The Clinton Scandal and the Future of American Government (review)

The Clinton Scandal and the Future of American Government. Edited by Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000; pp. xii + 269. $55.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.

The controversies over the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and all that transpired in its wake have occasioned widespread coverage by the press, as well as a number of book-length publications. This collection offers chapters on the Clinton crisis and its consequences for the presidency (Spitzer), on Congress and the politics of impeachment (Kazee), on the courts and the Paula Jones litigations (O'Connor and Hermann), on the Independent Counsel statute (Fisher), on Clinton and Executive Privilege (Rozell), on the special problems of holding a sitting president accountable for violating the law (Yaloff and Grossman), on scandal as distraction (Quirk), on the ramifications of Clinton's impeachment and subsequent acquittal (Gerhardt), on the paradoxes of Clinton's poll ratings (Andolina and Wilcox), on the Clinton scandal and the new media (Maltese), on presidential personality and the Clinton legacy (Wayne), and on presidential character--Clinton's included--as multidimensional (Pfiffner).

In their introduction to The Clinton Scandal, editors Rozell and Wilcox promise an "in-depth scholarly analysis" (xii) of the Clinton scandal. Its contributors have "different views" (xii) on the scandal, even "strong personal opinions" (xii), but (the editors allege) they "have tried to write with scholarly detachment and fairness" (xii) and, unlike the journalists, legal analysts, and political players who weighed in on the scandal while it was happening, this group of contributors consists of "leading scholars on various topics germane to the events" (xii) who have had the "benefit of time and lack of pressure to try to cash in on the scandal with a quick and provocative book" (xii). Thus their book, it is hoped, will "stand the tests of time and of more rigorous analysis" (xii).

How should the rhetorician weigh in on these claims? Take them at face value? Suspend judgment until after a detached, unpressured, fair-minded reading of the book has been completed? Or respond to the claims with a large dollop of suspicion, the hypothesis being that we are witness here to a rhetorical genre? Call it "the rhetoric of 'true' scholarship."

Having written recently on Bill Clinton's rhetorical dilemmas in the wake of the "Clinton scandal" (QJS, Nov. 2000), I am more than a little sympathetic to the plight of the editors in introducing their book. How else describe their book than as an advance over what went before it? Why not offer the usual nods toward attempted disinterestedness? Isn't the rhetorical situation of preparing an introduction to any collection of original essays fraught with its own dilemmas? Damned if you don't employ the customary tropes of scholarly advertising; damned if you do!

Add to these problems the hypercharged character of the "Clinton scandal" wherein nearly everything sayable is emotionally loaded, including pretensions to affectlessness (Roland Barthes' "writing-degree-zero"). Consider, for example, the editors' choice of names for the "scandal." Would "Clinton-Lewinsky scandal" have appeared more evenhanded, albeit a bit long-winded? Should the editors have bowed to the journalistic "Monicagate scandal" with its intimations of familiarity and implication of invidious comparison? How does one introduce a detached, scholarly book on this topic when every choice of title, and nearly every choice of term or phrase, is subject to legitimate rhetorical critique?

To be sure, there are some questions that a book of this kind must address. But for the virtual absence of rhetorical analysis--for example, of Clinton's extraordinary performance before a grand jury--the contributors covered what was necessary to an assessment of the scandal's impact and implications for future governance. However, like the editors, the contributors confronted rhetorical dilemmas of their own. How to write for the readership of the present while at the same time addressing future readers, such as the college...