A Vast Conspiracy (67 page)

On Tuesday, October 6, Hyde had one last chance to thwart the Democrats’ strategy. At a committee hearing to determine the measure that would be sent to the House floor, Howard Berman, an unpredictable liberal from California, surprised everyone with a proposal that seemed to split the difference between Boucher’s limited approach and Hyde’s open-ended mandate. Berman proposed that the committee simply assume that the allegations in the Starr report were true and then move to a determination whether such conduct by the president amounted to an impeachable offense. It was simple and straightforward, and Barney Frank, the Massachusetts iconoclast who was the best tactician on the committee, saw that the Republicans might embrace it. This possibility of an outbreak of civility worried Frank, because he believed in Gephardt’s winning-by-losing strategy.

Frank sat near Berman in the hearing room, and he leaned over and whispered to Berman that he knew just how to kill his proposal—by endorsing it wholeheartedly. Frank knew that many Republicans on the committee were simply against anything he was for, on principle. Frank’s gambit worked, and Berman’s idea was voted down on a party-line vote. So
was Boucher’s proposal. And Hyde’s open-ended, no-formal-deadline approach was passed by committee, also by a straight party-line vote, twenty-one to sixteen.

The Boucher and Hyde proposals, both slightly modified, came to the floor on October 8, the first time that the full House had considered impeachment since September 11, when Clinton was thrashed in the vote to release the Starr report. This time, though, the atmosphere was different. Buoyed by polls that suggested continued support for the president, nearly all the Democrats had come home. That didn’t stop a last-minute bout of panic from hitting the White House—when James Carville bellowed at Rahm Emanuel that the Republicans were going to undercut Gephardt’s strategy and agree to Boucher’s proposal. The contagion of worry even spread to Abbe Lowell, who burst in on Gephardt to ask, “What if they accept the deal? What if the Republicans call our bluff and agree with our proposal?”

But Gephardt, at this point a veteran of the Gingrich Republicans’ kamikaze style, promised that the GOP would stand unified behind Hyde’s proposal, even if it meant being branded as a partisan lynch mob. “They can’t help themselves,” Gephardt said. “They will never do it. They will be against it because we are for it.”

Gephardt was right. Hyde’s plan passed by a vote of 258 to 176, with all of the Republicans in the House and just thirty-one Democrats voting with the majority. At the end of the day, Rick Boucher’s proposal came to the floor and the gentleman from Virginia rose with a request for Newt Gingrich. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “on that I demand the yeas and nays.”

The tabulations found 236 against and 198 for the plan that limited the impeachment hearings to the Lewinsky allegations and called for their conclusion by the end of the year. The vote had run almost entirely along party lines. No loser ever left the House floor more content than Rick Boucher did on that day. And like the rest of his colleagues, he fled the Capitol following the vote and returned home to campaign.

19

Mr. Genitalia and the Perjury Ladies

O
n Wednesday, November 4, the day after the elections, Henry Hyde summoned his aide Tom Mooney to the place they always went when they wanted secrecy: a conference room at the O’Hare Hilton, just outside Hyde’s district in Illinois. The chairman’s mood had evolved from misery to despair. The elections of the previous day had been an epic disaster for the Republicans. In the sixth year of a two-term presidency, the party controlling the White House had traditionally lost many, sometimes dozens, of seats in Congress. With the Lewinsky scandal roiling, Democrats had feared losses of that magnitude. (Vice President Al Gore told Mark Penn, the president’s pollster, that he thought the Democrats would lose between thirty and forty seats.) Though many polls tightened in the final days, almost no political observer predicted the scale of the Democratic comeback. The Senate stood unchanged, at fifty-five Republicans and forty-five Democrats. Republicans actually lost five seats in the House, and their advantage there was shaved to a bare 223 to 212.

Every election was subject to varying interpretations, but Hyde joined in the consensus that the voters were expressing their displeasure with the Republicans’ obsession with the scandal. Gingrich’s last-minute decision to
spend $10 million of party money on advertisements that attacked Clinton had flopped. If there was any good news for Hyde, who loathed Gingrich, it was that the election would clearly cost the speaker his job. (By the end of the week, Gingrich announced plans to resign.)

But the question of impeachment remained. What should Hyde and his committee do now? Late on that Wednesday afternoon, Hyde and Mooney convened a gloomy conference call with the other twenty Republicans on Judiciary. Jim Rogan, who had expected an easy coast to reelection, was still waiting for the last votes to be counted, to make sure that he had won. Bob Inglis had lost his Senate race in South Carolina. Their experiences provided vivid examples of the political cost of association with their cause. Hyde said that he wanted to discuss two issues. First, he said he was completing work on written questions for Clinton to answer. The president had refused invitations to testify before the committee, but Hyde thought that he could at least put Clinton on the spot by forcing him to address some of the embarrassing questions raised by his conduct.

Second, the chairman said, he believed they ought to call Kenneth Starr as a witness. Previously, it had been mostly Democrats who were agitating to hear from Starr. They said they wanted to confront him about the alleged improprieties in his investigation, but basically the Democrats had wanted Starr as an exhibit—a physical embodiment of the most unpopular man in American politics. But Hyde now saw Starr as a final opportunity to see if there really was something more to the scandals than Lewinsky. If anyone knew of the elusive other shoe, it was Starr—so they ought to hear what he had to say.

Hyde’s colleagues didn’t agree or disagree as much as listen in grumpy silence. The chairman sensed their dismay, so he offered words of gentle encouragement. “What can we do?” he asked. “Can we sweep it under the rug?” No, he answered for them, they had a duty to continue, regardless of the political consequences. Later, Hyde would joke privately that he gave this speech twice a week to his fellow Republicans on Judiciary. In a strange way, Hyde was invigorated by the futility. Like Clinton, he reveled in self-pity. Indeed, the less popular he and his inquiries became, the more he was persuaded that he was on the right course. The chairman promised he was leading his troops to certain failure, to public ridicule, to political calamity even greater than the one they had just endured.

Onward!

“Point of order, Mr. Chairman,” said Mel Watt, an imperious Democrat from North Carolina.

“I don’t yield for any points of order,” Henry Hyde responded. “I would like to make my statement.”

It was November 19, the day that Starr was going to testify, and the Judiciary Democrats were observing their custom of opening each hearing with a little procedural torture for the chairman. Watt was protesting the amount of time that Hyde had allotted David Kendall to question Starr. “Now,” Hyde continued, “you are disrupting the continuity of this meeting with these adversarial motions.”

“We are disrupting a railroad, it seems like, Mr. Chairman,” Watt shot back.

Everyone was on edge, because Starr was the one person who could, in theory, transform the impeachment debate. The Democrats were particularly worried. In the typical congressional manner, they had demanded that he appear—and then panicked when it became clear that he would. For days, the Democratic members had badgered their counsel, Abbe Lowell. “What should we ask him? What should we do?”

Starr also recognized the stakes, both for his investigation and for his own reputation. He had prepared for his appearance as he used to rehearse for Supreme Court arguments, with staff members peppering him with questions. As a former solicitor general, Starr was well suited for this kind of interrogation, and he wore a confident smile when he sat down at the witness table, with his diminutive wife behind one shoulder and the stolid Bob Bittman behind the other.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Starr began. “I welcome the opportunity to be before the committee.”

“Would you pull the mike up?” Hyde interrupted.

“I was just told to push my mike away,” Starr replied.

“By a Democrat, I am sure,” Hyde said, drawing a laugh.

“The person did not identify his affiliation in saying that,” Starr answered, displaying, in contrast, his leaden wit.

The previous night, the OIC had given the prepared text of Starr’s two-hour presentation to members of the Judiciary Committee, so there were no surprises. His remarks basically recapitulated the highlights of the Starr report. Following the lunch break, the Democrats had their chance to have
at Starr for the first time. Abbe Lowell took the first shot, and he employed the clipped, contemptuous tone of a veteran cross-examiner. “Mr. Starr, isn’t it true that …”; “Mr. Starr, you have to agree, I take it …”; “Mr. Starr,… the key word in your title ‘Independent Counsel’ is ‘independent’?… Part of being ‘independent,’ I think you would agree with me, is being free of conflicts of interest that might bias your investigation, correct?”

The consistent theme of the Democratic critique, articulated first by Lowell and then by the committee members themselves, was that Starr himself had broken laws—that he and his staff had violated Lewinsky’s rights in the Ritz-Carlton, had illegally leaked information to the press, had conflicts of interest in the Jones case. Starr handled these accusations with aplomb. Ironically, with respect to Starr, the Democrats fell into the same trap as the Republicans did throughout the Clinton years. The problem with Starr was not that he was a lawbreaker, as the questioners consistently tried to imply, but rather that he lacked judgment and reason when it came to this case. Neither Starr nor Clinton was a criminal. The errors of both Starr and his critics illustrated the perils of a world where the legal system had taken over the political system. It was never enough to prove that your adversaries were mistaken; you had to prove that they were evil as well.

On most of the issues that Starr addressed, the prosecutor also had the advantage of being right. When Lowell pressed him about the alleged mistreatment of Lewinsky on January 16, Starr calmly and appropriately rejected the charge. “We did, in fact, use a traditional technique that law enforcement always uses,” he said in his fussy diction. “We made it clear to the witness that she was, in fact, free to leave. The Ritz-Carlton, shall I say, is a fairly comfortable and commodious place. We will show you … telephone records that indicated she reached out to Mr. Carter, her attorney.… She called her mother. She went for a walk.… We conducted ourselves professionally.” And so, Democratic accusations notwithstanding, they had.

As usual, though, Barney Frank was operating a few steps ahead of everyone else. Listening to Starr’s opening presentation, Frank noticed that, in passing, the prosecutor had conceded that he had found no evidence of impeachable offenses in the Travelgate and Filegate areas within his jurisdiction.
This admission dashed the Republicans’ central hope in summoning Starr—that he had some new bombshell to drop. But Frank, characteristically, was thinking of a further implication of this disclosure by Starr. Frank noted that Starr had said he sent the information about impeachable offenses to Congress “as soon as it became clear.” But when, the congressman asked, had he decided that there was no information incriminating to the president in Travelgate?