Clinton: `unhappy heir to the long unravelling' of greatness

As President Clinton's top security advisers came and went at the White House to brief him on the embassy bombings in Africa, alert journalists also spotted other advisers slipping into the presidential mansion.

These were his personal lawyers, Mr David Kendall and Mr Mickey Kantor, who have the vital task of preparing him for his testimony to a grand jury on Monday. Hardly a day goes by that the President does not spend time going over his testimony and wondering what unpleasant surprises the independent counsel, Mr Kenneth Starr, may be preparing for him.

Mr Clinton's aides insist he is staying focused on his presidential tasks, but increasingly questions are being asked in the US and abroad about how the Starr investigation is affecting its main target, who happens to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

Columnists wonder if it is just coincidence that Iraq is yet again threatening a crisis over UN arms inspections; that two US embassies have been wrecked by terrorist bombs.

And have the scandal allegations dominating Washington since January distracted the President from the situation in Kosovo, the stalled Middle East negotiations, the Asian economic crisis, the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan?

The Northern Ireland peace accord is seen as the only bright spot on the foreign policy front. Next month the President will go there to urge participants to ensure the success of the next phase of making the Assembly and the North-South bodies work.

First, he will travel to Moscow for a summit with President Yeltsin, at which the Russian economy and nuclear disarmament will be the main topics. However, the US Congress has so far refused to vote the extra funds the International Monetary Fund needs as it tries to lift the Russian economy out of its crisis.

The New York Times leading foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, writing this week about a "trail of foreign policy wimp-outs" says that "activist rhetoric without an activist President looks like empty bluster".

On the domestic front, the bright promise held out in President Clinton's stirring state-of-the-union address in January has faded. Congress has balked at anti-tobacco legislation and there are no billions of dollars from a cigarette tax to fund the educational reforms on which the President had set his heart.

Mr Clinton showed little fight for promised campaign finance reform as it struggled in Congress, but he is criss-crossing the country raising millions for the Democratic party. He is also stuck in a sterile budget fight with Republicans and has failed to get the funding to pay US back-dues to the UN.

Is Monica Lewinsky to blame for all this? Obviously not, but who knows what impact the long-drawnout Starr investigation is having on a President who cannot turn on a TV or pick up a newspaper without seeing his sex life being dissected?

Mrs Hillary Clinton has answered this question by referring to how she and her husband can "compartmentalise" their lives and not allow personal problems impinge on their public duties. Certainly the President is assiduous in fulfilling busy daily schedules.

Mr Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, is well known for his wide reading and ability to absorb complex issues. Irish visitors are often amazed by his grasp of detail on Northern Ireland problems. But his delays over decisions are also a characteristic.

His Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, and national security adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, insisted at the weekend that the President was focused on foreign policy as the Starr investigation moves to a critical stage for him.

Mr Berger told CBS: "We probably spent five hours (Saturday) on various foreign policy matters, the Middle East peace negotiations, the situation in Africa, the situation in Kosovo, the situation in Iraq. He's doing what has to be done in a very forceful and effective way." Mr Friedman obviously would not agree.

What must be particularly galling to a President who saw his second term as defining his historical legacy is how he has become the butt of cartoonists and late-night comedians. And not just in the US.

He may be responsible for much of his own predicament but the times are also against greatness. As the historian, David Brinkley, wrote in Newsweek this week, the mythology which saw the US presidency as "a kind of magnificent lion who can roam freely and do great deeds" is gone with the end of the second World War and the Cold War.

"Bill Clinton is the unhappy heir of that long unravelling - an increasingly forlorn figure who lacks the great issues that might have given him stature and stripped of the deference that protected most of his predecessors," says Prof Brinkley.

What the President is superb at is expressing the nation's sorrow and compassion at times of tragedy, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, school massacres and now the attacks on Americans serving abroad. This week he will again identify with a nation's outrage, shock and grief for victims as the bodies return to US soil.

He will look and sound like a president should. Yet his tragedy is that the same nation will turn from that spectacle to the ignoble one of a US president explaining before a grand jury what he meant by "sexual relations".