Friday, February 26th, 1999 -- New York -- It was, perhaps, the second time I met Bill Clinton that should have stuck in my mind as the quintessential opportunity to watch an animated and joyful president.

On a perfect Virginia evening a friend and I motored off to Pamela Harriman's farm in Middleburg for an unusually big bash celebrating "her" Democrats and, of course, William Jefferson Clinton.

The table at which I sat had an excellent view of the comings and goings of the nation's illuminati.

They were all there.

I spied Vernon Jordan, and went up to him to remark that I might need his help in a matter that was falling apart through petty offenses committed in his office by a lawyer who was soon to be disbarred for other reasons. Jordan lived up to his reputation -- he was accommodating and invited me up that next week.

As we were chatting about "America's dirty little secret" -- racism -- out from the crowd of more than a thousand emerged Bill Clinton, the new President of the United States.

He crushed my hand in his as if he'd known me all my life and then turned to his friend Vernon and clasped him on the back pulling that big man toward him in a Russian-style bear hug that was to become his signature.

It was pure Bill Clinton -- the Clinton that so many of us have refused to abandon, because the good within him so overwhelmingly outweighs the bad.

It seems decades ago, yet only six years have passed. Pamela Harriman is gone, and with her nearly a century of intriguing and delightful Washington politics. Gone too is the electric atmosphere that permeated her three joined Georgetown houses where so many of our national leaders spawned their campaigns and received the mothers milk of politics in her drawing room teas or backyard soirees.

When Pamela died taking her daily swim in a Parisian pool, Washington lost its head and soul. It was almost as if the Beltway knew she was not around to scurry over the phone to call Clark Clifford and stop the "get Clinton" madness. Clifford, sadly, is gone as well.

I first met Bill Clinton in 1991 at a much smaller and dearer affair. Friends of his held a dinner party at their Maryland estate. A friend and confidante, Esther Coopersmith, invited me for an opportunity to meet the man she was backing for election in 1992. We drove to Maryland and met this man.

I recall how much taller he was than I expected, much as Gabriel Garcia Marquez remarks in the opening paragraph of this essay on "The Mysteries of Bill Clinton," the recent essay published in Salon that prompted me to write this petit memoir.

Marquez wrote:

The first thing you notice about William Jefferson Clinton is how tall he is. The second is the seductive power he has of making you feel, from the first moment of meeting, that he is someone you know well. The third is his sharp intelligence, which allows you to speak to him about anything at all, even the prickliest topics, provided you know when to bring it up.

The Nobel laureate is right. Later that Maryland evening, after dinner, some of us were hustled onto a yacht for chocolate-covered strawberries and a short cruise down the river.

Clinton, of course, was on board.

I watched as he moved through the crowd of fifty or so people. Each got a personal minute or two. Each was treated to a moment of history. I shrunk from the course merely to lengthen the opportunity to study him.

Within minutes I had come to two conclusions: first, he would win his race against George Bush; and second, he would most likely become the most popular president of the century.

It was crystal clear to me -- a cynic beyond reason -- that this man would rise far above the others. But why? Why was a Northern prep school boy like me attracted to this Arkansas traveler? I don't know really know. It's the unexplainable part of Clinton that everyone notices almost immediately. I watched the women nearly melt into pools of tallow as he easily strode their way, much as I would watch them do the very same thing at Harriman's farm a year later. He had that je ne said quoi that has eluded the thousands of politicians that have come to -- and gone from -- the Beltway in my lifetime.

Marquez wrote that an acquaintance of his characterizes Clinton this way: "The dangerous thing about these gifts is that Clinton uses them to make you feel that nothing could interest him more than what you are saying to him."

That friend is also right.

Backed up against the aft stanchions of the boat, I had nowhere to go as Clinton walked that easy walk over to me and began chatting about the campaign. He seemed to know me although he didn't, and I recognized in him the same trait that has allowed me so much undeserved success in my own life -- the ability to size someone up in seconds and to bore into them so quickly that they trust your judgment immediately. After all, if he can know me that quickly and that well....

We talked for what seemed twenty minutes. It was an embarrassingly long time, as other people were waiting for their two minutes with the candidate.

Then we walked forward and he asked if I had any advice for him. I said, "Yes. Ask Jackson Stevens to resign from your finance committee." My reasons for that counsel are private, and whether he took my advice I don't know. However, Stevens was never mentioned again in Clinton campaign literature as far as I know.

What is most interesting about the President is his sharp and very piercing intellect. Marquez recalls that Clinton said in 1992 that his favorite book was "One Hundred Years of Solitude" -- a mention that Marquez thought was designed to flattering cement the Latin vote in America. However, Clinton -- at a dinner given by Bill Styron at Martha's Vineyard -- convinced Marquez that he was completely sincere.

To be honest, I was surprised that a man like Marquez would doubt, for even a moment, that Clinton would trap himself in an intellectual lie. Despite the entreaties of the conspiratorial House Managers, Clinton is not a liar -- and is often the first to admit he knows nothing about a subject. One other thing is sure -- he is not an intellectual poseur. But Marquez assumed the lie and wrote a most powerful defense of it. Marquez recalls the Styron dinner:

Dinner began at 8, with some 14 guests around the table, and lasted until midnight. Bit by bit, the conversation came down to a kind of literary round table involving the president and the three writers. The first topic to come up was the forthcoming Summit of the Americas. Clinton had wanted it held in Miami, where it did take place. Carlos Fuentes considered that New Orleans or Los Angeles had stronger historical claims, and he and I argued strongly for them until it became clear that the president had no intention of changing his plans because he was counting on reelection support from Miami.

"Forget the votes, Mr. President," Carlos said to him. "Lose Florida and make history."

That phrase set the tone. When we spoke of the problems of narco-traffic, the president heard me out generously. "Thirty million drug addicts in the U.S. go to show that the North American mafia are more powerful than those in Colombia, and the authorities much more corrupt." When I spoke to him about relations with Cuba, he seemed even more receptive. "If Fidel and you could sit and talk face to face, all problems would completely disappear."

When we talked about Latin America in general, we realized that he was much more interested than we had supposed, although he lacked some essential background. When the conversation seemed to stiffen a bit, we asked him what his favorite movie was, and he answered "High Noon," by Fred Zinneman, whom he had recently honored in London. When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me."

As the evening with Marquez reached its end Clinton took a phone call from Gerry Adams who he gave permission to come the United State and raise funds for peace in Northern Ireland right there. Carlos Fuentes asked the President who he thought of as his enemies.

The President replied almost angrily, "My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism." Even then he knew who would take try to take him down.

In his essay Marquez takes an oblique hit at the Bible Belt by accusing Jonah of inventing the literature of "fiction" when he buffaloed his wife into believing that he was three days late coming home because a whale swallowed him. Clinton, like Jonah with his "whale of a story," denied his relationship with Lewinsky -- and did so proudly and aggressively as any "self-respecting husband," quipped Marquez.

Like Marquez I feel there is a huge distinction between lying about one's private life and lying about other things that may impact others outside one's family. "It is one thing to lie in order to deceive; but it is quite another to conceal truths in order to protect that mythical dimension of human existence that is private life. Quite rightly, no one is obliged to give evidence against himself, " Marquez writes, cleverly bringing our own Constitution into the argument without mentioning it directly.

Who would not agree that it is much more honest to perjure oneself fighting a secret of the heart than to be found innocent at the high cost of love?

What Clinton is guilty of is just this -- and no more. He made the dreadful error of telling the truth about Monica, and in doing so he made love a lot less than it should be. I borrow this idea from Marquez, who in turn borrowed it from Cervantes:

Disastrously, with the same insistence with which he had denied blame, he later admitted it and went on admitting it over all the media, written, visual and spoken, to the point of humiliation -- a fatal error in an uncertain lover, whose secret life will go into the history books not for having made love badly but for having made it a lot less glorious than it should be.

Ludicrously, he submitted to oral sex while he talked on the telephone with a senator. He supplanted himself with a frigid cigar. He naturally used all kinds of tricks of avoidance, but the more he tried the more his inquisitors came up with evidence against him, for Puritanism is insatiable and feeds on its own excrement.

Now, take a moment to see the President as he is today. He seems so much older, tired and weary of defending himself against attack. Sally Quinn, the Pam Harriman wanna-be dowager to so-called "Washington insiders" -- who is, in truth, anything but -- now carries her sword for Starr. Appearing over and over on pundit TV programs pushing her latest literary drivel, she claims that Clinton did it "to" himself -- he didn't follow "our" rules. She explains her position like the New Moralist she really is -- yet comes across like a pathetic caricature of a slaveowner in 18th Century Virginia.

Sally Quinn is in truth a disgrace to Washington residents, most of whom are descendants from the slaves who truly built this nation, human chattel who built the neighborhood she now pretends to command. Quinn speaks for the true Beltway carpetbaggers and as she does speaks lies so thick as to make anyone with an open mind choke.

Quinn is joined by her coterie: Tony Snow, close friend of Linda Tripp, despicable persons both; Brit Hume, a pseudointellectual whose son Sandy recently and tragically committed suicide because he was gay, caught driving drunk, and apparently had no one to turn to -- not even his father, a man so obviously filled with self-loathing that he could not connect even with his boy, who had tried so hard to follow in his father's footsteps and showed such promise as a journalist; Sam Donaldson, a man on the verge of wealthy, bitter senility; Cokie Roberts, a woman living off her family's disrenown and ill repute, and a traitor to her profession for nothing more than money; Bob Woodward, who hasn't written a word of sense since he was spoon-fed his first book by "Deep Throat"; Tim Russert, whose snide smile so eminently symbolizes his pathetic quest for power while living under the pretense of "just another guy"; Matt Drudge, who steals with impunity other's stories in the wee hours and makes them his own "scoops"; George Stephanopoulos, a simple traitor; Mike McCurry, the Brutus of the 21st Century; George Will, rumored to brutalize his own family and a man so full of guilt he suffers from anguishing migraines that cut him down in mid sentence; and the pitiable John McLaughlin, so frightened of life that he chooses to bellow and bombast through it lest his own lack of reasoning reveal itself.

All these men and women -- including nobodies like Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell -- who will have no place in history other than mention in the footnotes, dare to engage in a hypocritical attempt at the destruction of a poor white boy from a dysfunctional family in Arkansas that rose, through his own intelligence good sense and with his talented wife's aid, to the most powerful station on earth. These nobodies will be forgotten by Americans days after they die. Their evil will live on, sullying the reputation of the man from Hope -- and just for money, nothing else.

But Bill Clinton's name, for better or worse, will live on into history after the names of this modern day media lynch mob evaporate odiferously and instantly into oblivion.

Like a man caught in a time warp, trapped in this 21st-century version of New England fundamentalism in which Salem women were burned alive as witches, Bill Clinton has been condemned to wear a filthy woolen shirt of penitence by Ken Starr -- a modern-day inquisitor-judge in the employ of the Puritan Code.

Every day, the President must endure yet another insult, another accusation, another disgrace, another lie -- all warnings to us pedestrians to "stay safely out of his way."

As Marquez profoundly points out:

The method and the morality of the procedures were essentially the same. When Clinton's enemies failed to find what they needed to bring him down, they hounded him with mined interrogations until they trapped him here and there in minor inconsistencies. Then they forced him to accuse himself in public, and to apologize for things he had not even done, live, using the technology of universal information that is nothing more than a trimillennial version of the drums that persecuted Hester Prynne (in the Scarlet Letter.) From the prosecutor's questions, cunning and concupiscent, even small children became aware of the lies their parents told to keep from them how they came into being.

Didn't they, though.

-- Mac MacArthur