Living History (77 page)

In spite of polls showing large majorities against impeachment, many Democrats up for reelection believed that, unless they were tough on the President, they would lose their seats. It was a legitimate concern in some districts. In much of the country, however, impeachment and Starr’s investigation could tarnish Republican candidates who sought to exploit the process.

In early September, David Kendall discovered that the OIC was ready to send a referral on impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee, which would then decide whether the matter should go to the full House of Representatives for a vote. I had studied this area of the law in 1974, when my duties for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment staff had included writing a memo outlining the procedures for impeaching a President and another on the standards of evidence required to trigger an impeachment. According to the Constitution, the House must approve by majority vote the articles of impeachment, which are similar to a criminal indictment of a federal official. The articles are then sent to the Senate for trial. Although a jury in a criminal trial must be unanimous for a guilty verdict, only a two-thirds majority of the Senate is required for conviction and removal from office. The Constitution reserves impeachment as a remedy for only the most serious of offenses: “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution designed impeachment to be a slow, painstaking process because they believed that it should not be easy to remove a federal official, particularly the President, from office.

In 1868, the House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson for defying Congress’s wish that a harsh post-Civil War reconstruction policy be imposed on the South. I thought the House was wrong, but at least they acted against Johnson on grounds of his official actions as President. Johnson was tried and acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Richard Nixon was the second American President to face impeachment proceedings, and I knew firsthand how carefully that process safeguarded the use of grand jury evidence, following the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. That investigation was carried out under tight security and confidentiality for eight months before articles of impeachment having to do with President Nixon’s actions as President were presented to the Judiciary Committee. Chairman Peter Rodino and Special Counsel John Doar set examples of discreet nonpartisan professionalism.

David Kendall asked for an advance copy of the OIC’s referral to the House Judiciary Committee so that he could draft a response―a request grounded in simple fairness and precedent from the Nixon impeachment. Starr refused. On September 9, Starr’s deputies drove two vans to the Capitol steps and delivered copies of the over 119,000-oard “Starr report,” complete with thirty-six boxes of supporting documents, to the sergeant-at-arms.

Starr’s piece of grandstanding was appalling; the quick decision by the House Rules Committee to make the entire report available on the Internet, even more so.

Federal law requires that grand jury evidence be kept confidential so that testimony elicited by a prosecutor from a witness without the clarifying effect of crossexamination cannot prejudice a case or harm an innocent person. This is one of the basic tenets of our judicial system. The Starr report was a compilation of raw grand jury testimony obtained from witnesses who were never crossexamined, and it was released to the public without regard to fairness or balance.

I have not read the Starr report, but I’ve been told that the word sex (or some variation of it) appears 581 times in the 445-page report. Whitewater, the putative subject of Starr’s probe, reportedly appears four times, to identify a figure, like the “Whitewater Independent Counsel.” Starr’s distribution of his report was gratuitously graphic and degrading to the Presidency and the Constitution. Its public release was a low moment in American history.

Starr recommended that the House Judiciary Committee consider eleven possible grounds of impeachment. I was convinced that he had overstepped his legal authority.

The Constitution requires the legislative branch of government―not the independent counsel, which is a creation of the executive and judicial branches―to investigate evidence of impeachable offenses. Starr’s duty was to deliver an unbiased summary of the known facts to the committee, which would then deploy its own staff to assemble evidence.

But Starr appointed himself prosecutor, judge and jury in his zeal to impeach Bill Clinton. And the more I believed Starr was abusing his power, the more I sympathized with Bill―at least politically.

Starr’s list of impeachable offenses included charges that the President lied under oath about his personal behavior, obstructed justice and abused his office. Bill never obstructed justice or abused his office. He maintained that he did not lie under oath. Whether or not he did, a lie under oath about a private matter in a civil suit was not grounds for impeachment, according to the vast majority of constitutional experts and historians.

The day after Starr delivered his report to Congress, Bill and I attended a Democratic Business Council reception, where I introduced him as “my husband and our President.”

Privately, I was still working on forgiving Bill, but my fury at those who had deliberately sabotaged him helped me on that score. My schedule was loaded with events, and I showed up for every one of them. That day, there was a speechwriting meeting, a colon cancer prevention event, an AmeriCorps reception and several other appearances. If the White House staff saw me carrying on as usual, I hoped it would encourage them to do the same. If I could get through the day, they could, too.

For weeks Bill had apologized to me, to Chelsea and to the friends, Cabinet members, staffers and colleagues he had misled and disappointed. At a White House prayer breakfast with religious leaders in early September, Bill offered an emotional admission of his sins and a plea for forgiveness from the American people. But he would not give up his office. “I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense using all available appropriate arguments,” he said. “But legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong. If my repentance is genuine and sustained … then good can come of this for our country as well as for me and my family. The children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong, but God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.”

Bill cast his political fate with the American people. He asked for their compassion and then went back to work for them with the same commitment that he had brought to his Presidency from his first day in the White House. And we continued with our regular counseling sessions, which forced us to ask and answer hard questions that years of nonstop campaigning had allowed us to postpone. By now, I wanted to save our marriage, if we could.

The public response to Bill’s forthright apologies raised my spirits. The President’s job approval was holding steady through the crisis. A solid majority of about 60 percent of Americans also said that Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings, that Bill should not resign and that the explicit details in the Starr report were “inappropriate.”

My own approval rating was nearing an alltime high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic.

Although the case for impeachment was both unpopular and unjustified under the constitutional standard, I assumed that the House Republicans would pursue it if they thought they could. The only way to avoid impeachment was through a strong showing in the November elections. But the party in the White House traditionally loses congressional seats in midterm elections, as we had in 1994, and especially in a President’s second term. Democratic candidates everywhere were feeling justifiably nervous about the President’s political health.

On September 15, a delegation of about two dozen Democratic Congresswomen met with me in the Yellow Oval Room. The representatives sat on couches and chairs, while butlers served coffee and pastries. The women had come to urge me to take a public role in the upcoming election, but I think they also wanted to see and hear for themselves how I was holding up and what I was planning to do next. Once they realized that I was serious about standing up for the Constitution, the President and the Democratic Party, they asked me to get out and campaign for them.

We talked about how to direct the voters’ attention away from impeachment and back to the issues that mattered to voters―federal help to reduce class size and to help with school construction, Social Security and health insurance reforms, better foster care and adoption practices and protection of the environment.

“I’ll help you in any way I can,” I said. “But I also need you to help hold the party together, and to keep the Democratic Caucus members where they belong―behind the Constitution and the President.”

“We are not here to talk about the President’s behavior,” Representative Lynn Woolsey told reporters after the meeting. “We are here to talk about what’s important, more important to the people of this country.” Woolsey later explained: “We told her that as women, we know that women can do more than one thing at a time in an emergency… So we asked her to get on a plane and stop at places where her voice so desperately needs to be heard.”

And so I did. Campaigning in dozens of congressional races, my frenetic schedule kept me occupied all day. But the nights were difficult, especially after Chelsea returned to Stanford. Bill and I had only ourselves, and it was still awkward. I didn’t avoid him as I had before, but there was still tension between us and not as many shared laughs as I was used to on a daily basis with my husband.

I am not the sort of person who routinely pours out her deepest feelings, even to my closest friends. My mother is the same way. We have a tendency to keep our own counsel and that trait only deepened when I began living my life in the public eye. It was a welcome distraction when my good friends Diane Blair and Betsy Ebeling came to stay with me for a few days in mid-September. I was blessed with close friends, but once the relentless investigating started, I felt compelled to protect them from being dragged into any probe. After August 1998, I felt even more cut off and alone because I did not want to talk to Bill as I always had before. I spent a lot of time alone, praying and reading. But it made me feel better to have friends around who had known me forever, who had seen me pregnant and sick and happy and sad and could understand what I was going through now.

On September 17, during Diane and Betsy’s visit, Stevie Wonder called and asked if he could come over to see me at the White House. He had attended the state dinner for another of his fans, Czech President Vaclav Havel, and his new wife, Dagmar, the night before, and he wanted to return privately to play a song he had written for me. Capricia escorted Stevie, his assistant and one of his sons into the second-floor corridor of the residence, where a grand piano stood under a large painting by Willem de Kooning.

Diane and Betsy sat on a settee, and I sat in a small chair near the piano as Stevie began to sing a haunting, lilting melody. He hadn’t finished all the words, but the song was about the power of forgiveness, with the refrain, “You don’t have to walk on water …”

As he played, I kept moving my chair closer to the piano until I was sitting right next to him. When Stevie finished, tears filled my eyes and, when I looked around, tears were running down Betsy’s face and Diane’s. This was one of the kindest gestures anyone made during this incredibly difficult period.

I was also touched when Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour called to propose an article and photo shoot for the December issue of the magazine. It was gutsy of her to offer and counterintuitive for me to accept. In fact, the experience did wonders for my spirits. I wore a glorious burgundy velvet Oscar de la Renta creation for the cover shoot. For a day, I escaped into a world of makeup artists and haute couture. The Annie Leibovitz photographs were great, giving me the chance to look good when I had been feeling so low.

September 21, the day Bill addressed the opening session of the United Nations in New York, played out like an absurdist farce. When the Starr report didn’t force Bill to resign, the Republican leadership upped the ante and released the President’s videotaped grand jury testimony. As Bill entered the enormous General Assembly Hall to an enthusiastic and unusual standing ovation, all of the major television networks were simultaneously broadcasting a tape of his August interrogation by Starr’s deputies. As the hours of agonizing testimony droned on over the airwaves, Bill gave a forceful speech to the U.N. about the growing threat of international terrorism and the urgent need for a united response from all civilized people. I’m sure few Americans heard Bill’s warning about the dangers terrorists posed to us. When he finished speaking, the Presidents, Prime Ministers and delegates gave him another warm and prolonged ovation. The reception from his international peers affirmed Bill’s leadership, a timely recognition of the good work he had done as President.

Bill also met with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to discuss curbing Pakistan’s nuclear program and the overall threat posed by nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent, and with Secretary-General Kofi Annan about how to respond to Iraq’s continued defiance of U.N. resolutions. Later, he joined me at a forum on the global economy at New York University with Italian President Romano Prodi, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov and our friend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

By the time we returned to the White House the next day, it looked as if the Republicans’

publicity stunt had failed. The spectacle of the President keeping his composure while being barraged with prurient questions that no one would want to answer seemed to create more sympathy among the American people for Bill’s predicament.

The following evening, Nelson Mandela, who had also attended the U.N. session, visited us at the White House with his wife, Graça Machel. At a reception for African American religious leaders in the East Room, Mandela spoke about his genuine love and respect for Bill. After praising the relationship Bill had forged with South Africa and the rest of the continent, Mandela noted gently, “We have often said that our morality does not allow us to desert our friends.” He turned to Bill and addressed him directly. “And we have got to say tonight, we are thinking of you in this difficult and uncertain time in your life.” Mandela drew laughter and applause when he pledged not to “interfere in the domestic affairs of this country” But he was clearly making a plea to Americans to demand an end to the impeachment spectacle. Mandela, who had mastered his anger and forgiven his own jailers, was, as always, philosophical.