Bill Clinton's popularity among Americans, particularly women, remains extraordinarily high. Some 68-70 per cent support the President despite prosecutor Kenneth Starr's charges. People are judgmental, of course, and blame the President for getting himself into a series of adolescent situations.
When Mr Starr assembles his evidence he may seek to have the President impeached by the House of Representatives for "high crimes and misdemeanours", and tried by the Senate, as prescribed by the constitution. Such talk is premature. The melodrama has many more scenes to play before it ends.
Susan McDougal, a faithful friend of the Clintons for years, arrived back in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Thursday morning from a California jail where she spent the last 18 months for refusing to answer a prosecutor's questions on the Whitewater affair involving the Clintons.
Mr Starr has new questions for Ms McDougal, he said, based on what his investigators have discovered since her last appearance before the grand jury after which she was imprisoned. If she doesn't answer the questions put to her she will be cited for criminal contempt and returned to jail, Mr Starr warned.
Ms McDougal returned home to Little Rock in shackles. "I won't talk" (to the grand jury), she said at Little Rock airport. Her brother supported her. "Ken Starr is a sham," he said. "She [his sister] will have nothing to do with the grand jury. Many people have asked us, `Is Susan protecting the President?' The President is a very powerful man. . . The legacy of President Clinton may be destroyed by Ken Starr. The legacy of Susan is that there will never, never be an Independent Counsel Act again. It was destroyed." Ms McDougal's former husband, Jim, died in prison recently. The McDougals had operated a savings bank and helped finance Mr Clinton's early campaigns for Congress and governor of Arkansas. At the time he was a law professor at the University of Arkansas.
"I won't talk," Susan McDougal shouted as she left the airport for the Whitewater inquiry hearing room. "She has nothing to hide," her brother declared. "She doesn't want immunity. Kenneth Starr spent $40 million promulgating that she knew about it. It's an outright lie - a $40 million lie."
Grand juries provide the verdicts prosecutors want. A prosecutor in New York famously remarked that "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if required." When Paula Jones, on the advice of her conservative lawyers, who are financed by the right-wing Rutherford Institute, appealed Judge Susan Webber Wright's dismissal of her suit against President Clinton, she and her adviser, Susan Carpenter McMillan, called it a "sexual harassment case" which the women's movement should support.
On Monday, Patricia Ireland, head of the National Organisation for Women, suggested that her members might wish to support Ms Jones's action against President Clinton. Forty-eight hours later members of NOW said they considered the Jones case a right-wing cause , not a "women's issue". They rejected any attempt by NOW to file a friend-of-the-court legal brief for Paula Jones.
Former president George Bush supported his successor against Mr Starr, who wants to call secret service agents as witnesses against Mr Clinton.
Mr Starr is particularly interested in the testimony of a retired agent who told a journalist that Mr Clinton was alone with Ms Monica Lewinsky while the agent was on duty outside the Oval office. "I can tell you, sir," Mr Bush informed the head of the secret service, "that I am deeply troubled by the allegations swirling around there in Washington. . . [and] what all this might do to the office I was so proud to hold. But regardless of all that, I feel very strongly that the USS (United States Secret Service) agents should not be made to appear in court to discuss that which they might or might not have seen or heard."
Former president Gerald R. Ford said: "I have totally refrained from any comment involving the current allegations in Washington. I do not think I should do so in this situation."
Mr Starr wants to compel the Secret Service to cast light on the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.