote letters to one another, kept diaries, wrote frank memos and produced other documents that allow later historians to have an immensely revealing view of a leader operating in private.

Setting aside the particular case of the White House intern, one problem we've got in modern times is that very few of the kind of sources that once were kept are now produced. People do not write letters very much anymore. They're afraid of keeping diaries, because they might be subpoenaed. Memos are often sanitized because they might wind up on page A1 of the Washington Post. And certainly, there's no sign that modern presidents tape themselves. The public outrage after Nixon revealed his private taping in 1973 was so great that no president is likely to want to withstand a similar furor.

Bizarrely enough, however, the new investigative culture means that if there are depositions and other kinds of testimony under oath about a modern president behind the scenes – in the current case or otherwise – it could provide sources to future historians that go beyond what we might have had before. It reminds me of the transcripts we had from J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping: Whoever would have imagined that Hoover would wind up being such an unwitting friend to historians?

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Do you think the media with respect to the President Clinton affair is jumping to conclusions too quickly, considering what happened with the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic Park bombing, and the death of Princess Diana?

Michael Beschloss: I don't think the media are jumping to conclusions. I think they are trying to report as much accurate information as quickly as they can. The burden mainly rests with the American people to understand that they are watching a story unfolding.

Watergate teaches us that what may look one way on a certain day, could look different even a week later.

Bethesda, Md.: Living my whole life within the Washington Beltway, I would like to know, since you are a presidential historian, how many presidents have had rumors of affairs either before they became president or while they were president. How many? 2? 5? More? Less?

Michael Beschloss: My guess would be about a dozen, if you simply are speaking of rumors of some kind. But usually, the most serious information we get about presidential private lives emerges long after they are out of office.

For instance, Franklin Roosevelt's relationship with Lucy Mercer was first revealed by his last press secretary, Jonathon Daniels, in 1966, in a memoir – 21 years after Roosevelt died.

Fort Worth, Texas: Would you please talk more about the ramifications of the Secret Service agents having to testify about a president's private behavior? What rights does a public official have in regard to private behavior becoming public?

Michael Beschloss: One interesting part of this is that this became an issue in recent weeks not because of Bill Clinton, but because of John Kennedy. Seymour Hersh's new book draws on interviews with Secret Service agents who guarded Kennedy and told Hersh about certain episodes in JFK's private life.

Even doing so more than three decades after Kennedy left office raises an issue. If a president has to worry that anything a Secret Service agent learns about his private life could become public – even years later – there is a good chance that he might do things that might keep the agents from learning certain things about him, but might also endanger his security.

Without speculating on whether Secret Service agents should or should not testify in the current case, my guess is that in the future we're going to have to grapple with this conflct.

Reston, Va.: Given this administration's ability to obfuscate, duck, and hide, it seems likely to me that Clinton will survive until the end of his term. Given Hillary's strong personality and personal ambition, it also seems likely to me that, should all this prove true, she may divorce Bill post-term. What might the affect be on the Bill's legacy should this happen?

Michael Beschloss: It is impossible to say. Historians, as I've suggested earlier, usually have views about presidents years later that are spectacularly different from the views they had while the president served.

A historian writing in 1961 might have assumed that later generations would see Dwight Eisenhower as a dim-witted, passive, inarticulate president who belonged in the low ranks of presidential reputations. In fact, we see him now as almost the opposite of these things.

That's because, in the intervening 37 years, we have gotten nearly full information and hindsight on Eisenhower as president. We historians have neither on Bill Clinton – particularly in the middle of a crisis like this – and won't for many years.

Lucknow, India: Kennedy and Clinton are birds of the same feather – handsome, virile and have an attactive image. It is normal that women are attracted to them, if not by the looks, by the power they have.
Wouldn't it be better if such personalties are allowed to have "harems" where they can satisfy their desires without being compromised ?

Michael Beschloss: My suggestion is that you move to America, take American citizenship and start a political party in order to have your view known.

Indianapolis, Ind.: It seems President Clinton has an uncanny way of emerging from scandals and crises a little battle-scarred, but ultimately still in charge, still intact as President. Is this Clinton's "slick" ability or are the people around the President THAT good? How does this compare with Nixon's people who seemed to greatly underestimate the power of the press?

Michael Beschloss: Here is another case where it's impossible to make that kind of judgment in real time. One of the central questions that historians ask about a past president is: How much of his leadership was his own doing, and how much of it was his handling by very savvy advisers.

For instance, that is one big question that scholars are asking about Ronald Reagan right now.

Bob Levey: I know you're not a psychologist, but does Bill Clinton strike you as the kind of president who would take huge, reckless risks in his personal life when he has taken fewer in his political life compared to earlier presidents?

Michael Beschloss: That is a big question that historians will ask, and it is also a question that we historians now ask about John Kennedy. For instance, we have known for about 10 years that John Kennedy in 1963 was apparently involved with a woman who was under suspicion of being an East German agent. That was after 2 1/2 years in which Kennedy had dragged his feet on civil rights and social programs that he had promised to fight for in the campaign of 1960.

One of the fascinating questions about a president is, How much of this had deep psychological roots? If future scholars find the same paradox in Clinton, they will be asking the same kinds of questions.

Gallipolis, Ohio: Do you believe a major part of Bill Clinton's legacy will be the demise of the Democratic Party during his watch? Loss of the House and stronger grip on the Senate?

Michael Beschloss: If this crisis grows more intense, as Watergate did, history suggests that it will be very damaging to the Democrats in the mid-term elections this year and could cast a shadow over Democratic chances in the year 2000. But we are a long way from that at this moment.

Vineland, N.J.: Mr. Beschloss: I very much enjoyed "Taking Charge." I look forward to your future books.

On the issue of "The Clinton Crisis": We see several precedents being set during this administration due to legal troubles. The president can now be sued while in office, the attorney-client privilege has been restricted to private lawyers and not White House counsel, the Secret Service may now be required to testify as to what they have witnessed in the president's private life; how will these issues and others as a result of this president's legal problems affect future presidencies?
Thank You

Michael Beschloss: Thank you for the kind word. Unless any of these things are restricted in the future, anyone who runs for president is going to have to assume that he or she is living in a very different climate from the one that surrounded most of the presidents of the past.

Herndon, Va.: Two questions, please.

In your judgment, is there a right-wing involvement, and if so to what extent?

Are the powers vested in the independent prosecutor unconstitutional?

Michael Beschloss: On the first question, certainly there are right-wing figures who do not like Bill Clinton, but there is a very big difference between that and suggesting that this crisis has been fabricated by a national right-wing conspiracy.

On the second question, I am merely a historian.

Reston, Va.: Do you see a parallel between the D.C. city situation and the national situation? The mayor of D.C., a proven adulterer from a scandal-plagued administration comes back years later to become mayor again. Seemingly, the people don't care on the character issue. Now we have President Clinton, seemingly an admitted adulterer with a scandal-plagued administration, and again people don't seem to care, giving him high approval ratings. Doesn't character matter any more, or is the Almighty Dollar king over all?

Michael Beschloss: I think by the end of this crisis, we Americans will have reached some new conclusions on how much leadership is influenced by character.

Pittsburgh, Pa.: Will the historians ever actually parse past statements of the Clinton's for accuracy? It seems that if this is done, Bill and Hillary's legacy [will] simply be cute use of words in their defense?

Michael Beschloss: One of the things that historians do is examine what public figures said in public and judge them on the basis of later information.

In the 1980s I wrote a book called "Mayday," on the impact of the U-2 affair on the Cold War under Dwight Eisenhower, and I was startled to find, for instance, that the then-secretary of state told Congress several untruths. Had that been revealed at the time, there could have been a serious firestorm.

Cincinnati, Ohio: Someone told me that it was common knowledge that President Bush had an affair while in the White House. I don't believe it, but is this a rumor that you were aware of?

Michael Beschloss: This came up during the 1992 campaign. The newest biographer of George Bush reports that there is no evidence to demonstrate conclusively that it was true.

Colesville, Md.: If it turns out Clinton is lying about this whole thing, do you think this will have an effect on America's own personal behavior in the future, i.e. make lying more commonplace?

Michael Beschloss: Here is another case in which it is impossible to know. There is just too much ahead that is likely to unfold. Please give me 30 years and I will come back to you with a lasting judgment.

Bob Levey: In a recent broadcast appearance, you pointed out that other presidents in this century had to confront huge issues, like the Cold War, nuclear war and civil rights. But Bill Clinton hasn't been confronted with anything so huge. Will that affect how history views him and the Lewinsky story?

Michael Beschloss: Historians tend to give higher rankings to presidents who had to deal with big domestic and foreign crises and did so well. Thus, a president who presides during calm periods has a harder time winning favorable attention from scholars.

At the same time, though, if you have a period of peace and prosperity, such as the one in the 1950s, historians ask how much the president had to do with that. Eisenhower said, "It didn't just happen, I'll tell you that." And historians have come to agree with him. Setting aside the question of scandal, you may see the same thing operating in the evaluation of Bill Clinton. But, of course, if the current crisis seriously jeopardizes his presidency, all bets would be off.

Bob Levey: That's it for today's special edition of Levey Live. There may be additional special editions of Levey Live next week, as events warrant. Our next regularly scheduled program will appear on Tuesday, Feb. 3, from noon to 1 p.m. Eastern time. Our guest will be the publisher of The Washington Post, Donald E. Graham.