Last week may have been bad for conservatives, but it sure was good for the canon. Lawyers, lackeys, and cronies on all sides mined their liberal arts educations for a touch of eloquence in the closing speeches of the Clinton trial. Allan Bloom must be smiling somewhere.
White House partisans, as if through a central committee, leaned heavily on 19th-century novelists (Hugo, Dickens, Conan Doyle), the most often cited work being Hugo's Les Miserables. Somewhere a memo (cc: Nicole Seligman, Dale Bumpers) must recommend comparing Ken Starr to Inspector Javert. This allusion of course casts the president as Jean Valjean, a poor man imprisoned and persecuted his entire life for stealing bread to feed his starving family -- which, come to think of it, is pretty close to the official White House line.
There was also active trading in the anti-totalitarian classics. Sidney Blumenthal's now famous retelling of the conversation in which the president compared himself to Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon sounds typically self-serving, but otherwise off-key. For one thing, it would cast Henry Hyde as Stalin, and would mean that the president was being pursued for . . . right-wing deviationism? Finishing-school dean Richard Cohen of the Washington Post flogged House manager James Rogan for not having been a thorough enough prosecutor to read the Koestler book. But, making the generous assumption that Blumenthal was telling the truth, surely the president meant to tell his court intellectual that he felt like a character in Kafka's The Trial. In any event, given Koestler's recent exposure as an abuser of women, it's doubtful we will be hearing any more references to him from this White House.
Republicans, in general, favored Shakespeare's moral vision. "Fair is foul and foul is fair," said William Bennett; Pete Domenici did not acquit himself quite so nobly on Meet the Press: "Oh what a tangled web we have, when first we practice to deceive," quoth the senator. Henry Hyde, though, outdid them all with his closing remarks, which made good use of the St. Crispin's speech from Henry V: "For he that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother."
The only classicists, judging by the closing remarks, were Hyde and White House counsel Charles F. C. Ruff. Ruff made a short nod to Diogenes, the Greek founder of cynicism who was said to carry a lamp around even in the daytime in search of one honest man. Ruff was speaking of the Republicans in their search for a good witness but perhaps subconsciously describing the job of White House counsel under Bill Clinton. Hyde, though, saw Ruff's Diogenes and raised him one, quoting a magnificent passage from Gibbon's Decline and Fall to describe the president: "Severus promised, only to betray; he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation."