Nagasaki; how Japan could get fathers to spend more time with their children, as I had with Chelsea; how many times a month I ate dinner with my family; how I was coping with all the pressures of the presidency; and how I had apologized to Hillary and Chelsea.
In Seoul, I supported both Kim Dae Jung’s continuing efforts to move beyond the economic crisis and his outreach to North Korea, so long as it was clear that neither of us would allow the proliferation of missiles, nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction. We were both concerned about the recent North Korean test launch of a long-range missile. I had asked Bill Perry to head a small group to review our Korea policy, and to recommend a road map to the future that would maximize the chances of North Korea abandoning its weapons and missile programs and reconciling with South Korea, while minimizing the risks of its failure to do so.
At the end of the month Madeleine Albright and I hosted a conference at the State Department to support economic development for the Palestinians, with Yasser Arafat, Jim Wolfensohn of the World Bank, and representatives of the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia. The Israeli cabinet and the Knesset had supported the Wye River accord, and it was time to get some investment into Gaza and the West Bank to give the beleaguered Palestinians a taste of the benefits of peace. While all this was going on, Henry Hyde and his colleagues kept pushing their agenda, sending me eighty-one questions that they demanded be answered with “admit or deny,” and releasing twenty-two hours of the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes. Tripp’s taping of those conversations without Lewinsky’s permission, after her lawyer explicitly told her the taping was criminal and she should not do it again, was a felony under Maryland’s criminal law. She was indicted for it, but the trial judge refused to allow the prosecutor to call Lewinsky as a witness to prove the conversations occurred, ruling that the immunity Starr had given Tripp to testify about her unlawful violation of Lewinsky’s privacy prevented Lewinsky from testifying against her. Once more, Starr had succeeded in protecting lawbreakers who played ball with him even as he indicted innocent people who would not lie for him. During this period Starr also indicted Webb Hubbell for a third time, claiming that he had misled federal regulators about work he and the Rose Law Firm had done for another failed financial institution. It was Starr’s last, almost desperate attempt to break Hubbell and force him to say something damaging about Hillary or me.
On the nineteenth of November, Kenneth Starr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, making comments that, like his report, went far beyond the scope of his responsibility to report the facts he had found to Congress. The Starr report had already been criticized for omitting one big piece of evidence helpful to me: Monica Lewinsky’s adamant assertion that I never asked her to lie. Three surprising things came out of Starr’s testimony. The first was his announcement that he had found no wrongdoing on my part or Hillary’s in the Travel Office and FBI file investigations. Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts asked him when he had reached those conclusions. “Some months ago,” replied Starr. Frank then asked him why he waited until after the election to exonerate me on these charges, when he had submitted his report “with a lot of negative stuff about the President” before the election. Starr’s brief response was confused and evasive.
Second, Starr admitted he had talked to the press, on background, a violation of the grand jury secrecy rules. Finally, he denied under oath that his office had tried to get Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire to record conversations with Vernon Jordan, me, or other people. When confronted with the FBI form proving that he had, he was evasive. The
The fact that Starr had admitted violating the law on grand jury secrecy and had given false testimony under oath didn’t slow him or the committee Republicans down a bit. They thought different rules applied to the home team.
The next day Sam Dash resigned as Starr’s ethics advisor, saying that Starr had “unlawfully” injected himself into the impeachment process with his remarks at the congressional hearing. As my mother used to say, Dash was “a day late and a dollar short”: Starr hadn’t cared about the lawfulness of his behavior for a long time.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, the House Republicans returned to Washington to elect Bob Livingston of Louisiana, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, as the new Speaker of the House. He would take office in January when the new session of Congress began. At the time, most people thought the movement to impeach me was stalled. Several moderate Republicans had said that they were opposed to it, and that the election had been a clear message that the American people wanted the Congress to reprimand or censure me and get on with the public’s business.
In the middle of the month, I settled the Paula Jones case for a large amount of money and no apology. I hated to do it because I had won a clear victory on the law and the facts in a politically motivated case. Jones’s lawyers had appealed her case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the governing case law was clear: if the Court of Appeals followed its own decisions, I would win the appeal. Unfortunately, the three-judge panel assigned to hear the case was headed by Pasco Bowman, the same ultra-conservative judge who had removed Judge Henry Woods from one of the Whitewater cases on the basis of spurious newspaper articles after Woods had rendered a decision Starr didn’t like. Pasco Bowman, like Judge David Sentelle in Washington, had shown that he was willing to make exceptions to the normal rules of law in Whitewater-related cases.
Part of me almost wanted to lose the appeal so that I could go to court, get all the documents and depositions released, and show the public what my adversaries had been up to. But I had promised the American people I would spend the next two years working for them; I had no business spending five more minutes on the Jones case. The settlement took about half our life savings and we were already deeply in debt with legal bills, but I knew that if I stayed healthy, I could make enough money to take care of my family and pay those bills after I left office. So I settled a case I had already won and went back to work.
My promise to leave the Jones case behind would be tested once more, and severely. In April 1999, Judge Wright sanctioned me for violating her discovery orders and required me to pay her travel costs and the Jones lawyers’ deposition expenses. I strongly disagreed with Wright’s opinion but could not dispute it without getting into the very factual issues I was determined to avoid and taking more time away from my work. It really burned me up to pay the Jones lawyers’ expenses; they had abused the deposition with questions asked in bad faith and in collusion with Starr, and they had repeatedly defied the judge’s order not to leak. The judge never did anything to them.
On December 2, Mike Espy was acquitted on all charges brought against him by independent counsel Donald Smaltz. Smaltz had followed Starr’s playbook in the Espy investigation, spending more than $17 million and indicting everybody he could in an effort to force them to say something damaging against Mike. The jury’s stinging rebuke made Smaltz and Starr the only two independent counsels ever to lose jury trials.
A few days later, Hillary and I flew to Nashville for a memorial service for Al Gore’s father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., who had died at ninety at his home in Carthage, Tennessee. The War Memorial Auditorium was full, with people from all walks of life who had come to pay their respects to a man whose Senate service included his role in building the interstate highway system, his refusal to sign the segregationist Southern Manifesto in 1956, and his courageous opposition to the Vietnam War. I had admired Senator Gore since I was a young man, and always enjoyed the chances my association with Al gave me to be with him. Senator and Mrs. Gore had campaigned hard for Al and me in 1992, and I got a big kick out of hearing the Senator give his old-fashioned stump speeches full of fire and brimstone. The music at the memorial service was moving, especially when we heard an old tape of Senator Gore as a rising young politician playing the fiddle in Constitution Hall in 1938. Al delivered the eulogy, a loving and eloquent tribute to the father, the man, and the public servant. After the service I told Hillary I wished everyone in America could have heard it.
In mid-month, just as I was about to leave for Israel and Gaza to keep my commitments under the Wye River accord, the House Judiciary Committee voted, again along straight party lines, in favor of impeaching me for perjury in the deposition and the grand jury testimony, and for obstruction of justice. They also passed a fourth count accusing me of giving false answers to their questions. It was a truly bizarre proceeding. Chairman Hyde refused to set a standard for what constituted an impeachable offense, or to call any witnesses with direct knowledge of the matters in dispute. He took the position that a vote for impeachment was simply a vote to send the Starr report on to the Senate, which could determine whether the report was factually accurate and whether my removal from office was warranted. A bipartisan group of prosecutors told the committee that no normal prosecutor would charge me with perjury on the evidence in this case, and a panel of distinguished historians, including Arthur Schlesinger of City University of New York, C. Vann Woodward of Yale, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton, said that what I was alleged to have done did not meet the framers’ standard of impeachment—that is, a “high crime or misdemeanor” committed in the exercise of executive power. This had long been the accepted understanding, and their
