Where I stand -- Brian Greenspun: Protecting president takes priority over prosecutor's 'need'

BRIAN GREENSPUN is the editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

Do you remember where you were when President Richard Nixon resigned?

Even though we all remember (at least those of us who were here at the time), Nixon's resignation at the end of the Watergate debacle and the ensuing 20-plus years of national hand-wringing that has followed, that singular political event did nothing to engrain itself in the national memory as did another end to an earlier presidency.

Any American at the age of recognition on Nov. 22, 1963, remembers with a great sense of pain and with the minutest of detail where he or she was the moment that fateful news hit the nation's airwaves, "President John Fitzgerald Kennedy has been assassinated."

It was the kind of news that stilled a nation and stunned its citizens. It was the kind of news that everyone in earshot wished they could rescind and close their minds to ever hearing. It ended an era of good feeling about ourselves, our country and of the kind of people who live in this great nation with us. In short, life changed for all Americans the day JFK was killed.

In the case of President Nixon, even though the scars of Watergate have run deep and still cause great political pain 24 years later, it is clear that the country has managed to grow beyond that challenge to our Constitution which resulted from Nixon's fateful helicopter ride for the last time from the lawn of the White House. The reality, though, is that nothing really bad happened to America and our political processes. Everything worked as it was intended.

John Kennedy's tragic death was different. Sure, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office and assumed control as was required, but the people never quite got past the sounds of those bullets and the picture of Jacqueline, blood-soaked and crying, as she held her husband in the back seat of that convertible as it sped away to the hospital and the inevitable.

What does all of that have to do with where we are in 1998, you ask? Plenty. But to understand the answer, you have to transport yourself beyond the current scandal in Washington so that partisan politics can't cloud the life-or-death issues that exist.

Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr wants a federal judge to order members of President Clinton's Secret Service detail to testify under oath about what they may have heard or seen while on duty at the White House. The Secret Service, the Justice Department and former presidents of the United States have urged the judge to find that there is a privilege against having to give such testimony.

In the balance may hang the life of a future president of this great country.

That balancing act has at one end of the scale a prosecutor's "need" to take testimony from people who are allowed at the president's side for only so long as the president agrees. They are at his side because the people of the United States demand that our president be protected at all times against a repeat of what happened in Dallas in 1963. It is as much for our own protection from a national emotional breakdown as it is the saving of a single, albeit very important, human life that we require that protection.

At the other end of the scale is the need for those who swear an oath and are willing to give their own lives to save the president's to have immediate, constant and most times intrusive access to the physical person they are charged to defend. Without an acquiescence on the part of the president, they will not be able to do their jobs.

If you put both of those needs on that balancing scale, there is no question which way justice must lean. There are other ways for Starr to get what he wants. How about putting Monica Lewinsky on the stand, for starters? But there is no other way to protect a president from an assassin's bullet other than to place human shields between him and the would-be killer. For that, the Secret Service has to have complete access to the president and for that, the president has to have complete trust in those who are bound to serve him.

The issue before the court is not a narrow one involving President Clinton and a sex scandal. It has at its core the very safety and security of all future presidents of the United States. That means the physical health of one human being and the mental health and national psyche of close to 300 million Americans.

It is what we call an "overwhelming national interest." And such an interest must always win out over a petty partisan affair involving the political life and times of one man.

I never want to have to remember where I was when the next president of the United States is assassinated because we didn't listen to the Secret Service in 1998. How about you?

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