Going All Out for Scandal

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Yes, I think I'd like to have one or two final shudders and then go about my business. For one thing, I am no longer confident that I have a store of euphemisms adequate to sustaining the discussion. My language consultants already advised me that I'd have to come up with something better for "semen" than "icky poo."

These days I've been thinking a lot of a guy in my high school I'll call Leonard, who was said to know 58 terms for the female breast. He used the terms constantly, and unexpectedly. A few of us would be talking about our Latin teacher's severity, and Leonard would suddenly pipe up with, "That Matilda's got a set of Howards on her, all right!"

I haven't seen Leonard since graduation. Judging from the comedies Hollywood has released lately, I'd guess that he's prospering as a screenwriter. I've resented being reminded that I knew somebody like Leonard in those days. I resented being reminded of a "relationship that was not appropriate"; the euphemism introduced by the President himself is just how that Latin teacher would have described what I spent a lot of time longing for in those days. Many people on television Monday night said this episode has diminished the presidency. For me, it has diminished high school.

Also, it has confirmed my suspicion that as much as I like a limited scandal now and then, I may not have the stomach for all-out scandal. The last scandal I enjoyed without qualification was the one triggered by the revelation that a writer named Clifford Irving was about to publish a book based on extensive interviews with Howard Hughes--a moneybags so maniacally reclusive that he made Thomas Pynchon seem like William Ginsburg. Irving, of course, had dreamed it all up, presumably figuring that a man reclusive enough to make his words particularly valuable would be too reclusive to blow the whistle.

It was a nice, tidy little scandal. You'd pick up the morning paper buoyed by the knowledge that you were almost certain to find some embarrassing revelation--maybe some weasel words from the publishing house that had given assurances of the manuscript's authenticity--but that little harm could come of it all beyond a couple of years in the pokey for Irving. Even if there had been cable-news channels then, none of them would have had a format that could have been described as "all Clifford, all the time."

Although limited war is now commonly supported as a greatly preferable alternative to all-out war, limited scandal seems a thing of the past. At some point in the O.J. trial, with both sides promising to call witnesses to challenge the credibility of any witness called to challenge the credibility of a witness, it occurred to me that if this lasted long enough, we might all be called to testify.

Once you put an all-out scandal in motion, there's no stopping it, which is why I doubt that all this is behind us. We've gone so far as to have ABC bump a football game so we could hear the President confess that he had I.R.'d an intern after all. As overnight polls indicated that most Americans were satisfied by the apology, TV pontificators informed us that it wasn't an apology that would satisfy most Americans. It was limited, they said. This is all out.