Shameless Questioning “I did not have sexual relations with that woman – Miss Lewinsky.” Of course not. It was just a peculiarly intimate form of massage, that’s all. Well, okay, so President Clinton was disingenuous last January. So what? However inconvenient the fact may be to special prosecutors, political ax-grinders, and self-appointed moralists, it remains true that, as Clinton said toward the end of his brief public remarks Monday night, “Even presidents have private lives.” Many of us now plying the journalistic trade were brought up on the inherited literary ambience of Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Within the polarities constituted by those two famous sensibilities can be found most of the variations on human beheavior and on the possible attitudes toward them. We were reminded after Clinton’s brief and incomplete televised apologia of a famous exchange between the two authors, reported by Hemingway in his 1964 memoir, A Moveable Feast. “Ernest, did you sleep with your wife before you were married?” Fitzgerald asked one day. (Or words to that effect.) “I don’t remember,” Hemingway records that he replied. “You don’t remember? How can you not remember a thing like that?” Fitzgerald is alleged to have said. “I know it seems odd, Scott, but I just don’t remember,” Hemingway continued to insist. And the celebrated Nobel Prize laureate recounted the incident as a specimen of his friend’s penchant for asking “shameless questions.” We would suggest that, unless Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr can demonstrate an attempt by the president to obstruct justice or to suborn perjury – and the leaks from his office concerning Monica Lewinsky’s testimony indicate that she has testified to nonesuch – it is high time for Mr. Starr to cease probing into the exact details of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship. It was widely reported that, in his precedent-setting appearance before Mr. Starr’s grand jury on the afternoon before his TV address, Mr. Clinton acknowledged having had what he termed an “inappropriate” relationship with the person he once called, somewhat deviously, “that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” But Mr. Clinton declined to answer questions about the exact mechanics of that relationship – the blow-by-blow, as it were – and he repeated again Monday night that such things were nobody else’s business. Almost despite ourselves, we concur. Who among us really needs to have all that spelled out? But let us go to another and even more celebrated literary text. It was neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald nor any liberal apologist for a Democratic administration who uttered the famous admonition: “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Those words, delivered roughly two millennia ago, are still good enough for us. Unless an act can be demonstrated to have criminal implications – and in our time, consensual sex between adults is not so regarded – we will not judge it. Nor, to evoke another statement from the same source, do we intend to cast stones. We believe that Mr. Starr should be similarly instructed. He has succeeded in using legal processes to extort from President Clinton a most damaging personal confession. To proceed any further in that line, demanding the nitty-gritty of it all, would be, by anybody’s defiition, shameless.