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Klinton and Kafka

The Washington Post
1.19.99 Richard Cohen

"I feel like a character in a novel," Bill Clinton told his aide, Sidney Blumenthal, almost a year ago. The novel he cited was Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" about the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. The parallels are obvious, if not disingenuous. Clinton's problem is not that he is being framed. It is that he's guilty.

But of what? For that answer we have to turn to the novel Clinton should have cited, the one I think is the most important of the 20th century: Franz Kafka's "The Trial." Its original German title is "Der Prozess." It suggests, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent New Yorker, "something ongoing, evolving, unfolding, driven on by its own forward movement -- a process and a passage." In other words, an impeachment trial.

In my mind, Clinton is Joseph K., who, in the first sentence of "The Trial," is arrested "without having done anything wrong" or, in another translation, "without having done anything truly wrong." I prefer the latter because it comes closest to what I think Clinton believes and, in a sense, what I do, too: It was wrong to have sex with Monica Lewinsky, and it was wrong to lie about it, but it was not "truly" wrong -- like abusing presidential power by covering up a burglary (Nixon) or adamantly refusing to administer the law (Johnson). Here the word "truly" takes on a contemporary meaning. It stands for "impeachable."

"The Trial" is not merely about the framing of an innocent man. It is about process. Kafka understood process because by day he worked for the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute -- a private insurance company, a dense bureaucracy, where process was everything. Kafka's literary imagination was the product of many things -- a German speaker in Czech-speaking Bohemia, a Jew among gentiles -- but no one should overlook what the man did for a living. He toiled in workmen's comp.

And so Kafka knew about process. He would have known that the November elections would not have ended the threat to Clinton. Congress believes in process. It is the creature of process. Process is everything, and once it's begun it continues until its conclusion because that, after all, is the process.

In the process of impeachment, the vaunted middle ground collapses. Moderate Republicans in the House were not given the option of a compromise. It was yea or nay, up or down. So said the process. It will be the same, probably, in the Senate for the trial.

The president is in maximum jeopardy. Kafka would know that. The process is devouring him. It proceeds regardless of the public mood, not despite it, as some would have it. The process requires witnesses, and it is more and more likely some will be called. When that happens, Clinton's case will be hurt even more.

Monica Lewinsky says she was never told to lie, never promised a job, in exchange for silence. Yes. But in her deposition and in her testimony, she will be asked to explain, expand: Did she and Clinton ever talk about lying? What was understood? What was expected? Black and white will slur into gray, "no" will become "maybe." The process is a form of alchemy. It can turn steel into fudge.

Still, Clinton is not the perfect Kafka protagonist. To be that, he must come to believe in his own guilt. He must come to believe that he has to be guilty, otherwise he would not be accused. This realization, which Clinton has fought so tenaciously, will ultimately come packaged as a compromise -- the show trial confession in exchange for leniency (censure) -- if conviction seems likely.

But as Kafka would know, that's too late. By then, the process will insist on an up-or-down vote on conviction: guilty or not. Some senators will explain that since the offenses do not warrant the removal of a president, they will vote nay. But others might come to realize that the process has boxed them in: Is Clinton guilty or is he not?

"Logic" is another term Kafka used. You may prefer "law." It is about the same. "Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living," Joseph K. says at the very end of "The Trial." One paragraph later, logic, the process, has won. K. is being executed, stabbed in the heart, watching his own death "with failing eyes" as others -- someone at a window, his killers, maybe mankind itself -- watched also.

"It was as if the shame of it must outlive him," Kafka wrote.

He was right about that, too.

The Trial being one of my favorite novels, I see even more parallels to be drawn to present-day America. Creeping, smiling totalitarianism chief among them.