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In the end, the lie that caught him happened to be about sex. What a pity. Because what distinguished this lie was not its substance but the venue: a court of law. Yes, the underlying story is salacious, titillating and, in an appalling way, amazing. Which is what made it such a public sensation. But even sensations fade away. This one did not. Why?
Because the law takes a moving target--and there has never been a moving target quite like Clinton--and fixes it. This lie was frozen in a deposition. Frozen for examination. Frozen for accounting.
That does not happen very often in a frantic media age where tales of every conceivable variety and shade of veracity course constantly through the national consciousness. Because television is a medium designed for leaving impressions, not memories, the television age is one in which facts and words and truth are maddeningly elusive, in which national memories are extraordinarily shallow. Yet there remains one stubborn barrier to total amnesia. The law: ancient, ponderous, interminable, immovable. But fixedly real.
The fatal lie for Clinton is not the one endlessly repeated on videotape of the finger-wagging "that woman" television denial. After all, we've seen the endlessly repeated videotape of the Flowers denial on 60 Minutes. Yet Flowers faded, as does everything on television. Lewinsky would have too.
The fatal lie for Clinton was the one heard only by a handful of people in a Washington law office on a Saturday in January, and viewed later on tape by a few jurors in an Arkansas courtroom. It is to be found deep in the transcript of a long deposition in an even longer case, indeed a case that was later dismissed. But once that lie was made, the law forced an accounting.
"Except on really important occasions," writes Graham Greene of one of his spies, "he always preferred the truth. The truth can be double-checked." It has been Clinton's good fortune that politics is not very good at double-checking. The law, however, is.