Clinton might well have been convicted had it not been for the public's unease with Starr's scorched-earth tactics, which left the lives of innocent participants and bystanders -- not to mention standards of decency -- in ruins. After all, poll after poll found that people viewed the president's conduct as revolting, dishonorable, treacherous, and even criminal. Wholly aside from his sexual escapades with an intern not much older than his daughter -- which, because they were consensual, were nobody's business but their own -- he enlisted a small army of friends and subordinates in his cover-up. He even lied to his own secretary of state, whose principal asset in dealing with foreign potentates is her credibility, and allowed her to vouch for his probity -- which alone should qualify as an impeachable offense.

Nonetheless, Clinton's approval ratings remained high, while Starr's dipped to a level reserved in our society for child molesters. Pundits had difficulty understanding why so few supported the president's conviction and removal. They seemed not to fathom the huge gap between what prosecutors consider to be acceptable and what the public considers to be decent.

Thus, our national scold, William J. Bennett, author of last year's bestseller The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, fumed in the Wall Street Journal that the Senate's acquittal was "an ignoble moment for a great people." The House managers who implored the Senate to convict the president were, in Bennett's view, "profiles in courage" who "took a big political risk because of their dedication to justice."

Similarly, one of the managers, Representative Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), opined that "this nation is in hopeless decline." House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (R-Illinois) declared in his summation speech: "I wonder if after this culture war is over . . . an America will survive that's worth fighting to defend."

Those who were not surprised at Clinton's latest survival act had their own explanations, ranging from the robustness of the economy to feminist leaders' decision to stand by their man. Even though civil libertarians have long been disillusioned by Clinton -- Nat Hentoff, a lion of the left who favored Clinton's conviction, rightly deems his presidency the most hostile to civil liberties in several decades -- most lined up against removal. To cultural conservatives, this seemed the rankest partisan hypocrisy.

However, there is a more likely -- and more charitable -- explanation for this apparent paradox. In his attempt to bring the president down, Starr's staff had cornered a young and terrified Monica Lewinsky in a hotel room and, surrounded by federal agents, pressured her to wear a wire against her friends. That was about the same time Starr's people disclosed to Lewinsky that her "friend" Linda Tripp had tape-recorded their seemingly private conversations and turned the tapes over to Starr. And when Starr was unable to persuade Lewinsky's then-lawyer, William Ginsburg, to come to a plea agreement on Starr's terms, the prosecutor subpoenaed Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, and reduced her to tears before the grand jury. As if this were not enough, Starr threatened to indict Lewis for obstructing justice by trying to protect her daughter's privacy.

Many of Starr's other tactics had institutional as well as private ramifications. He forced a court battle leading to a decision that the Secret Service protectors forced upon the president by law had a legal obligation to act as spies and tattletales when questioned by a prosecutor acting with a grand jury. He subpoenaed bookstores for information on the buying habits of their customers. He forced Lewinsky's psychologist to testify about her patient. He induced the courts to allow inquiries into private conversations between the president and the White House legal counsel, on the theory that normal "attorney-client privilege" does not apply because the lawyer somehow represents the White House rather than the president. When Julie Hiatt Steele refused to back up a pet Starr witness and former friend, Kathleen Willey, on the latter's tale of unwanted presidential sexual attentions, Starr indicted her for obstruction of justice and lying to an FBI agent. To make matters worse, Starr started to inquire into the circumstances of Steele's adoption of her Romanian-born son. Such pressure to force a witness to conform her testimony to a preconceived script could itself be considered obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury, but of course there is nobody to prosecute the prosecutor.

By the time it was all over, the American public knew too well how far our system has gone in allowing federal prosecutors and grand juries to barrel their way into what many citizens had thought were private areas of life. The publication of the Starr Report, with its minute and graphic sexual details, made it even clearer that when a prosecutor decides to go after a citizen either public or private, virtually nothing is sacred. Privacy, friendships, relationships -- all were mere fodder for the voracious and destructive machine run by the Office of Independent Counsel. Citizens were, rightly, disgusted.

That this disgust influenced the public's attitude toward impeachment should not have been so surprising. After all, as Alan Dershowitz points out in his book Reasonable Doubts, at least some of the jurors who voted to acquit O.J. Simpson were convinced of his guilt but were also convinced that the Los Angeles Police Department had set out to frame him. The jurors were unwilling to convict a fellow citizen on the basis of tactics so ugly and evidence so tainted. And on the very day that Clinton was acquitted by the Senate, a Manhattan jury acquitted 27-year-old Montoun T. Hart for complicity in the murder of Bronx high-school teacher Jonathan M. Levin. Jurors were faced with what seemed to be a fairly strong prosecution case capped by an 11-page confession, but they had good reason to believe that the unvideotaped confession -- whether truthful or not -- had been coerced during a six-hour interrogation in which the suspect may have been drunk and high on marijuana. Such acquittals are becoming more and more common.

If Henry Hyde, William Bennett, and other cultural conservatives are interested in seeing to it that cads and criminals like Bill Clinton get their just deserts, they should support legislation that keeps prosecutors from engaging in tactics that turn the stomachs of average citizens. These measures are not likely to originate with Clinton, whose bad character will keep him from recognizing that his fellow Americans deserve to be protected from the tactics that visited such destruction on him. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, however, Hyde is in a good position to introduce such legislation. Perhaps by doing so, he can redeem himself in the eyes of the nation.

Harvey Silverglate is the coauthor, with Alan Charles Kors, of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (Free Press).