US cruise missile strikes - 28 August 1998

Last Wednesday evening, just when those of us whose job is to keep one eye peeled for the news feel free to close it and listen in relief to what EB White called the most beautiful sound in America, the tinkle of ice at twilight, a bulletin came in. President Clinton would make a public speech on Thursday the 27th in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Let me put you in the mood, the very wary, watchful, the almost morbidly suspenseful mood in which we heard about that coming speech. Only eight days before, a very chastened president had made what everybody hoped would be a full liberating confession about the squalid Lewinsky affair. Yet it was to all but a handful of Senators and politicians and the media and other public figures, deeply disappointing, tricky, legalistic, evasive. For Mr Clinton the social aftermath was grim. He was going away for a holiday, up in Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard, a small, triangular island off the elbow of Cape Cod. That surely would provide a blessed haven.

Only half a century ago it was classically described as a small land of old small towns, new cottages, high cliffs, white sails, green fairways, salt water, wild fowl and the steady pull of an ocean breeze. The tumbling centre of this island paradise, Edgartown, population 1,399. Well, very old residents possibly dream of this sanctuary, but when they wake up they see the sort of reality that has overtaken similar heavenly islands everywhere: as many people as cobblestones, the summer invasion of tourists who suffocate as they jostle each other through the quaint old showplace houses.

Luckily, for presidents in retreat, there are people rich enough to swipe and buy as much as 50 acres and make it their own. To such a borrowed place, the Tuesday morning after the sad Monday evening, the Clintons repaired – trudged would be better. They approached the presidential plane, not as usual waving at the crowd, if any. They were photographed from behind. Young Chelsea Clinton, holding her mother's right hand, her father's left, he holding on to his dog's leash, they ambled into the plane. No waving. No waving at the other end. The president embraced his old and firm ally, Mr Vernon Jordan, suspected by Prosecutor Starr of having arranged a job for Miss Lewinsky, so as to get her out of the White House and what you might call out of harm's way.

Mrs Clinton was not seen then or for days, nor was the president. All the press corps, bedded down in various spots on the island, most on the mainland, all the press corps could report was nothing, no golf, no swimming, no sign of the almost compulsory ritual for a president on holiday – a walkabout through the quaint old streets, pressing the flesh with one and all.

The general surmise about this odd decision to go into seclusion was perhaps incorrect but it was fairly understandable. Mrs Clinton was surely trying to get over the shock of having heard only the day before the president's confessional, that he did, after all, have a thing with Monica Lewinsky. This inference has been firmly denied by the many people who remember how Mrs Clinton went off round the country to speak up for her husband, right after his January sworn declaration that he'd never had a sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. How, therefore, the confession, after more than six months, must have a been a cruel emotional blow to Mrs Clinton. I've heard more people say, I don't believe for a minute she didn't know. But this was not a vicious rumour. It was a plain statement from Mrs Clinton's own press secretary. A sympathetic Senator, an old ally of Mr Clinton's mused, "What a vacation this is going to be. I'm sorry for both of them".

Well then the president dined with the Jordans, Mrs Clinton dined with other friends off along the island and then, swift as an incoming tornado, which can take your mind off anything, came the Cruise missile attacks on the Sudan and Afghanistan. Only a momentary pause here, I must say, for the unworthy thought that the president had invented a mighty distraction from his troubles. This idea never really got going, even on the sleazier talk shows. Most such gossip seemed to come from abroad, from Muslim countries.

The Allies, to a man, seconded the attacks and nobody here paused to doubt the rightness or wisdom of this tactic. Effectively, whether by luck, design or the grace of God, the name of Lewinsky vanished from the front pages, the top TV spot, for the first time in months. The full-throated support went up from the Congress; they're scattered on holiday just now, but they cried in harmony with all the unison of a Hallelujah chorus.

In a few days, of course, since there were no more exploding missiles, there were no more exploding headlines, just what they call investigative pieces about the likely suspects, "think" pieces. Meanwhile the White House press corps, lolling around Martha's Vineyard, heard a new sound. A new hunch was launched, from where I don't know.

The president was thinking of responding to the shabby notices he'd had for the first confessional, by going before the public once more and making a second. For several days he would, he wouldn't. That precious fount of news known as "sources" kept saying that the White House staff were, weren't advising the president to make the grand gesture now, while our minds were on other things, like the Sudan and hurricanes. And then, Wednesday evening, the president is going to make a speech tomorrow at high noon, in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The president had made up his own mind and would bare his soul. And we learned he would be introduced by the last of the old-style liberal Democrats, the famous Senator from Massachusetts, who'd had similar troubles of his own and weathered them all, except the first – the fatal drowning of a girl off a tiny island off the coast of Massachusetts. Chappaquiddick, remember? Almost 30 years ago. Still, who more fitting than Senator Ted Kennedy to stand in for a penitent president?

So, came Thursday noon and heaven alone knows how many people skipped the lunch hour, how many oldsters delayed the golf game, how many journalists in how many states, sat with pen and paper or tape recorder, to hear the grand confession. The occasion, a Massachusetts town, and the first shock was the joyous, stunning reception by a small audience of parents.

Mr Clinton did not deign to mention Whitewater, the FBI, Miss Lewinsky or any other inappropriate houri. A young news editor, coming on the tape of this speech 20 years from now could have dated it 1993, or since it gave a breathtakingly impressive recital of all the splendid things the Clinton administration had done, maybe it was a triumphant speech at the end of his first term. Maybe it was a campaign speech delivered in October 1996, just before he went thundering back into the White House? And that same editor, looking at the tape, would have said, no wonder they re-elected him. What bounce, what confidence, what intelligence, what a range of knowledge tossed off quickly and lightly on top of all the detail. And then he'd see the date – Thursday 27 August 1998. Impossible.

This a marooned, a besieged president? Where, how? Do you remember the film, The Three Faces of Eve, for which Joanne Woodward, oh 40 years ago, won the Oscar? I hope some people recall it, not of course because I introduced it and did the running commentary. It was about a famous case, reported by two doctors in Georgia, of a young woman who had two separate personalities and woke up each day to be, and act out for the day, one of them. An austere, painfully shy, hesitant, young Puritan and next day a saucy hoyden, sashaying around nightclubs and raunchy young men. This famous case established the fact of people with two or more personalities, which emerge and subside at different times.

Well, in a totally non-clinical way, Mr Clinton gives the impression of having two characters. The tricky, sly, deceptive, engaging con-man and the public, conscientious, truly concerned, engaging, eloquent, sympathetic statesman. So the unreal spectacle on Thursday, which for an hour or more made me think we were living on two planets at once, there was this ruddy-faced, engaging, cheerful, funny, eloquent president reeling off impressive stuff about a balanced budget, lowest unemployment ever, more own home ownership, smaller government bureaucracy, determination to make every school in the country safe for children, to free every parent from the haunting menace of guns, robbers, drugs. The small audience gave the cue to all of us and rose with a collective shout of praise and wonder.

Meanwhile, Russia was stumbling into bankruptcy, Islam was starting protest marches against the outrage of American attacks on their soil, Saddam Hussein was chucklingly telling the United Nations inspectors to get lost and Secretary Albright was almost saying Yessir. The Stock Market, as Mr Clinton spoke so rapturously, so cheerfully, was plunging down 300 points, as deep a drop as any since the Black Monday of 1987. Surely, in the hour we need him, he will survive.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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