Clinton Scandal: Waiting for the President to stand naked

As President Clinton busies himself with the great affairs of state in Washington - a summit with the Chinese leader, trade with Latin America, a possible war with Iraq - a court in his home state of Arkansas is working through the preliminaries of a case that threatens to expose a cruder side to the President, and make a mockery of the most dignified office in the land. Mary Dejevsky, writes on a nightmare waiting in the wings.

When Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s that "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked", he was making more than a statement of the obvious. He was reminding his fellow Americans that inside the shell of office, glittering as it did with the spangles of power, lived a creature of frail flesh.

Lear, in shock after discovering that it was the crown that won respect and not the man beneath it, observed in like vein that man was simply a "poor, bare, forked animal".

Today's audiences don't need to be told any of these things. Tabloid culture, and its relentless exposure of the frailties of the famous, has seen to that. But 400 years after Shakespeare and 30 after Dylan's heyday, the most powerful man in the world is about to play not the tragic king, but a part very close to that of the Fool. And he may be exposed not as a forked animal, but a bent one.

The Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit against President Bill Clinton has been scheduled to be brought to court on 26 May, and Americans have started to imagine the unimaginable. Or rather, they have started to believe that what could only have happened in the comic or childish imagination - the President of the United States dropping his trousers and exposing his genitals outside the privacy of the bedroom or the bathroom, for the purpose of a public report on their precise appearance - might actually happen.

Ms Jones claims that on 8 May 1991 in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock Arkansas, Mr Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Ms Jones has backed up her story by telling the world the presidential penis has certain "distinguishing characteristics".

According to two people familiar with Ms Jones's affidavit, she lists three such attributes. The member is five inches long, has the circumference of a quarter, and bends to one side. Moreover, she is describing the member not in its flaccid but in its erect mode.

Peyronie's disease can cause bending of the kind Ms Jones claims to have witnessed, as she jumped from the sofa in horror, and Mr Clintons doctors have apparently found no sign of such a condition.

Nevertheless, to settle the matter finally, a doctor would have to examine Mr Clinton"s penis in its erect state, then he (or she?) would have to report back to the court. The jury is out on whether a court could ever require such an examination. It is an untested area, and as such cause for speculation that can only grow in ribald intensity as the trial date approaches.

No one ever pretended the lawsuit known as Paula Jones v the President of the United States would be an edifying experience. Since late summer, however, when Ms Jones rejected a financial settlement - rumoured to be close to the $700,000 she originally claimed - sacked her lawyers and hired an aggressive PR consultant, things started to get brutal.

Ms Jones has submitted a long list of intimate questions to Mr Clinton in an attempt to solicit details of his sex life and his anatomy. Her lawyers have also named - and in at least one case, subpoenaed - women believed to be former girlfriends of the President, including Gennifer Flowers.

She is the woman named during the 1992 election campaign as his long- time mistress, who has steadfastly refused to speak against him.

The strategy is two-fold: to show a "pattern of behaviour" in Mr Clinton's past and to demonstrate the veracity of the "distinguishing-characteristics" affidavit Ms Jones reportedly swore when she first brought her case three years ago. Meanwhile, the court in Little Rock, Arkansas, was embarking on the preliminary hearings of witnesses that are a prelude to most American court cases. So far, evidence has been taken from Ms Jones's close relatives, former colleagues, and a couple of women said to have been high-school girlfriends of Mr Clinton's.

As the hearings proceed, the odds that the case will actually come to court on the appointed date have also shortened dramatically.

Having rejected the settlement said to be close to what she had asked for, because it was conditional on Mr Clinton not accepting responsibility or apologising, Ms Jones is said to want only to restore her reputation.