It's fascinating, in all of this, to look at the trajectory of the Baby Boomers. In their experience, the presidency was enacted first as tragedy. Now it plays itself out as farce.

 The sixties -- the country that Bill Clinton came from, the culture that formed him and his generation -- was a carnival of the tragic, with bodies everywhere. Clinton's Rose Garden hero, John Kennedy, was murdered in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson led the nation into the lost war that eventually killed 58,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese, that ruined the Great Society and tore America in two. Johnson collapsed upon the stage like King Lear in the fifth act, and six years later, Watergate (that is, scandals arising from the American civil war over Vietnam) forced Richard Nixon out of the White House as well. Large, Shakespearean themes: assassinations, war, usurpation of power.

In nineties America -- the country over which the quintessential boomer presides -- we see a good-times presidency brought to peril by . . . fellatio with an intern. A hilariously degrading spectacle, but at worst, perhaps a shame, in a society that is only incompletely vulnerable to shame.

Journalists should pay attention to an interesting theme that runs through the continuum from sixties to nineties. In both the tragedy and the farce, one notices the central, corrupting role of liars and lies (about Vietnam, about Watergate, about sex) and therefore a concomitant, sometimes illogical ebb and flow of public trust in the president, and in the media. In the sixties, Lyndon Johnson squandered the moral authority of the presidency. Looking at Clinton's astonishing approval ratings last month, it seemed to be the media that had at last exhausted their credibility.

Are Americans very good judges of character? Short-term, their verdicts naturally tend to be astigmatic. But Americans seemed to have decided that short-term media judgments are even worse: sensational and even hysterical. So citizens may let the president off by a process much like jury nullification.

Journalists cannot help speculating on what will be the ultimate verdict on Clinton. Close up, he seems to represent an oddly contemporary discontinuum of effective leadership and breezy squalor. But Americans disconnected their judgment of Clinton's moral behavior from their opinion of his job performance.

History is holistic only in the lives of the saints. Otherwise, the disconnects and ambiguities prevail. Perhaps we journalists should not ask, what place a president will occupy in history, but should try to anticipate the eventual range of ambiguity about him. How widely separated will be the good-bad spectrum of his reputation? As a people, our judgments, after all, run to extremes. Was Jefferson democracy's icon of Enlightenment? Or a slave-owning hypocrite?

Harry Truman: a squalid mediocrity? So he seemed close up. His approval rating in polls at the end of his presidency was 23 percent, an all-time low. Longer range, the second verdict prevailed: Truman as tough, spunky hero of plain folks, common sense, give-'em-hell underdog democracy.

Eisenhower: somnambulating geezer of good times, or historian Fred Greenstein's cunning "hidden hand" president, a kind of Zen hero of all the trouble that did not happen? Reagan the clueless? Reagan the visionary?

In early February, ABC's Sam Donaldson, wondering on-camera about Clinton's high ratings amid squalid charges, remembered the story of Lincoln's reaction when told that Ulysses Grant, his most effective general, was a drunk. Lincoln is said to have replied: "Find out what he drinks, and send my other generals a case of it." But of course, as Donaldson did not say, Ulysses Grant went on to preside over one of America's most corrupt administrations.

What will be the range of ambiguity in history's judgment of Clinton? Maybe he will be thought to be innocent of the sexual stories that are told about him. Maybe I am the queen of Romania. Maybe the accusations don't matter anyway. Paul Johnson, a conservative author, thinks that history will remember Clinton as a mediocrity clinging to a rung just below Chester A. Arthur.

Or will Clinton be recalled by both journalists and historians as a brilliant politician and admirable president who worked hard, caringly, sensibly, to trim and tune post-ideological government and to preside over one of the most successful, prosperous eras of American history -- the baby boomers' middle-aged payoff?

Someone may eventually fit all of this into a Unified Field Theory of Media. So far, we know this: the media in the hard markets of multicultural democratic pluralism, make their living on the excitements of discontinuous reality. At the low end that means the checkout-counter view of public lives (a view that is not necessarily inaccurate). The problem is that, dumbing down, we have too often abandoned the high end. A falling tide leaves all boats in the mud.

In the third week of February, as cjr went to press, the Clinton-Starr story was changing from day to day. One saw the possibility that it might lead to unendurable mess and resignation. Or alternatively, that the story might subside into chronic soap opera and eventually be canceled due to low ratings. A scandal must keep surpassing itself or lose its audience. A sunny presidency of denial might tootle on across the bridge to the twenty-first century.

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