Defending the American Presidency: Clinton and the Lewinsky Scandal

Defending the American Presidency: Clinton and the Lewinsky Scandal. By Robert Busby. New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2001, 255 pages.

Over the course of the past few years, Americans have been given an intimate lesson in two hard-to-explain processes unique to the American political system. In 2000, Americans faced the stark reality that the popular vote in a presidential election is sometimes meaningless. In 1998-1999, Americans were taught how the process of impeachment occurs, with impeachment belonging to the House of Representatives and the removal of the president belonging to the Senate. Robert Busby has revisited the impeachment of Bill Clinton in his book Defending the American Presidency: Clinton and the Lewinsky Scandal.

Busby utilizes a model of scandal politics to explain how a secretive affair between two consenting adults developed into a national crisis that nearly removed a democratically-elected president.

According to Busby, scandal politics evolves over two phases. The initial phase, deemed the "substantive action," centers on some event that leads those involved at the heart of the action to develop "unorthodox measures to limit the political damage which might be inflicted upon them." The second phase, the "procedural stage," tends to be the one that causes the most damage, because cover-ups and obfuscation are employed to hide the initial action that set the process in motion.

Busby next introduces two other recent scandals to compare to the Monica Lewinsky scandal--Watergate and Iran Contra--to illustrate how his model can explain scandal politics. The remainder of the book is then devoted to building his case, by ticking off how each event in the Lewinsky scandal lead to another, bubbling forth into the impeachment crisis. Busby includes two chapters at the end of the book to discuss the role that the media and public opinion played in the scandal. He concludes his study by arguing that a number of important factors saved Clinton--a positive economy, stability in foreign affairs, and a public that had been desensitized to charges that President Clinton had engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a woman.

Two important themes emerge from the book. First, and Busby hits this dead-on, is that impeachment is a political rather than a legal process. It has all the trappings of a legal process--an independent counselor secures a grand jury indictment, articles of impeachment are debated and approved, and a "trial" is held in the Senate, with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court acting as judge, to determine whether the President of the United States should be convicted or acquitted. The legal process simply masks what is actually at play--a variety of actors desperately seeking to convince popular opinion that their interpretation of events is the correct one.

The fact that impeachment is a political process is demonstrated throughout the book. There was the Clinton "damage limitation" strategy that showcased the President engaging in the "people's work" while his minions advanced the political case that the whole Lewinsky episode was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt. There was the Office of the Independent Counsel that leaked testimony as a way to gain the upperhand in the battle over spin. Further, the independent Counsel, Kenneth Start, stressed the importance of the legal issues involved while jamming his report full of tawdry moments between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky for no other purpose than to attract the complete attention of the media and the American public. And in the end, the answer to whether or not President Clinton would be impeached fell to who made the best political argument--was it a legal matter of giving false information or was it about sex? Of course, in the end, the Clinton administration and his partisans in Congress made the successful case that the President should not be removed because his actions were personal and not an abuse of the Office of the President.

A second theme that emerged from this study is the distance between elite opinion and mass opinion. A great deal of ink has been spilled by communications scholars who argue that elite opinion drives mass opinion. The elite recognize an important event and then draw the attention of the masses towards it. In the Clinton impeachment episode, editorials roundly condemned the President and even called on him to step down, yet, in every instance, his public approval ratings climbed. The elite seemed to boost Clinton's approval ratings with the American public. Additionally, by the end of the process, the Republicans in Congress, the Independent Counsel, and the media in general suffered in the eyes of the public for disregarding what the mass public felt was important.

While the book is organized by offering a theoretical framework and then using a "case" to test the validity of the theory, in the end the theory is neglected for the intricacies of the case. Busby does not succeed in advancing our theoretical understanding of scandal politics. However, he should be commended for providing elaborate detail of how sex with an intern lead to the impeachment of the president--from what preceded the events of January 1998 through the Senate vote in February 1999. For those who wish to find a "smoking gun" or a startling revelation on the scandal, they will be disappointed. There is nothing new revealed, which Busby acknowledges. But that does not mean the book has nothing to offer. For those who wish to see how spin has come to dominate our political process, this book excels. The chapters on the media and on public opinion, while necessary, do not fit well into the organization of the book. Busby recognizes the importance of new communication technologies, like the Internet, but does not fully develop his case on how or why they were important. How the Internet was used to by-pass both the spinning mechanism of the presidency and the filtering process of the media was very important to this crisis, yet only earn some brief statements by Busby. Further, he could have explored in greater detail those "right-wing" organizations at the heart of Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy" attack that played an enormous role, both politically and financially, in bringing this particular scandal about.

Some of my misgivings aside, this was an enjoyable book to read and has a great deal to offer students of political science, communications, and public relations. For political scientists, the book demonstrates the complexities of the impeachment process. For those in communications studies, the effort to manipulate public opinion via spin demonstrated in the book will be particularly useful. And for those in public relations, how to avoid a scandal and, if one cannot be avoided, strategies of damage control are abundant in the book.

Christopher S. Kelley, Kettering Foundation

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