WASHINGTON -- With the specter of impeachment looming, the House of Representatives beamed President Clinton's sexually explicit grand jury session into millions of American homes yesterday. The national television audience saw an evasive Clinton spar with prosecutors over intimate details of his private life but give no ground on his denial of a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

As expected, the four hours of history-making videotape included graphic and, at times, shocking descriptions of intimate behavior involving the president and the former White House intern. In the unblinking eye of a single fixed camera, Clinton seems by turns charming, morose, flip, argumentative and self-pitying. At one point, he wags his finger at prosecutors in the same manner he used in January when he publicly denied having had a sexual affair with "that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

White House aides and congressional Republicans said it would take several days at least, to measure the impact of the videotape on public opinion. Overall, however, the taped testimony seemed to fall far short of the advance billings of both Clinton's defenders and his foes -- who had predicted that emotional fireworks would be on display.

Details of his testimony were previously covered by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's 445-page report to the House. Whether Clinton lied in his testimony about the relationship -- which Lewinsky said involved intimate touching by Clinton that he denies -- still boils down to a he-said, she-said situation.

Clinton told the grand jury that he had not lied in denying a sexual relationship with Lewinsky in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual misconduct case, asserting that their encounters did not meet the definition of sexual relations offered by her lawyers. But Lewinsky has testified that Clinton touched her in a manner that would meet that definition.

'The most mysterious area'

Volunteering his own view on the last such controversy to come before Congress -- the 1991 testimony of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill -- Clinton remarked: "I believed that they both thought they were telling the truth. This is, you're dealing with, in some ways, the most mysterious area of human life. I'm doing the best I can to give you honest answers."

Yesterday was the first opportunity for most Americans to see Clinton employing a full array of verbal gymnastics and semantic line-drawing as he fought prosecutors' attempts to prove that he lied when he denied under oath in January that he had had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

'Some sort of gotcha game'

Referring to that testimony in the Jones case, Clinton said Jones' lawyers were playing "some sort of a gotcha game" when they took his deposition.

"My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful," Clinton testified, a low growl creeping into his voice. "But I was determined to walk through the minefield of this deposition without violating the law, and I believe I did."

In his report to the House 10 days ago, Starr alleged that Clinton lied about Lewinsky in the Jones case, and he cited that allegation as the first of 11 potential grounds for impeachment of the president.

A matter of definition

Clinton testified that he "did things that were, when I was alone with her, that were inappropriate and wrong." But he also defended the truthfulness of his testimony in the Jones case, which Clinton described as a "bogus" lawsuit, when he testified under oath that he did not recall being alone with Lewinsky.

"Well, again, it depends on how you define 'alone,' " he said, smiling. "There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were."

Clinton refused to answer most of the prosecutors' direct questions about the details of his sexual encounters with Lewinsky, explaining his reticence as "an effort to preserve the dignity of the office I hold."

"I do not want to discuss something that is intensely painful to me," he said. "This has been tough enough already on me and my family, although I take responsibility for it. I have no one to blame but myself."

Lapses in memory

At other times, Clinton claimed that his memory had failed him, even though, by all estimates, he has a near-photographic memory and can recall thousands of names and faces of people he has met only once or twice.

"I have been blessed and advantaged in my life with a good memory," he testified, but added that he and his friends have been surprised by how many things he has forgotten since he became president. Clinton suggested that "the pressure of your four-year inquiry" was partly to blame.

During his testimony last month, sent via closed-circuit television to the federal courthouse, where the grand jurors were gathered, the president seems to have been intensely aware that his appearance -- the first by a president before a grand jury %J investigating him as its principal target -- would be made public someday. He notes his reluctance to provide answers about his sexual behavior that would become part of the annals of the presidency.

Air of resentment

And hinting at what the Clinton team regards as the partisan motives of the independent counsel's office, the president and his lawyer, David E. Kendall, ask a Starr assistant at the conclusion of the testimony whether the only reason for the taping was, in fact, because a grand juror was absent and would need to view the taped testimony, as the counsel's office contended.

Throughout a long afternoon of testimony in the Map Room of the White House, and despite relentless prodding by prosecutors from Starr's office, Clinton remained far more controlled than numerous leaks about his angry demeanor had led many to expect.

'The most important issue'

But he makes clear his resentment for Starr and his team throughout the proceedings. Clinton says repeatedly that Starr had made his private sex life "the most important issue in America."

Testifying that he did not remember details of what his friend and confidant Vernon Jordan had told him Lewinsky had said, Clinton complained: "Until all this came out, this was not the most important thing in my life. This was just another thing in my life."

Portraying himself as a victim of an overly aggressive independent counsel, Clinton replied acidly that "the questions that you're asking betray the bias of this investigation that I've been worried about for a long time."

To a deputy independent counsel, Solomon Wisenberg, Clinton snaps: "I am not going to answer your trick questions."

Bitter complaints

And in a statement near the close of his testimony, the president complains bitterly that, for the past 5 1/2 years, he "had to contend with things no previous president has ever had to contend with -- a lawsuit [by Jones] that was dismissed for lack of legal merit but that cost me a fortune and was designed to embarrass me [and] this independent counsel inquiry, which has gone on a very long time and cost a great deal of money and about which serious questions have been raised."

The broadcast of Clinton's Aug. 17 testimony was the highlight of a massive document release by the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee. A total of 3,183 pages of documents were made public in two thick tan-jacketed volumes. Included is a wealth of information, including transcripts of testimony by Clinton and Lewinsky, copies of White House telephone records, entry logs for White House visitors, a time line by Lewinsky of "some of the highlights of my relationship with the president" and photos of her now-famous navy blue dress.

While the documents provided no significant new information about Clinton that was not contained in Starr's 445-page report, there were a number of revelations regarding other figures in the investigation. These details included disclosures that:

Linda R. Tripp, the Howard County woman whose tapes of conversations with Lewinsky triggered Starr's investigation of the former White House intern's relationship with the president, is now under investigation herself. Starr's office is looking into whether Tripp committed perjury when she told the grand jury that she had not made copies of any of her tapes. FBI tests found that nine of the approximately two dozen tapes made by Tripp show signs of duplication.

Lewinsky was "disappointed and angry" with Clinton after his Aug. 17 address to the nation because Clinton failed to recognize the suffering he had caused her and because, she told Starr's investigators "the president lied." Lewinsky also indicated that she was taking two anti-depressant medications, which affect her short-term memory "just a little bit," at the time of her grand jury testimony last month.

Lewinsky's July 28 immunity agreement with the independent counsel forbids her to make any public statements or talk with reporters without permission from Starr's office until after the vTC Clinton investigation ends. But she is permitted to testify in court or before Congress.

Clinton, who was addressing the United Nations General Assembly yesterday while his recorded testimony was being telecast, had no immediate comment. His lawyers had tried in vain to have the tape destroyed, and Democrats in Congress had fought its release.

Clinton's spokesman, Mike McCurry, denounced the "rank partisanship" behind yesterday's events.

"The question of impeaching a president is one of the most solemn and serious undertakings that any Congress can take upon itself," he said, reading from a prepared statement. "Sadly, the Republican majority in Congress is off to a bad start."

'Thoroughly unnecessary'

Clinton's spokesman said that the House had released "a great deal of salacious material designed, it seems, to do nothing but to titillate or to aggravate or to exasperate the president and those around him. And it is thoroughly unnecessary."

For their part, Republicans defended that action as necessary, even while they acknowledged, in the words of a House Judiciary Committee member, Republican Charles T. Canady of Florida, that "there's really not much new here." He said the material had to be made public because it bore on the underlying question of whether Clinton had lied in his grand jury appearance.

Yesterday's events in Washington and New York helped underscore how far the Clinton scandal has moved in just over a month. In his four-minute speech to the nation on the night of Aug. 17, which came after his grand jury testimony that day, Clinton told the country it was "past time to move on."

A deepening crisis

Now, the House seems increasingly to be headed toward impeachment proceedings. More and more, the deepening crisis Washington is blotting out other matters. Polls taken over the weekend show a slight erosion in Clinton's popularity and a slight increase in the number of Americans who say they want Clinton to resign or be impeached.

At the same time, almost three in five Americans said that the GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee voted to release the tape to embarrass and damage Clinton, according to a CBS News poll released Sunday. And every poll so far shows that a clear majority of Americans want the president to remain in office for the remaining 27 months of his term.

Pub Date: 9/22/98