interpretation was backed up by an open letter to Congress signed by four hundred historians. For example, in the Watergate case, the House Judiciary Committee voted against impeaching President Nixon for alleged income tax evasion because it had nothing to do with his performance in office. But all this was entirely irrelevant to Hyde, to his equally hostile counsel, David Schippers, and to the right-wingers who controlled the House.
Ever since the election, Tom DeLay and his staff had been firing up the right-wing networks to demand my impeachment. The radio talk shows were pushing it hard, and moderates were beginning to hear from anti-Clinton activists in their home districts. They were convinced they could get enough moderate members of Congress to forget about the popular opposition to impeachment by making them fear the retaliation of disappointed Clinton haters.
In the context of this strategy, the Hyde committee’s vote against a censure resolution was as important as its votes for the impeachment articles. Censure was the preferred option of 75 percent of the American people; if a censure motion were to be presented to the House, the moderate Republicans would vote for it and impeachment would be dead. Hyde claimed that Congress didn’t have the authority to censure the President; it was impeachment or nothing. In fact, Presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk had both been censured by Congress. The censure resolution was voted down by the committee, again on a partisan vote. The full House would not be able to vote on what most Americans wanted. Now it was just a question of how many moderate Republicans could be “persuaded.”
After the committee vote, Hillary and I flew to the Middle East. We had a meeting and dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu, lit candles on a menorah for Hanukkah, and visited Rabin’s grave with his family. The next day Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Dennis Ross, Hillary, and I helicoptered into densely populated Gaza to cut the ribbon on the new airport and have lunch with Arafat in a hotel overlooking Gaza’s long, beautiful Mediterranean beach. And I gave the speech to the Palestinian National Council that I had pledged to deliver at Wye River. Just before I got up to speak, almost all the delegates raised their hands in support of removing the provision calling for the destruction of Israel from their charter. It was the moment that made the whole trip worthwhile. You could almost hear the sighs of relief in Israel; perhaps Israelis and Palestinians actually could share the land and the future after all. I thanked the delegates, told them I wanted their people to have concrete benefits from peace, and asked them to stay with the peace process.
It wasn’t an idle plea. Less than two months after the triumph at Wye River, the negotiations were in trouble again. Even though Netanyahu’s cabinet had narrowly approved the agreement, his coalition didn’t really favor it, making it virtually impossible for him to proceed with troop redeployment and prisoner releases, or to move on to the even more difficult final status issues, including the question of Palestinian statehood and whether the eastern section of Jerusalem would become the capital of Palestine. The previous day’s amendment of the Palestinian charter helped Netanyahu with the Israeli public, but his own coalition was a much harder crew to convince. It looked as if he would either have to form a more broad-based government of national unity or call elections. On the morning after my speech to the Palestinians, Netanyahu, Arafat, and I met at the Erez border crossing to try to energize the implementation of Wye River and decide how to move to the final status issues. Afterward, Arafat took Hillary and me to Bethlehem. He was proud to have custody of a site so holy to Christians, and he knew it would mean a lot to us to visit it close to Christmas. After we left Arafat, we joined Prime Minister Netanyahu for a visit to Masada. I was impressed that so much work had been done since Hillary and I had first been there in 1981 to recover the remains of the fortress where Jewish martyrs had fought to the death for their convictions. Bibi seemed somewhat pensive and subdued. He had gone beyond his political safety zone at Wye River, and his future was uncertain. There was no way to know whether the chances he had taken would bring Israel closer to lasting peace or bring an end to his government.
We bid the prime minister farewell and flew home to another conflict. Six days earlier, on just the second day of renewed UN inspections in Iraq, some inspectors had been denied access to Saddam’s Ba’ath Party headquarters. On the day we returned to Washington, the chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler, reported to Kofi Annan that Iraq had not kept its commitments to cooperate with him and had even imposed new restrictions on the inspectors’ work.
The next day the United States and the United Kingdom launched a series of attacks from airplanes and with cruise missiles on Iraq’s suspected chemical, biological, and nuclear lab sites and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors. In my address to the American people that evening, I noted that Saddam had previously used chemical weapons on Iranians and Kurds in northern Iraq and had fired Scud missiles at other countries. I said I had called off an attack four weeks earlier because Saddam had promised full compliance. Instead, the inspectors had repeatedly been threatened, “so Iraq has abused its final chance.”
At the time the strikes were launched, our intelligence indicated that substantial amounts of biological and chemical materials that had been in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War as well as some missile warheads were still unaccounted for, and that some elementary laboratory work toward acquiring a nuclear weapon was being done. Our military experts felt that unconventional weapons might have become even more important to Saddam because his conventional military forces were much weaker than they had been before the Gulf War.
My national security team was unanimous in the belief that we should hit Saddam as soon as the Butler report was issued, to minimize the chances that Iraq could disperse its forces and protect its biological and chemical stocks. Tony Blair and his advisors agreed. The Anglo-American assault lasted four days, with 650 air sorties and 400 cruise missiles, all carefully targeted to hit military and national security targets and to minimize civilian casualties. After the attack we had no way to know how much of the proscribed material had been destroyed, but Iraq’s ability to produce and deploy dangerous weapons had plainly been reduced.
Although they talked about Saddam as if he were the devil himself, some of the Republicans were in a snit over the attacks. Several of them, including Senator Lott and Representative Dick Armey, criticized the timing of the attacks, saying I had ordered them in order to delay the House vote on impeachment. The next day, after several Republican senators had expressed support for the raid, Lott backed off his comments. Armey never did; he, DeLay, and their minions had worked hard to get their more moderate colleagues in line, and they were in a hurry to vote on impeachment before some of them started thinking again.
On December 19, not long before the House began to vote on impeachment, Speaker-designate Bob Livingston announced his retirement from the House in the wake of public disclosure of his own personal problems. I learned later that seventeen conservative Republicans had come to him and said he had to quit, not because of what he had done, but because he had become an obstacle to my impeachment.
Barely six weeks after the American people had plainly sent them a message against impeachment, the House passed two of the four articles of impeachment approved by the Hyde committee. The first, accusing me of lying to the grand jury, passed 228–206, with five Republicans voting against it. The second, alleging that I had obstructed justice by suborning perjury and hiding gifts, passed 221–212, with twelve Republicans voting no. The two charges were inconsistent. The first was based on the perceived differences between Monica Lewinsky’s description of the details of our encounters in the Starr report and my grand jury testimony; the second ignored the fact that she also had testified that I never asked her to lie, a fact supported by all the other witnesses. The Republicans apparently believed her only when she disagreed with me.
Shortly after the election, Tom DeLay and company began roping in the moderate Republicans. They got some votes by depriving moderates of the chance to vote for censure, then telling them that since they wanted to reprimand me in some way, they should feel free to vote for impeachment, because I’d never be convicted and removed from office since the Republicans couldn’t get the required two-thirds vote for removal in the Senate. A few days after the House vote, four moderate Republican House members—Mike Castle of Delaware, James Greenwood of Pennsylvania, and Ben Gilman and Sherwood Boehlert of New York—wrote to the
I don’t know all the individual carrots and sticks that were used on the moderates, but I did find out about some of them. One Republican committee chairman was plainly distraught when he told a White House aide that he didn’t want to vote for impeachment but he would lose his chairmanship if he voted against it. Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican, told Mack McLarty he might lose his seat on the Appropriations Committee if he didn’t vote to impeach me. I was disappointed when Jack Quinn, a Buffalo, New York, Republican who had been a frequent guest at the White House and who had told several people, including me, that he was opposed to impeachment, did an about-face and announced that he would vote for three articles. I had carried his district by a large majority in 1996, but a vocal minority of his constituents had apparently put a lot of heat on him. Mike Forbes, a Long Island
