Authors: Unknown
“But if our expectations, if our fondest prayers and dreams are not realized,” he said, “then we should all bear in mind that the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.”
I was still trying to rise. By seeing each hour through to the end, and starting over every morning, I was rebuilding my life imperceptibly, one day at a time. It was a challenge to forgive Bill; the prospect of forgiving the hired guns of the right wing seemed beyond me. If Mandela could forgive, I would try. But it was hard, even with the help of many friends and role models.
Some weeks after Mandela’s visit, the Dalai Lama called on me at the White House.
At our meeting in the Map Room, he presented me with a white prayer scarf and told me he thought often of me and my struggle. He encouraged me to be strong and not give in to bitterness and anger in the face of pain and injustice. His message dovetailed with the support I was receiving from my prayer group, especially Holly Leachman and Susan Baker, who came to visit and pray with me, Secret Service agent Brian Stafford, then head of the President’s Protective Division, and Mike McCurry, the President’s press secretary through the hardest days. Each went out of his way to check in on me and see how I was faring under the pressure. Democratic members of Congress called to ask what I wanted them to do. One Congressman said, “Hillary, if you were my sister, I’d punch Bill Clinton right in the nose!” I assured him that I appreciated his concern, but I really didn’t need that kind of help. Some Republicans confided that they disagreed with their party’s decision to pursue impeachment.
On October 7, a delegation of freshmen House members came to see me in the White House. Once again, we met in the Yellow Oval Room as sunlight streamed through the windows. They were worried that the Republicans would force an impeachment vote before the midterm election. I gave the best pep talk I could. “We can’t let them hound the President out of office,” I said. “Not like this. You’re members of Congress. Your job is to protect the Constitution and do what’s right for the country. So let’s walk through this.” Then drawing on my experience twentyfive years earlier, I explained what the Constitution said about impeachment, how the framers envisioned the impeachment power would be used and how it had been interpreted in the more than two hundred years since. As we closed the meeting, I also assured the members that if it came down to a vote, both the President and I wanted them to heed their consciences and their constituents; we would understand, whatever they decided.
The consensus among Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans on the Hill was that censure―a vote of reprimand―would be the most appropriate response to Bill’s behavior. But powerful Re publicans were adamantly opposed to the compromise.
Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, derided the notion of censure as “impeachment lite.” Hyde was particularly intransigent. He blamed the White House for a September 16 piece in Salon, an Internet magazine, that reported that he had carried on a lengthy love affair during the 1960s, while he was married to his late wife. Hyde called his infidelity, which took place when he was in his forties, a “youthful indiscretion.”
He was outraged and indignant that the media had exposed such a personal transgression, and Republicans called for an investigation of the magazine. Despite my many political and ideological differences with Hyde, I was sympathetic to his distress, although mystified that he didn’t see the double standard in his reaction.
I spent the fall crisscrossing the country on a campaign marathon. I urged people to vote as if their lives depended on it. I concentrated on areas where the races were tight and my own popularity high. As I had six years earlier, I campaigned hard for Barbara Boxer, who was defending her Senate seat against a strong challenger in California, and for Patty Murray, the effective “mom in tennis shoes” Senator from Washington. I also tried to help Senator Carol Mosley Braun in Illinois. Before the end, I made stops in Ohio, Nevada and back in Arkansas on behalf of a dynamic young Senate candidate, Blanche Lincoln. “We have to send a very clear signal to the Republican leadership in Congress that Americans care about the real issues,” I told a crowd in Janesville, Wisconsin.
“They care about education, health care and Social Security. And they want a Congress that cares about what they care about.”
I poured my heart into Representative Charles Schumer’s campaign to defeat New York Senator AI D’Amato. An intelligent and doggedly progressive Democrat, Chuck Schumer was one of Bill’s most steadfast supporters. D’Amato had chaired the Whitewater hearings in the Senate, where he had paraded blameless White House secretaries, ushers and a babysitter in front of the committee, finding nothing but saddling them with legal bills. D’Amato was vulnerable to Schumer’s vigorous challenge.
I was in New York attending a fundraiser for Schumer when I realized my right foot was so swollen that I could barely put my shoe on. When I got back to the White House, I called Dr. Connie Mariano, who, after a cursory look at my foot, whisked me off to Bethesda Naval Hospital to determine if I had developed a blood clot from my nonstop flying around the country. Sure enough, I had a big clot behind my right knee that required immediate treatment. Dr. Mariano told me to stay in bed taking blood thinners for at least a week. Although I wanted to take care of myself, I was determined not to cancel any of my campaign stops. So we compromised. She sent along a nurse to administer the medicine I needed and to monitor my condition.
As voting day approached, the GOP launched a massive ad campaign that focused on the scandal. The scheme was unsuccessful. Voters seemed to be more disgusted with Republican political tactics than with the President’s personal life. I believe we would have picked up additional seats if more Democrats had called the Republicans on their fervor for impeachment. But going against Washington’s conventional wisdom was too big a gamble for most candidates to take. The pundits were still predicting a Republican surge.
On Election Day, the exit polls started coming in, and Bill was in an upbeat mood. He sat with staff members in John Podesta’s West Wing office, monitoring the results. John, a smart, no-nonsense political adviser, who had served in Bill’s first Administration as Staff Secretary, recently had returned as chief of staff after Erskine Bowies ended his tenure. An aide had shown Bill how to follow the returns on the Internet, and he sat at John’s computer eagerly surfing political websites. As always, I was too nervous to watch the returns. So I invited Maggie and Cheryl Mills, an accomplished lawyer in the counsel’s office, to join me in the movie theater for a screening of Oprah Winfrey’s new film of the Toni Morrison novel Beloved. When we emerged later that night there was good news: The vote was historic. Democrats gained 5 seats in the House and narrowed the Republican margin: It was now 223 to 211. The Senate held steady at 55 Republicans to 45 Democrats. Barbara Boxer won reelection to the Senate, and the best news of the night was that Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato in New York. Republicans and the media pundits thought Democrats would lose up to 30 House seats and 4 to 6 Senate seats.
Instead, Democrats won seats in the House, the first time since 1822 that a President’s party had done so in his second term.
Another surprise soon followed. Three days later, Friday, November 6, Senator Moynihan taped an interview with New York television legend Gabe Pressman announcing that he would not run for a fifth term. The interview was to be aired on Sunday morning, but the news leaked early.
Late on Friday night, the White House operator patched through a call from Representative Charlie Rangel, the veteran Congressman from Harlem and a good friend.
“I just heard that Senator Moynihan announced he is going to retire. I sure hope you’ll consider running because I think you could win,” he said.
“Oh, Charlie,” I said. “I’m honored you would think of me, but I’m not interested, and besides, we have a few other outstanding matters to resolve right now.”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m really serious. I want you to think about it.”
He may have been serious, but I thought the idea of running for Senator Moynihan’s seat was absurd, although this wasn’t the first time it had come up. A year earlier, at a Christmas reception at the White House, my friend Judith Hope, the chair of the New York Democratic Party, mentioned that she didn’t think Moynihan would run again. “If he doesn’t,” she said, “I wish you would run.” I had thought Judith’s comment was farfetched then and I still thought so.
I had other things on my mind.
The 1998 midterm election produced yet another surprise when Newt Gingrich stepped down as Speaker of the House and announced that he would resign from Congress. At first, this seemed like a victory for our side and the likely derailment of impeachment.
Bob Livingston of Louisiana was set to succeed Gingrich as Speaker, but Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip and the real power in the Republican Caucus, pressured the Republicans into opposing any reasonable compromise such as a censure vote. When Erskine Bowles asked Gingrich why the Republicans would pursue a course that was neither right nor constitutional, Gingrich replied, “Because we can.”
The Whitewater inquiry and the Paula Jones lawsuit that had touched off this constitutional showdown were all but forgotten. Jones’s lawyers had appealed Judge Wright’s dismissal of the case and for the past month had been sending out signals that she was ready to settle for $1 million. The law was clearly in Bill’s favor, but the three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was dominated by two of the same conservative Republicans who had issued the legally indefensible ruling that earlier had removed judge Henry Woods from a Whitewater-related case on the basis of newspaper articles. Given that history, Bill worried that there was a good chance that partisan politics again would trump law and precedent, and the judges would rule that the case could proceed to trial. On November 13, Bill’s attorney, Bob Bennett, told Bill that Jones had agreed to drop her suit for a payment of $850,000. Although he hated to settle a case he’d already won and that judge Wright had found to be without legal or factual merit, Bill decided that there was no other sure way to put this episode to rest. He did not apologize and made no concessions of wrongdoing. Bennett simply said, “The President has decided he is not prepared to spend one more hour on this matter.” And then it was over.
For weeks I had been expecting the House Judiciary Committee to issue a raft of subpoenas, which is what was done during the 1974 Nixon impeachment inquiry. The committee’s responsibility is to con duct its own investigation, not rubber-stamp the independent counsel’s allegations. I was disgusted when Hyde announced that the committee would be calling Kenneth Starr as its main witness. Starr spoke uninterrupted for two hours and then answered questions from committee members for the rest of the afternoon. It was almost nine o’clock at night when David Kendall finally was given a chance to cross-examine Starr. Working under a ridiculously unrealistic time limit imposed by the committee’s Republican majority, David began his remarks with a summary of the process.
“My task is to respond to the two hours of uninterrupted testimony from the independent counsel, as well as to his four-year, $45 million investigation, which has included at least twenty-eight attorneys, seventy-eight FBI agents and an undisclosed number of private investigators; an investigation which has generated by computer count 114,532 news stories in print and 2,513 minutes of network television time, not to mention twentyfour-hour scandal coverage on cable; a 445-page referral; 50,000 pages of documents from secret grand jury testimony; four hours of videotape testimony; twentytwo hours of audiotape, some of which was gathered in violation of state law, and the testimony of scores of witnesses, not one of whom has been crossexamined.
“And I have thirty minutes to do this.”
During the Soviet-style show trial procedure, Starr had to admit that he had not himself examined a single witness before the grand jury. He had nothing to add to his referral.
But he did announce that the OIC finally had cleared the President of any impeachable offenses in the socalled Travelgate and Filegate investigations.
Barney Frank, the sharp and skillful Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, asked Starr when he had reached that conclusion.
“Some months ago,” said Starr.
“Why did you withhold that before the election when you were sending a referral with a lot of negative stuff about the President and only now … give us this exoneration of the President several weeks after the election?”
The independent counsel had no response.
The next day, Sam Dash, the OIC’s ethical adviser who had appeared oblivious to previous lapses by Starr and his subordinates, resigned in protest over Starr’s testimony.
Dash, who had been chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 and 1974, wrote a letter accusing Starr of abusing his position by “unlawfully” injecting himself into the impeachment process. His resignation had no apparent effect on the proceedings.
Nor did an open letter issued by 400 historians―including co-sponsors Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., of City University of New York; Sean Wilentz of Princeton University and C. Vann Woodward of Yale University―that openly urged Congress to reject impeachment because the constitutional standards for it had not been met. Their statement should be required reading in civics classes:
As historians as well as citizens, we deplore the present drive to impeach the President. We believe that this drive, if successful, will have the most serious implications for our constitutional order.
Under our Constitution, impeachment of the President is a grave and momentous step. The Framers explicitly reserved that step for high crimes and misdemeanors in the exercise of executive power. Impeachment for anything else would, according to James Madison, leave the President to serve “during the pleasure of the Senate,” thereby mangling the system of checks and balances that is our chief safeguard against abuses of public power.