Republican who had supported me in the impeachment battle, changed when he was offered a new leadership position on Livingston’s team. When Livingston resigned, the offer evaporated. Five Democrats also voted for impeachment. Four of them came from conservative districts. The fifth said he had wanted to vote for censure, then bought the argument that he was doing the next best thing. The Republicans who voted against impeachment included Amo Houghton of New York and Chris Shays of Connecticut, two of the most progressive and independent House Republicans; Connie Morella of Maryland, also a progressive whose district had voted overwhelmingly for me in 1996; and two conservatives, Mark Souder of Indiana and Peter King of New York, who simply refused to go along with their party’s leadership in converting a constitutional question into a test of party loyalty. Peter King, with whom I had worked on Northern Ireland, withstood weeks of enormous pressure, including threats to destroy him politically if he did not vote for impeachment. In several television interviews, King made a simple argument to his fellow Republicans: I’m against impeachment because if President Clinton were a Republican, you’d be against it, too. The pro-impeachment Republicans who appeared on the programs with him never had a good response to that. The right-wingers thought every person had a price or a breaking point, and more often than not they were right, but Peter King had an Irish soul: he loved the poetry of Yeats; he was not afraid to fight for a lost cause; and he was not for sale.
Although the pro-impeachment forces were said to have had prayer meetings in DeLay’s office to seek God’s support for their divine mission, the impeachment drive was fundamentally neither about morality nor the rule of law, but about power. Newt Gingrich had said it all in one phrase; they were doing it “because we can.” My impeachment wasn’t about my indefensible personal conduct; there was plenty of that on their side, too, and it was beginning to come out, even without a bogus lawsuit and a special prosecutor to do the digging. It wasn’t about whether I had lied in a legal proceeding; when Newt Gingrich was found to have given false testimony several times during the House Ethics Committee investigation into the apparently unlawful practices of his political action committee, he got a reprimand and a fine from the same crowd that had just voted to impeach me. When Kathleen Willey, who had immunity from Starr as long as she told him what he wanted to hear, lied, Starr just gave her immunity again. When Susan McDougal wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted her. When Herby Branscum and Rob Hill wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted them. When Webb Hubbell wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted him a second and a third time, and indicted his wife, his lawyer, and his accountant, only to drop the charges against the three of them later. When David Hale’s first story about me was disproved, Starr let him change it until Hale finally came up with a version that was not disprovable. Jim McDougal’s former partner and my old friend, Steve Smith, offered to take a lie-detector test regarding his assertion that Starr’s people had prepared a typewritten statement for him to read to the grand jury and kept pressuring him to do so, even after he had told them repeatedly that it was a lie. Starr himself didn’t tell the truth under oath about trying to get Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire.
And the House vote certainly wasn’t about whether the House managers’ accusations constituted impeachable offenses as historically understood. If the Watergate standard had been applied to my case, there would have been no impeachment.
This was about power, about something the House Republican leaders did because they could, and because they wanted to pursue an agenda I opposed and had blocked. I have no doubt that many of their supporters out in the country believed that the drive to remove me from office was rooted in morality or law, and that I was such a bad person it didn’t matter whether or not my conduct fit the constitutional definition of impeachability. But their position didn’t meet the first test of all morality and just law: The same rules apply to everyone. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, no man is above the law, but “no man is below the law either.”
In the partisan wars that had raged since the mid-1960s, neither side had been completely blameless. I had thought the Democrats wrong to examine the movie tastes of Judge Bork and the drinking habits of Senator John Tower. But when it came to the politics of personal destruction, the New Right Republicans were in a class by themselves. My party sometimes didn’t seem to understand power, but I was proud of the fact that there were some things Democrats wouldn’t do just because they could. Shortly before the House vote, Robert Healy wrote an article in the
Tip O’Neill may have been a better patriot than Gingrich and DeLay, but they and their allies were more effective in concentrating power and using it to whatever extent they could against their adversaries. They believed that, in the short run, might makes right, and they didn’t care what they put the country through. It certainly didn’t matter to them that the Senate wouldn’t remove me. They thought if they trashed me long enough, the press and the public would eventually blame me for their bad behavior, as well as for my own. They badly wanted to brand me with a big “I,” and believed that for the rest of my life and for some time thereafter, the fact of my impeachment would loom far larger than the circumstances of it, and that before long no one would even talk about what a hypocritical farce the whole process had been, and how it was the culmination of years of unconscionable conduct by Kenneth Starr and his cohorts.
Just after the vote, Dick Gephardt brought a large group of the House Democrats who had defended me to the White House so that I could thank them and we could show unity for the battle ahead. Al Gore gave a stirring defense of my record as President, and Dick made an impassioned plea to the Republicans to stop the politics of personal destruction and get on with the nation’s business. Hillary commented to me afterward that the event almost had the feel of a victory rally. In a way it was. The Democrats had stood up not just for me but, far more importantly, for the Constitution. I certainly hadn’t wanted to be impeached, but I was consoled by the fact that the only other time it had happened, to Andrew Johnson in the late 1860s, there were also no “high crimes and misdemeanors”; just like this case, that was a politically motivated action by a majority party in Congress that couldn’t restrain itself.
Hillary was more upset about the partisan political nature of the House proceedings than I was. As a young lawyer, she had served on John Doar’s staff for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, when there was a serious, balanced, bipartisan effort to fulfill the constitutional mandate of defining and finding high crimes and misdemeanors in the official actions of the President. From the beginning, I had believed that the best way to win the final showdown with the Far Right was for me to keep doing my job and let others handle the defense. During the proceedings in the House and Senate, that’s what I tried to do, and many people told me they appreciated it. The strategy worked better than it might have. The release of the Starr report and the determination of the Republicans to proceed with impeachment brought with them a marked shift in the media coverage. As I’ve said, the media was never a monolith; now even those who had previously been willing to give Starr a free ride began to point out the involvement of right-wing groups in the cabal, the abusive tactics of the OIC, and the unprecedented nature of what the Republicans were doing. And the TV talk shows began to show more balance, as commentators like Greta Van Sustren and Susan Estrich, and guests like lawyers Lanny Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Julian Epstein, and Vincent Bugliosi made sure that both sides of the case were heard. Members of Congress also made the case, including Senator Tom Harkin, House Judiciary Committee members Sheila Jackson Lee, and Bill Delahunt, himself a former prosecutor. Professors Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and Susan Bloch of Georgetown released a letter on the unconstitutionality of the impeachment process signed by four hundred legal scholars. As we headed into 1999, the unemployment rate was down to 4.3 percent and the stock market had rebounded to an all-time high. Hillary had hurt her back while making a Christmas visit to employees in the Old Executive Office Building, but it was getting better, after her doctor told her to stop wearing high heels on the hard marble floors. Chelsea and I decorated the tree and went on our annual Christmas shopping spree.
My best Christmas presents that year were the expressions of kindness and support from ordinary citizens. A thirteen-year-old girl from Kentucky wrote me to say that I’d made a mistake, but I couldn’t quit, because my opponents were “mean.” And an eighty-six-year-old white man from New Brunswick, New Jersey, after telling his family he was going to Atlantic City for the day, instead rode the train to Washington, where he took a cab to the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s house. When he was greeted by Jesse’s mother-in-law, he told her he was there because the Reverend Jackson was the only person he knew of who talked to the President, and he wanted to send me a message: “Tell the President not to quit. I was around when the Republicans tried to destroy Al Smith [our presidential nominee in 1928]
