The President will address the nation at 10pm this evening, eastern daylight time, 9.00 Central, 7.00 Pacific.

Of all the times a similar announcement has come over the radio or the television, I can't recall one when more millions of Americans mentally made a date with history, as they did last Monday ? this time, more than 60 millions of them.

Whatever the outcome of that four-minute speech of the president, Monday 17 August 1998 will be remembered as long as there's a television station with an unfaded videotape, not to mention a living American with a memory of our time.

Looking back on the days before the fateful hour, it strikes me now that, semi-consciously, vast numbers of people had the feeling, the hope too, that this would mark the end of the affair. This only shows how much we've been brainwashed by the movies. In the real drama of Prosecutor Starr versus President Clinton it was, at best, only the beginning of the end.

I ought to say, though, that why even some veteran politicians of both parties hoped that the president's address to the nation would put an early end to things.

The chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, who would be the man to arrange the trial of the president, if the House voted articles of impeachment, an old hand at such hearings and a political opponent, Senator Hatch said just before the address, that if the president made an outright, from the heart, candid confession of his relationship with Miss Lewinsky and gave convincing word that he had not conspired or cajoled anybody into covering it up, or otherwise lying about it, if he then threw himself on the mercy of the American people, he might, most likely, be forgiven.

Because, as the senator put it, for the good of the nation and our form of government, nobody wants to impeach him.

When the president had finished, the senator, that same judiciary committee chairman, Senator Hatch, was, like many members of both parties, aghast with anger and disappointment. They felt, as the overwhelming editorial opinion of the country expressed it, that he'd spoken from a legally contrived script, that as a confession it was feeble and inadequate.

Several of Mr Clinton's Cabinet rallied at once with urgent pleas to move on and carry out the nation's business. But the president’s leaders of his own party were as dispirited as the press. The House Democratic leader, "I'm very disappointed in his personal conduct". The Democrats' Senate leader, "A more complete explanation of his relationship should have come earlier".

And the senior senators of the two most populous states, California and New York, both Democrats, Senator Moynihan of New York remarked, "He had made no adequate apology to an awful lot of people he has put through terrible times".

These people must have referred mainly to his loyal staff, not least though to Mrs Clinton whom, the president said, he had misled. Which came out to mean that only last Sunday, the night before his address, did he tell his wife that he'd lied about the Lewinsky affair.

Then the senior senator from California, the most politically powerful of all the states with an essential mass of votes to offer in any election, Senator Dianne Feinstein. She stood at the president's side on that famous or infamous day in January, when he wagged his finger at us and swore to the nation he had had no sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. After Monday night, Senator Feinstein said she was blazing with anger, "I believed him. I felt betrayed".

So, if finally so many influential people, papers, Democrats, have changed their mind and lost their loyalty, why does the great body of the Democrats in Congress stay mum, so far? Because of the puzzling fact that while 60-odd percent of the voters believe the president had lied before Monday evening, 60-odd percent say he's been a good president and shouldn't be impeached.

This contradiction is, especially for the politicians of both parties who are running for reelection in November, the great, awkward stumbling block to the free exercise of their conscience.

What was it about the speech ? apart from its brevity and lack of open-hearted candour ? that left so many people with the complaining word "inadequate"? Well, before it was written and finally transcribed to a teleprompter, the substance and style of the speech had been fought over, we are told, up to the last hour on Monday evening by two factions, the president’s White House political cronies and his legal advisors.

The politicians told him his one chance of redemption was a heartfelt complete confession, an apology to his many supporters, no mention of the special prosecutor or the length of the investigation, and then throw himself on the people's mercy.

The politicians lost. The lawyers had convinced themselves that his best chance of survival was to contrive a careful legal evasion of the whole truth. So the speech was a lawyer's extra-delicate exercise in weasel words. I cannot think whom these characters imagined they would fool by having the president go back to his deposition in the Paula Jones case, after which he gave that little speech to the press and said, "I swear to you I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman, Miss Lewinsky".

So, Monday night, he says that phrase in January was legally correct. But in the next sentence, his lawyers had him say, "Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate". Mr. Clinton left it to the 60-odd million to figure out the difference between a sexual relationship and an inappropriate one.

Incidentally, and very much incident to presidential crises, inappropriate has become, since Mr Nixon used it frequently 25 years ago, inappropriate has become the adjective of choice for defendants, for men accused of practically any crime in the book.

Nixon, till the day he abdicated, never said he did wrong. He left office because he didn't have sufficient political backing in the Congress. His actions had been, he feared, inappropriate.

Once Monday's speech was over, the first effect that the sharpest White House reporters noticed was on the faces of the staff. The close advisers who could be seen next morning. They had forgiven him Jennifer Flowers, with whom he swore he'd never had any sex. Then said months later "sorry yes, just once".

She said, with hours of taped telephone calls to give weight to her claim, that they had been lovers for 12 years. All forgiven. Paula Jones and the self-exposure incident in the hotel long ago. Which even the judge in the Paula Jones case said was, if true, gross behaviour. But the judge threw the case out, not for disbelieving Miss Jones but for finding no evidence that she'd suffered grievous harm professionally and privately. But Miss Lewinsky? They trusted him. As did many, many more.

It came out in the past few days that Mr Clinton, before the Grand Jury, refused to answer most questions on the Lewinsky matter, about which we reliably hear he was amazed to discover how much detail Mr Starr knew ? presumably from the Grand Jury testimony recently of Miss Lewinsky. Accordingly, Miss Lewinsky was called back to the Grand Jury this Thursday.

Well, having waded through this welter and foam of cross-currents of opinion, whatever the final consensus, we have to confront the root question of self-government. What is meant by moral authority? And does a leader need it?

Moral authority in a leader, old man Aristotle pointed out 2,000 more years ago, resides in a leader because he's a better than average character. Moral authority does not mean sexual behaviour. It means the capacity for being trusted, to have the people believe the word of the leader in many things, and be ready to follow him when he judges what is the right thing to do.

It means Lincoln declaring that a civil war had to be fought not to free an enslaved race, but to preserve the union. It meant Franklin Roosevelt taking the United States into the war against Hitler and Japan, not because it was legal ? he did many things that cried aloud for his impeachment ? but because it was right.

It was Harry Truman declaring that since the League of Nations had failed, because the western Europeans were too cowardly to stop Mussolini in Ethiopia, the United States had a moral duty to save the United Nations by going into South Korea to stem the Communist invasion from the north.

It is a pattern of lying in Mr Clinton that the prosecutor is investigating and that has offended and bewildered much of the country. This may still leave unexplained the discrepancy between the 60-odd percent of the country who believe he lied about his sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky, as with Paula Jones, as with Jennifer Flowers, and the 60-odd percent who say still he's a good president and shouldn’t go.

There is one pungent voice that's worth at least listening to. An old politician from Connecticut, not a party man, a maverick and a retired governor who now teaches politics at the University of Virginia. Asked how come about 60% think Clinton lied and about 60% want him to stay, Governor Lowell Weicker ? implying that they reflect the sad moral climate of our time ? said, then, that 60%, those people, are equally to be condemned with the president as having no sense of the moral side of leadership.

So after the four-minute confessional on Monday, there are only two opinions that are shared by the great majority of the people. One, this investigation is by no means over, that the president’s troubles reach forward certainly to the day of Mr Starr's delivery of an impeachment report to the House.

The other consensus which, sympathetic and even forgiving people are reluctant to come to, is that if he survives, Mr Clinton will be a limping leader through the remaining two years of his presidency.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (ⓒ BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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