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Meanwhile, Europe stares in amazement
By WILBUR G. LANDRY © St. Petersburg Times, published September 26, 1998 Neither then nor since have the French press or public considered that the sex lives of their leaders have anything to do with performance or are any of their business. So the reaction in France to the unbelievable (for the French) spectacle in Washington seems to confirm everything they ever thought about both the naivete and hypocrisy of the United States. And yet it doesn't, for the American people are coming off here with the reputation for maturity and good sense that their politicians and news media are seen to lack. One difference between the United States and France (and Western Europe generally) is that European candidates for high office campaign without their families, who remain part of their private lives. The families of American campaigners are often part of the package. There is a first lady, a first daughter, a first dog and a first cat. When a new dog arrives, the whole nation takes part in trying to name him. When the president slips, all eyes are on the wife -- and to be fair, also on his truthfulness, a test that President Clinton has failed. France, of course, is noted for being naughty. French men are supposed to have hideaway apartments and mistresses. And French women, ooh la la, they are the mistresses as well as the wives, sometimes both at the same time. While I have not carried out any scientific surveys, having lived in France off and on for almost 15 of the last 40 or so years, I'm convinced that a lot of that, perhaps unfortunately, is exaggerated and folkloric baloney. Only two recent examples come to mind of sex and marriage in the public domain. One was when Michel Rocard, who aspired to succeed Francois Mitterrand as president of France, rather surprisingly announced that he and his wife, seen to be a model couple, were incompatible and were getting a divorce. It was no big deal. More titillating, near the end of his term and life, Mitterrand himself let it come out that he had a second family and that his teenage daughter by the other woman was the apple of his eye. At his funeral, the daughter stood beside his other children, and her mother was just behind her, a few feet from Mitterrand's widow. Some people may have blinked a couple of times at the sight, but there was no scandal. Commenting on the spectacle in Washington, Simone Veil, senior minister in the last conservative government and now a member of the Constitutional Council, described Kenneth Starr as a "horrible personage" whom she suspected of having sexual hang-ups of his own. While no one should be sorry for Clinton because of a sorry past, she went on, the real victim of the scandal is American democracy -- a widely voiced opinion in France. Martine Aubry, a senior Socialist minister who seems to have a good chance of becoming France's first woman prime minister, had this to say: "Here we have two consenting adults. . . . A democracy should protect private lives; individual liberties are in question. A political power, a judicial power have no right to say what they consider to be moral or immoral." French President Jacques Chirac, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have all weighed in to support Clinton. A couple of Nobel Prize winners, several European authors and entertainment figures have charged he was victim of a "fanatical prosecutor with unlimited power." "In the eyes of a European, in any case of a Frenchman, the prosecution of Bill Clinton for an "immoral' liaison with Monica Lewinsky is stupefying," said an article in the influential French newspaper Le Monde. I have seen only one defense of Starr for only doing his job. Several French newspapers refused to report on the grand jury testimony, and Le Monde was criticized by several of its readers for translating and printing the text. In France, the official public prosecutor is more answerable to the justice minister than an American prosecutor would be to an attorney general. Even if he wanted to, a French prosecutor would never be allowed to investigate the private life of a French president. But there is a juge d'instruction who also acts as both grand jury and prosecutor and can delve into corruption in high places. The row in Washington comes at a time when France is attempting to revise its own legal code to strengthen the presumption of innocence for someone under investigation. Until now, a juge d'instruction has been able to hold a defendant in"provisional detention" while carrying out his investigation. The Socialist government, supported by President Jacques Chirac, a conservative, proposes taking away this power from the investigating judge himself and giving it to a judge not involved in the investigation. Although the grand jury originated in England to correct the arbitrary power of kings, it was dropped earlier in this century when it was seen to be an unfair advance trial that a prosecutor could use to present one-sided evidence that a target had no right to refute, and which weakened his presumption of innocence. It now exists only in America. None of the above squarely answers the argument that the sum of Clinton's conduct has made him an unfit model to be president. France is France, and America is America. In some things, the twain never quite meet. Meanwhile, an old foreign correspondent knows from experience that the first objective of any successful coup is to seize the television station. Starr and the plotters in Congress have done just that. And what is America doing when only it can really lead in dealing with everything from Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic to a spreading world depression? Europe's mouth, almost literally, hangs open at the sight of trial by public opinion polls of a neutered president skilled, at the very least, in bending the truth, and at a Congress fiddling while the world burns, divided and uncertain over which tune to play in order to get re-elected in November. Wilbur Landrey is the retired chief correspondent of the Times.
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E TEMPLE, France -- At the end of the last century, a French president died, presumably with a smile on his face, during a sexual encounter with a prostitute in the Elysee presidential palace. To avoid embarrassment, she left by the back door.
