NEWS ANALYSIS

An Oft-Battered Clinton Emerges Victorious Again

By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, June 11, 1999

HANOVER, N.H. -- We interrupt this presidential campaign to bring you a surprising announcement.

As candidates follow the curving roads around this state, as Iowa and New Hampshire gird for this week's campaign debut of Texas Governor George W. Bush, and as activists build organizations for the race to succeed Bill Clinton, the president finds himself in two astonishing places:

At the center of things in the seventh year of his presidency. And occupying the moral high ground in American politics.

With last night's Oval Office remarks hailing the West's "victory for a safer world" and its success overcoming barbarity in the Balkans, the master of the comeback -- the magician with the gift of turning the world upside down, the political figure who has made a career of defying expectations -- has done it again.

To the immense anger, frustration, and bewilderment of his critics -- a group that at one time or another these past seven years has included almost every corner of the political establishment and large portions of the American electorate -- President Clinton once again emerged tattered but triumphant.

Only a year ago, as the drama of the White House sex scandal deepened, the president still faced a determined independent counsel and a cadre of House Republicans hungry to impeach him and prevent him even from entering the seventh year of his presidency.

Only a year ago, as the president was hiding behind legalisms in his determination to avoid the prosecutor's grip and was constructing rhetorical ramparts in his effort to redefine what constituted a sexual episode, he was a prisoner in the ethical valley, far from the moral heights.

Now, when most two-term presidents are in the least productive part of their eight years in the White House, Clinton is a victorious commander in chief, showing mastery over the military services who treated him with skepticism, courage in the face of a difficult diplomatic problem, and resolve in a struggle against mass murder and what the president called "the awful ethnic cleansing."

And now, when the political establishment had written off his White House years as an embarrassing interlude, Clinton has reclaimed the moral power he admired in another turn-of-the-century president, Theodore Roosevelt, who originated the notion of the "bully pulpit," and whom Clinton emulated in early speeches calling for Americans to fulfill their personal responsibilities in a civil society.

The sound bite from the evening: "We did the right thing."

As a result, Clinton has redrafted his entry in the American textbook, redefined the office that his would-be successors are striving to win and, at a time when his wife is seeking a Senate seat from New York, solidified his family's place at the center of the political debate at the very time he could be expected to be receding from view.

In his remarks, the president identified himself with the great statesmen of freedom in the century just about to end.

He said that "we have sent a message of determination and hope to all the world," a remark with echoes of Woodrow Wilson; he said the United States had "given confidence to the friends of freedom," a phrase redolent with overtones from John F. Kennedy; and he vowed, "We will finish the job," a statement harking back to a vow Winston Churchill made to Franklin Delano Roosevelt before the United States even entered World War II.

Though this astonishing recasting of the president and his place in national life appears to be the result of the mischievous caprice of forces beyond his control, the broad contours of this development were taking shape weeks ago.

In early spring, as the war for Kosovo began, the White House invited a small clutch of guests to join Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, in an East Room discussion on millennial lessons. There, where Theodore Roosevelt's children once romped indoors on their ponies, the Clintons listened to the Boston University scholar deliver an address called "The Perils of Indifference" and then led a conversation about the nexus between morality and politics.

In his remarks about what he called "a violent century," Wiesel spoke of the Holocaust and of the Slavic offensive in Kosovo and, saluting the president, said, "This time the world was not silent."

Elsewhere in the capital, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was holding a special exhibition on the St. Louis, a ship stuffed full of European refugees from Hitler's terror that approached US shores but was turned back during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.

Clinton at that moment clearly was determined to use Theodore Roosevelt's bully pulpit, and was just as determined not to face the puzzling questions that historians have raised about Franklin Roosevelt's failure to recognize early the implications of the European Holocaust.

In winning at least a temporary victory in a struggle that his critics considered unwinnable -- and in succeeding with a military strategy that his critics considered destined to fail -- Clinton has again emerged on top.

More than any one achievement, that ability -- the agility to prevail in the most difficult circumstances, when all the circumstances are arrayed against him -- may emerge as the Clinton legacy.