Dennis Hastert of Illinois, a stocky former wrestling coach who was quite conservative but less abrasive and confrontational than Gingrich, Armey, and DeLay. Before long, a bipartisan delegation of senators and representatives came to take me to the House chamber. We shook hands and talked as if nothing else in the world was going on. When I was introduced and began to walk down the aisle, the Democrats cheered loudly as most Republicans clapped politely. Since the aisle splits the Republicans and Democrats, I expected to spend the trip down to the podium shaking hands on the Democratic side and was surprised that, for whatever reason, several Republican House members held out their hands, too.
I began with a salute to the new Speaker, who had said he wanted to work with the Democrats in a spirit of civility and bipartisanship. It sounded good and he might have meant it, since the impeachment vote in the House had occurred before he became Speaker. So I accepted his offer. By 1999, our economic expansion was the longest in history, with eighteen million new jobs since I took office, real wages going up, income inequality finally going down a little, and the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957. The state of our union was stronger than ever, and I outlined a program to make the most of it, beginning with a series of initiatives to create a secure retirement for the baby boom generation. I proposed to commit 60 percent of the surplus over the next fifteen years to extend the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund until 2055, an increase of more than twenty years, a small portion of it to be invested in mutual funds; an end to the limit on what Social Security recipients could earn without penalty; and more generous payments to elderly women, who were twice as likely as men their age to live in poverty. I also proposed to use 16 percent of the surplus to add ten years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund; a $1,000 long-term–care tax credit for the elderly and disabled; the option to let people between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five buy into Medicare; and a new pension initiative, USA Accounts, which would take 11 percent of the surplus to provide tax credits to citizens who opened their own retirement accounts, and to match a portion of the savings of workers with more modest incomes. This was perhaps the largest proposal ever made to help modest- income families save and create wealth.
I also proposed a large package of education reforms, arguing that we should change the way we spent the more than $15 billion a year of education aid to “support what works and stop supporting what doesn’t work,” by requiring states to end social promotion, turn around failing schools or shut them down, improve the quality of the teaching force, issue report cards on every school, and adopt sensible discipline policies. I again asked Congress to provide funds to build or modernize five thousand schools and to approve a sixfold increase in the number of college scholarships for students who would commit to teaching in underserved areas.
To give more support to families, I recommended a minimum wage increase, expanded family leave, a child- care tax credit, and trigger locks on guns so that children could not fire them accidentally. I also asked Congress to pass the Equal Pay and Employment Non-Discrimination acts; to establish a new American Private Investment Corporation to help raise $15 billion to create new businesses and jobs in poor communities; to enact the Africa Trade and Development Act to open more of our markets to African products; and to fund a $1 billion Lands Legacy initiative to preserve natural treasures, and a package of tax cuts and research money to fight global warming.
On national security, I asked for funds to guard computer networks against terrorists, and to protect communities from chemical and biological attacks; to increase research into vaccines and treatments; to increase the Nunn-Lugar nuclear safety program by two-thirds; to support the Wye River accord; and to reverse the decline in military spending that had begun at the end of the Cold War. Before closing, I honored Hillary for her leadership in the Millennium Project and in representing America so well all over the world. She was sitting in her box with the home-run–hitting Chicago Cubs star Sammy Sosa, who had joined her on a recent trip to his native Dominican Republic. After all she had been through, Hillary got an even bigger round of applause than Sammy. I ended “the last State of the Union address of the twentieth century” by reminding the Congress that “perhaps, in the daily press of events, in the clash of controversy, we don’t see our own time for what it truly is, a new dawn for America.”
On the day after the speech, with the highest job approval ratings I had ever had, I flew to Buffalo, with Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore, to speak to an overflow crowd of more than twenty thousand at the Marine Midland Arena. Once again, in spite of all that was going on, the State of the Union address, with its full agenda for the year ahead, had struck a responsive chord with the American people. I ended the month with a major speech at the National Academy of Sciences, outlining my proposals to protect America from terrorist attacks with biological and chemical weapons and from cyberterrorism; a trip home to Little Rock to view tornado damage in my old neighborhood, including the loss of several old trees on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion; a visit to St. Louis to welcome Pope John Paul II back to the United States; a meeting with a large bipartisan congressional delegation in the East Room to discuss the future of Social Security and Medicare; and a memorial service for my friend Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida, who had died suddenly not long before. Lawton had given me courage for the current fight with one of his favorite sayings: If you can’t run with the big dogs, you ought to stay on the porch.
On February 7, King Hussein lost his fight against cancer. Hillary and I immediately left for Jordan with a delegation that included Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush. I was very grateful for their willingness, on short notice, to honor a man we had all worked with and admired. The next day we walked in his funeral procession for almost a mile, attended the memorial service, and paid our respects to Queen Noor, who was heartbroken. So were Hillary and I. We had enjoyed some wonderful times with Hussein and Noor in Jordan and in the United States. I remembered with particular pleasure a meal the four of us had shared on the Truman Balcony of the White House not long before the king died. Now he was gone, and the world was a poorer place.
After meetings with the new monarch, Hussein’s son Abdullah, as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Assad, President Mubarak, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Boris Yeltsin, and President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey, I flew home to await the Senate vote on my future. Though the outcome wasn’t in doubt, the behind-the- scenes maneuvering had been interesting. Several Republican senators were upset with the House Republicans for putting them through the trial, but whenever the right wing turned the pressure up, most of them backed down and went along with dragging the whole thing out. When Senator Robert Byrd moved to have the charges dismissed as having no merit, David Kendall’s partner, Nicole Seligman, made an argument on the law and the facts that most senators knew was undebatable. Nevertheless, Byrd’s motion was defeated. When Senator Strom Thurmond told his Republican colleagues early on that the votes weren’t there to remove me and the process should be stopped, he was overruled in the Republican caucus.
One Republican senator who was opposed to impeachment kept us informed of what was going on among his colleagues. Several days before the vote, he said there were only thirty Republican votes for the perjury count and forty to forty-five for the obstruction of justice count. They were nowhere near the two-thirds majority the Constitution requires for removal. A few days before the vote, the senator told us that the House Republicans had said they would be humiliated if neither count got at least a token majority of the votes, and their Senate colleagues had better not humiliate them if they wanted the House to stay in Republican hands after the next election. The senator reported that they would have to whittle the number of Republican “no” votes down.
On February 12 the impeachment motions failed. The vote on the perjury count failed by 22 votes, 45–55, and the vote on the obstruction of justice count failed by 17 votes, 50–50, with all the Democrats and Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and John Chafee of Rhode Island voting no on both counts. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama, Slade Gorton of Washington, Ted Stevens of Alaska, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and John Warner of Virginia voted no on the perjury count.
The vote itself was anticlimactic, coming three weeks after the close of my defense. Only the margin of defeat was in doubt. I was just glad the ordeal was over for my family and my country. After the vote I said that I was profoundly sorry for what I had done to trigger the events and the great burden they imposed on the American people, and that I was rededicating myself to “a time of reconciliation and renewal for America.” I took one question: “In your heart, sir, can you forgive and forget?” I replied, “I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.”
After the impeachment ordeal, people often asked me how I got through it without losing my mind, or at least the ability to keep doing the job. I couldn’t have done it if the White House staff and cabinet, including those who were angry and disappointed over my conduct, hadn’t stayed with me. It would have been much harder if the American people hadn’t made an early judgment that I should remain President and stuck with it. If more congressional Democrats had bailed out when it looked like the safe thing to do in January, after the story broke, or in August, after I testified to the grand jury, it would have been tough; instead, they rose to the challenge. Having the support of world leaders like Mandela, Blair, King Hussein, Havel, Crown Prince Abdullah, Kim Dae Jung, Chirac,
