A Vast Conspiracy (70 page)

The desultory last day of debate on the four articles of impeachment added little to what had already been said many times. Members on both sides of the aisle congratulated themselves for their open-mindedness about the evidence—and then all the Republicans spoke for impeachment and all the Democrats came out against it. Democrats spent most of the day following up on an idea first expressed by Jerry Nadler of New York—that the articles unfairly failed to specify precisely which of Clinton’s statements were false. This criticism was valid. The article charged that Clinton gave false testimony about “the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee,” but did not, as a perjury indictment would, identify the offending testimony. Out of all the reasons to oppose impeachment, this was a rather minor one, but Barney Frank caught the significance of this Republican omission.

In an exchange with George Gekas of Pennsylvania, Frank challenged him, “You are embarrassed to try and unseat a twice-elected president on this degree of trivia and you have therefore used obfuscatory language to suggest a set of offenses that don’t have specific support.” This was exactly right. The Republicans left out the details because the actual statements
only dealt with the minutiae of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters. To his credit, though, Bill McCollum at least had the courage to answer Frank’s challenge. As his colleagues and staff cringed, McCollum said to the television cameras, “If you remember, that it was a very specific definition and it included in it touching of breasts and genitalia.” Then the congressman hefted one of the volumes of Starr evidence and directed everyone’s attention to “page 547 of the big document that we have got published here.” He began quoting from Clinton’s grand jury testimony.

C
LINTON:
You are free to infer that my testimony is that I did not have sexual relations as I understood this term to be used.

Q
UESTION:
Including touching her breasts, kissing her breasts, or touching her genitalia?

C
LINTON:
That’s correct.

After this recitation, McCollum said, “That is specifically, if anybody wants to know, where the president committed perjury.”

The votes began with an article alleging that Clinton gave “perjurious, false, and misleading testimony” before the grand jury, which passed in a straight party-line vote of twenty-one to sixteen. Article two charged “perjurious, false, and misleading testimony” in his deposition in the Paula Jones case. (In an especially bravura touch, the articles—and later the House managers—always referred to
Jones v. Clinton
as “a Federal civil rights action.” After a fashion, this manufactured grandeur was accurate. Jones filed her suit under the civil rights laws only because she had missed the statute of limitations for Title VII, which is the usual vehicle for sexual harassment cases.)

One member broke party lines on article two. Lindsey Graham voted no, which meant that it passed by a vote of twenty to seventeen. Graham had sound reasons for voting against it. A former prosecutor himself, he thought no criminal case would ever have been brought based on an irrelevant matter in a dismissed civil lawsuit. But Graham’s vote contributed to the impression that article two was weaker on the facts than article one—that is, that Clinton’s lies were more easily proved in the grand jury than in the deposition. In fact, the reverse was true, which had important implications as the case proceeded. Partisan form returned on article three, which alleged obstruction of justice in the Jones case, and in article four, which was a much-amended melange that basically wound up charging
Clinton with lying in his answers to the committee’s eighty-one questions.

As the hour grew late on December 11, the members began to ramble more and give in to the occasional unguarded remark. Hyde’s were the most revealing. After the first article passed, the chairman suddenly announced, “The chairman yields himself two minutes.

“I just want to say people watching on television might get the wrong idea that if we pass these articles of impeachment, we’re throwing the president out of office. That’s exactly not true.… What we do is we find whether there’s enough evidence to warrant submission to the Senate,” Hyde explained. “That’s the process. And our Founding Fathers were very wise to have the accusatory body not be the adjudicatory body.” The chairman returned to this theme several more times in the waning moments of the committee’s deliberations—that impeachment was somehow no big deal, that the Senate could clear everything up. Hyde later denied this interpretation, but it wasn’t difficult to find in the chairman’s words a hint of remorse, a belated recognition that this process had spun out of control. In any event, by this point it was too late. The full House would consider impeachment in just eight days, on Friday, December 18.

Hyde’s mixed feelings came through even more clearly the following week. He knew that Howard Berman, his favorite Democrat on the committee, was interested in pushing a censure proposal. Hyde knew that several of Washington’s old wise men, including the lawyers Lloyd Cutler and Robert Strauss and the recently retired Bob Dole, were pushing for a censure option to be allowed on the House floor. Hyde told Berman he had no objection to a censure vote on the floor, but Cutler and Strauss had to get Livingston and the Republican leadership to change their minds. Berman said he would see what he could do, but the idea went nowhere.

The idea offered a window in Hyde’s knowledge of Washington—which was extensive, circa 1985. Tom DeLay lived in an entirely separate universe from the fat-cat lawyers who could once privately broker deals in line with their idea of the national interest. DeLay answered to the Christian right activists who controlled the Republican Party at the grass roots. No overture from a Bob Strauss, or even a Bob Dole, was going to change their minds—or DeLay’s.

By that final week, there was almost nothing left for Clinton to do. The much-discussed if seldom seen Republican moderates were simply carried
along in the momentum generated by DeLay. In the Republican cloakrooms, there was much discussion of a recent election in California. In October 1997, the congressman for the district around Santa Barbara, a Democrat named Walter Capps, had died suddenly. Many national Republicans rallied behind the candidacy of Brooks Firestone, a wealthy moderate, but conservatives, including Tom DeLay, backed Tom Bordonaro. Bordonaro won the primary—and promptly lost the general election to Capps’s widow. Bordonaro’s primary triumph sent a chill through many moderate Republicans. DeLay’s people could mobilize the party’s base, and if they could topple the tire heir, they could bring down any number of moderates. DeLay didn’t make explicit threats; none were necessary. But the moderates all knew that nothing mattered more to their party’s base than impeachment.

Once again Gephardt asked Rick Boucher to serve as Clinton’s emissary to moderates of both parties. Peter King, the conservative Long Island Republican, kept trying to help out, but with little success. Shortly before the vote, Mike Castle, a bellwether moderate Republican from Delaware, asked King to float a censure proposal that also included a fine for Clinton. The next thing King knew, Castle was saying publicly that he couldn’t support “King’s” censure proposal. In a sign of the desperation in the White House, aides to Clinton allowed some congressmen a rare look at their internal polling numbers from Penn, Schoen & Berland, which showed, according to the cover memo, that “voters are overwhelmingly against impeachment of the President and that the Republicans’ partisan drive for impeachment is causing their party’s ratings to plummet.” It moved no one.

On the Wednesday before the vote, Boucher finally realized that the battle to which he had unexpectedly devoted the last three months of his life was lost. Late in the afternoon, he decided to take a run along the great mall in front of the Capitol. He hadn’t expected to feel so strongly. He had no love for Bill Clinton. But Boucher hadn’t seen this kind of passion and anger in the country since Vietnam. He knew America was the strongest country in the world. No other country could threaten us. The only people who could hurt us were ourselves. He sat down by a tree near the Washington Monument and cried.

As Boucher was taking his run, the president was making a brief televised address from the Oval Office. He had once again sent planes to attack Iraq,
to ensure compliance with the settlement terms of the Persian Gulf War. It was the second time that Clinton had ordered a military strike at a crucial moment in the Lewinsky scandal. Just after the Starr report was released, in September, he had ordered bombing raids in retaliation for terrorist attacks on American embassies in Africa. On that occasion, Republicans had been generally supportive. This time, Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the Senate, said, “Both the timing and the policy are open to question.” Gerald B. H. Solomon, the Republican chairman of the House Rules Committee, was even more explicit in his criticism. “Never underestimate a desperate president,” he said in a news release issued on Wednesday afternoon. “What option is left for getting impeachment off the front page or maybe even postponed?”

That night, the House Republicans held a raucous meeting of their full conference to discuss what to do about the impeachment vote. A large screen was set up, so that the legislators could watch Clinton’s remarks on Iraq. When his image appeared, the room erupted in hoots and boos. In the end, the House leadership agreed to delay everything one day. After two days of debate, the vote would take place on Saturday, December 19.

Hyde had directed a few of the abler Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to serve on what he called the “fact team” for the House debate. These members would commit to staying on the floor at all times, to remain available to answer questions about the facts of the case. Jim Rogan had taken the job seriously, spending several late nights cramming for the assignment, so he wasn’t especially interested when the Republican leadership called another meeting of the full conference for Thursday night.

In the early part of the meeting, the most notable statement came from Steve Buyer, an Indiana representative on the Judiciary Committee. In this quasi-public setting, Buyer made an argument that had been circulating privately among Republicans for several weeks. If you have any doubt about impeachment, Buyer said, you should go into the Ford building and look at the reports about Jane Doe Number 5. Schippers had devoted a good deal of his investigative efforts to tracking down the story of Juanita Broaddrick, the Arkansas woman who claimed that Clinton had raped her in 1978. This was an astonishingly unfair argument, but an effective one. The Republicans lacked the courage to raise this issue in public—and let the president’s defenders respond to it—but they were willing to mutter their dark insinuations and display their secret evidence. Forty-five Republicans made the trek to the Ford building to examine the Broaddrick allegations.
All of this group—including Michael Castle and Mark Souder, who had indicated they were going to vote no—wound up voting yes.

After about an hour in the meeting room, Rogan sidled up to Bob Livingston, the speaker-designee, to ask if he could leave early and return to his preparations.

“Bob,” Rogan asked, “I’d like to get back to work. Is there anything else going on?”

“Yeah, there is,” Livingston whispered. “Hang around for five minutes.”