They never apologized to the country for impeachment, they never apologized for all the things they've done. . . . And they've spent, what, $52 million on Whitewater and what have they admitted -- that there was nothing to Whitewater, nothing to the file controversy, nothing to the Travel Office controversy. . . . So after all this time, and they've spent over $100 million on all those special prosecutors and congressional investigations, trying to make the whole story of the administration, and they have yet to come up with one example of official misconduct in office -- not one.

   Here's one: lying to a federal grand jury. Perjury by a sitting President, not only the chief law enforcement officer of the nation, but sworn to preserve and protect the Constitution. Mr. Clinton will leave office in a few weeks, but his campaign for exoneration is in full swing -- in the face of history and in the face of an ongoing inquiry by Independent Counsel Robert Ray. Mr. Ray says he will move swiftly in deciding whether to seek an indictment for perjury in the Lewinsky matter after the President leaves office.
 
   Mr. Clinton will soon be a former President and as such his fate somehow involves us all. It's hard not to have some sympathy with the sentiments the elder George Bush expressed when asked on ABC's "This Week" about the possibility of a Clinton indictment: "I don't want something bad to happen. He's been through a lot. The country's been through a lot. Let's heal and forget."
 
   But as demonstrated in his Esquire remarks above, and elsewhere, Mr. Clinton is making magnanimity anything but easy. He is manifestly guilty of perjury in his Paula Jones testimony, but even today clings to the "what the meaning of 'is' is" defense. So consider Mr. Ray's dilemma: If he should decide to give the President a pass in terms of a larger public interest, the President will surely then claim his preposterous defense was vindicated, that he was the victim. This continuing corruption of our national discourse certainly serves no larger public interest.
 
   Consider Mr. Ray's own experience. He gave the First Lady every benefit of doubt in his inquiry into whether she improperly exerted influence in the White House Travel Office firings, and then lied to federal investigators in denying any role. His report concluded that, "as a matter of historical fact, Mrs. Clinton's input into the process was a significant -- if not the significant -- factor influencing the pace of events in the Travel Office firings and the ultimate decision to fire the employees." Mr. Ray decided not to seek an indictment because there was "insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Clinton's statements to this Office or to Congress were knowingly false." In President Clinton's rhetoric, this finding translates into "nothing to the Travel Office controversy."
 
   Similarly, Mr. Clinton says "they" -- presumably the Office of Independent Counsel -- have "admitted that there was nothing to Whitewater."
 

Mr. Ray found that in the Whitewater matter "the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President Clinton or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct." That is not to say no evidence, and indeed there remain possibly telling open details, such as whether the Clinton tax returns properly reported Jim McDougal's gift in assuming all Whitewater losses. The Whitewater probe also saw the convictions of 14 figures associated with the Clintons, including former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, the then-sitting Governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker, and the Clintons' former Whitewater Development Co. partners, Mr. McDougal and his wife Susan.
 
   For sheer brazenness, no one in contemporary political life can beat Mr. Clinton. His Administration of course was filled with examples of misconduct. The installation of a crooked Arkansas crony, Mr. Hubbell, as the number three man in the Justice Department. The vicious smear job on a hapless yet determined former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones. The shredding of campaign finance laws. A permanent campaign of witness intimidation and rhetorical assaults by an attack machine operating out of the White House counsel's office.
 
   All of this in a sense worked. Mrs. Clinton escaped indictment and became a Senator. President Clinton, impeached by the House of Representatives, now bids history to find that he had a little trouble in his personal life but did nothing wrong with or in the office of President. With tainted campaign finance figure Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton associate, installed as Democratic National Committee chairman and scandal-plagued Washington insider Harold Ickes masterminding Hillary Clinton's New York demarche, the Arkansas couple remain a force to be reckoned with. And a game plan for future Presidential corruption has been established: Marshal a high-powered legal team; make sure key documents disappear or delay producing them for years; smear the opposition with relentless assaults; intimidate witnesses; see that the central players are either kept quiet or discredited. Declare victory.
 
   This is the legacy that Mr. Ray must weigh in reaching his decision. The facts and the law, of course, must be the major factors, but prosecutors, especially in important cases, also bear a general responsibility for the public good. History's burden on Mr. Ray is that a decision not to indict serves the Clinton revisionism -- that it was all about "nothing." Not indicting also sends a somewhat more subtle and sinister message from the Clinton camp to future generations: "Here's how we got away with it."
 
   To review the facts, Mr. Clinton's conduct in the Lewinsky matter constitutes a strong case for a perjury indictment. Both Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and David Schippers, the chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings, reported that Mr. Clinton committed multiple acts of perjury in his August 17, 1998, testimony before a federal grand jury in the Lewinsky matter. In their minds, the issue was whether the law applied to Mr. Clinton, or whether a President is above the law.
 
   Mr. Clinton was cited for contempt by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright for lying in the Jones case. Judge Wright fined the President $90,000 for providing "false, misleading and evasive answers" in a sworn deposition. Judge Wright wrote of the need "to deter others who might themselves consider emulating the President of the United States by engaging in misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial system." Those words should resonate in any debate over indictment.
 

   Article One of the House impeachment resolution charged the President with "perjurious" testimony to the grand jury about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, his attempts to influence witnesses, and statements he made under oath in a civil deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit. During the impeachment debate, many senior members of the President's own party opposed his removal from office, but agreed that the courts were the proper forum for deciding whether Mr. Clinton had committed perjury and possibly obstruction of justice.
 
   Mr. Clinton is not "above the law," said Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin. "His conduct should not be excused, nor will it. The President can be criminally prosecuted, especially once he leaves office." Senator Barbara Boxer of California said that the Democrats' rejection of the articles of impeachment "does not place this President above the law. As the Constitution clearly says, he remains subject to the laws of the land just like any other citizen of the United States." Recent Vice Presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman said at the time, "Whether any of his conduct constitutes a criminal offense such as perjury and obstruction of justice is not for me to decide. That, appropriately, should and must be left to the criminal justice system, which will uphold the rule of law in President Clinton's case as it would for any other American."
 
   Whether or not the President is above the law is ultimately the issue Mr. Ray faces. Yes, Mr. Clinton was embarrassed, but will his flouting of the law escape even symbolic legal sanctions? Even the Arkansas disbarment proceedings threaten to dissolve into farce, with a parade of judges disqualifying themselves over various conflicts of interest.
 
   Mr. Ray's job is to serve justice today, and uphold its principles for the future. Yes, Mr. Clinton should be indicted, upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law. The sympathies expressed by the elder George Bush need not be entirely dismissed, but they can be weighed in other forums. If Mr. Clinton would stop denying his wrongdoings, for example, he could be considered for a Presidential pardon.
 

   The reaction to Independent Counsel Robert Ray's plea bargain with Bill Clinton seems to be a collective sigh of relief that we can now put the Clinton era behind us. The only problem is that the now former President has no such intention.
 
   We certainly sympathize with the dilemma faced by Mr. Ray. These columns have argued that the evidence warranted an indictment that allowed the legal system to play itself out as it would for any normal defendant. But the country does want a fresh political start, and prosecuting a former President would not have been painless or easy. In return for no indictment, moreover, Mr. Ray managed to wrestle from Mr. Clinton what history will understand to be a clear admission of guilt. The former President essentially copped a perjury plea.
 
   His "agreed order of discipline" with the Arkansas Supreme Court Committee on Professional Conduct states that "Mr. Clinton admits and acknowledges, and the Court, therefore, finds" that "he knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers" in an attempt to cover up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
 
   And that in so doing, Mr. Clinton "engaged in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice." His intentional deception "interfered with the conduct of the Jones case by causing the court and counsel for the parties to expend unnecessary time, effort, and resources, setting a poor example for other litigants, and causing the court to issue a 32-page Order civilly sanctioning Mr. Clinton."
 
   With this admission he avoided the humiliation of disbarment, though he did have to agree to the considerable embarrassment of a five-year suspension of his law license. He joins Richard Nixon as the only Presidents to be so sanctioned.
 
   In his own White House statement, Mr. Clinton also finally admitted that his testimony was "false." Yes, this was couched in the usual Clintonian parsing that "I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely." This means he tried to lie without getting caught. But he was nonetheless forced to concede that "I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false."
 
   Any normal defendant would leave bad enough alone. But Mr. Clinton quickly sent out his spinners to deny what he had just admitted on paper. Lawyer David Kendall insisted that "he did not lie." Court jester James Carville drew the hilarious conclusion that the plea repudiated impeachment and could have been concluded in 1998. Everyone else knows that Mr. Clinton would still be denying everything if it were not for his DNA on Monica's blue dress.
 
   We suspect Mr. Clinton's self-justifying will only get worse as time passes. Having violated all the normal rules as President, he will no doubt violate all of the rules for ex-Presidents.