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                                                                                NATION, Page 12

POLITICS

Moment Of Truth


Insisting that Flowers' charges are "false," Bill Clinton faces
the biggest test of his political career

By MICHAEL KRAMER -- Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington
and Richard Woodbury/Little Rock


    Let it never be said that Bill Clinton does not
understand the game and how to win it. As a strategist and
tactician, the Arkansas Governor is as thoughtful a student of
politics as has ever held office. It is not surprising then that
Clinton has developed a bottom-line theory for achieving the
ultimate office. "When you are running for the presidency at a
time when you are just coming into people's lives," Clinton told
TIME two weeks ago, "when you're a relatively unknown
challenger rather than an incumbent, and the public has to judge
whether you can defend the national security, they want to see
how you deal with trouble, how you handle yourself when things
blow up."

    Clinton is in the midst of answering that question -- for
himself, for his supporters and for those he is asking to put
him in the White House. The test of his political life is upon
him. He has planned for the presidency for decades; with a
historian's intensity, he has gone to school on the defects of
all the failed Democratic contenders for the past 20 years. That
a problem of zipper control might be his undoing cannot have
struck him unawares. Rumors of his womanizing have been around
for years. The stories were so widespread that at a 1988
Gridiron show in Little Rock, two lawyers portrayed themselves
as Clinton and Gary Hart and sang To All the Girls We've Loved
Before.

    Last fall, before the whispers became a crescendo,
Clinton, with his wife by his side, shrewdly pre-empted the buzz
by telling reporters that his 16-year marriage to the former
Hillary Rodham had been less than perfect. Whatever it was that
he was admitting -- and he refused to be specific -- he said he
was proud of still being married. As to the exact nature of his
problems, Clinton asserted they were no one else's business. The
revelation was received as a welcome exercise in truth telling,
and the issue faded from view.

    Until last week, that is, when the supermarket tabloid
Star printed allegations by an Arkansas state employee and
sometime cabaret singer named Gennifer Flowers that she and
Clinton had a 12-year affair. Never mind that Flowers herself
was already on record as denying the relationship. In a Jan. 30,
1991, letter, Flowers' attorney threatened legal action against
a Little Rock radio station for "wrongfully and untruthfully
((alleging)) an affair between my client" and Clinton.

    The Star bought Flowers' story for an undisclosed sum
(Clinton says it was $50,000). In graphic detail, Flowers
recounted the alleged affair that she said lasted from 1977 to
1989. Accompanying the tale were partial transcripts of about
a dozen conversations Flowers taped of herself and Clinton over
a 14-month period that ended in mid-January 1992. The Star has
refused to let other journalists listen to the entire tape, but
in an eight-second fragment made available last week, Clinton
can be heard saying that "as long as everyone hangs tough" there
will be no problems. "If they ever hit you with it, just say no
and go on." Snippets of the conversations published by the Star
do not re cord an admission of sexual contact, but the tabloid's
editor insists they confirm an illicit relationship and indicate
that Clinton was urging a cover-up.

    Nonsense, Clinton said last Thursday: "Local Republicans
are behind this." And Flowers' "story is just not true."
Clinton said that after consulting with his wife, he returned
Flowers' calls "every time she called me" because Flowers was
"frightened . . . she felt that her life was being ruined by
people harassing her . . . and offering her bribes to change her
story." Clinton says he urged Flowers to "just tell the truth."
He is not surprised that those words do not appear in the Star's
transcripts: "Well, I'm sure they didn't put that in there. I
told her several times."

    Whatever the truth, Clinton realized that his denials of
Flowers' charges were not enough, so he agreed to appear with
his wife on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday night. How to effectively
stem an anticipated "bimbo du jour" problem had become a
tactical consideration because Clinton was dissatisfied with how
his denials played through the print media's filter. "Too little
control of how it goes over," explained a Clinton aide. "The
only way out is through television." With 60 Minutes' post-Super
Bowl audience expected to approach 100 million people, the state
of the Clintons' union was certain to command a greater
viewership than George Bush's State of the Union address on
Tuesday, a speech sure to be one of the most politically
significant of his career.

    The 60 Minutes segment was taped in Boston in a suite at
the Ritz Carlton late Sunday morning, with a fire roaring the
backround. Dressed conservatively as they sat on a small sofa,
the Clintons were calm and collected. They held hands
intermittently. At one point Hillary Clinton gently rubbed her
husband's back, but there was none of the fawning gaze Nancy
Reagan affected every time her husband performed.

    As for Flowers' charges, there was no wiggle room. The
allegations are "false," said Clinton. The governor said he had
met Flowers in the '70s and he described their relationship as
friendly but limited.

    Clinton did not admit to any infidelity, whatsoever.
Hillary Clinton said the real danger for politicians -- and for
society at large -- is that "there is no zone of privacy."
Clinton's basic line echoed his stump statements: We think the
American people are more interested in what's going to happen
to them in the future than what happened to us in the past. If
perfection was the standard, I couldn't meet it and I don't
think anyone else could. Should we be disqualified because we
aren't perfect and have had our troubles?

    What is the probable fallout from Clinton's approach?

    If he's lying, he's finished. If Flowers' allegations are
true, or are perceived as such, the ques tion moves from
infidelity to veracity, and Clinton can return to teaching law.
He may even be finished if he eventually confirms Flowers'
charges, since he has already denied them. A second potential
pitfall is the possibility of Flowers-like charges by the three
other women Clinton has explicitly denied sleeping with, or
others. A third problem could concern Flowers' current
employment as a $17,520-a-year administrative assistant at the
Arkansas Employment Security Department. A Clinton staffer
"steered" Flowers to the agency, a referral described as
"routine." If it turns out she was placed in her job in order
to secure her silence, Clinton's troubles will mount.

    If Clinton's denials stick, what might the voters'
reaction be? On the night before Gary Hart's 1987 withdrawal
from the Democratic race, a TIME poll found that by a ratio of
roughly 10 to 1, people were more troubled by Hart's lying than
by his extramarital relations. How many people would reject
Clinton if he were seen as telling the hard truth is anyone's
guess. Some, perhaps too many for Clinton's sake, will apply a
double standard that forgives adultery generally but still
determines that a President is a role model from whom perfection
should be demanded -- no matter that many of America's leaders
have strayed without diminishing their effectiveness.

    Some negatives have already been identified. One of the
reasons Clinton leads in the polls is that Democrats are buying
the notion that his centrist policies render him electable
against Bush. Now, says Maryland Democratic chairman Nate
Landow, "some inside the party are worried about what the
Republicans would do to him with this issue in the general
election."

    Another problem concerns Clinton's gender gap. According
to a recent Times Mirror survey conducted before the Star's
assaults, women are 10 points less supportive of Clinton than
men. A Clinton adviser concedes that the gender gap will
increase, "at least in the short run." But "up here," says New
Hampshire state senator Mary Nelson, "we're hurting so bad
economically that I don't think Clinton's personal life will
matter much. I don't like infidelity, but we're talking about
the presidency, and other issues are more important. This is a
test for him, but it's also a test for us. We shouldn't judge
Clinton after he and his wife have resolved their problems."

    A few months before Gary Hart challenged the moralistic
conventions of political behavior and paid the price for his
apostasy, he wrote a mini-autobiography designed, apparently,
to portray himself as normal. The last paragraph read: "The
immortal Yeats wrote, `Not a man alive has so much luck that he
can play with.' As usual," Hart concluded, "Yeats put it right.
A man would be a fool to take his luck for granted." Thus, in
his own words, the fallen candidate's political epitaph: Gary
Hart -- fool.

    With his performance on 60 Minutes Clinton may avoid
Hart's fate, but he well knows the perils that would attend any
further allegations of womanizing. As Clinton himself told TIME
before the first Star story appeared, "The problem with
peripheral stuff is that it can cause people to erase you from
their minds. It's a way of their not having to make a firm
judgment. They've got other candidates to consider, and it's
easy for them to say, `I don't know what to make of Clinton, so
I'll look elsewhere.' If they say that, you never get them
back."