The Breach

by Peter Baker

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  Copyright 2000 by Peter Baker

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  ISBN-10: 0-7432-1293-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1293-9

  For Susan

  And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.

  Isaiah 58:12

  The American people returned to office a president of one party and a Congress of another. Surely they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call all us instead to be repairers of the breach and to move on with Americas mission. America demands and deserves big things from us, and nothing big ever came from being small.

  President Clinton,

  second inaugural address,

  January 20, 1997

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  PROLOGUE

  We have to impeachthe bastard

  Bob Livingston was looking for a place to escape. He moved wordlessly through the chamber of the House of Representatives, where his fellow congressmen were arguing about whether the president of the United States should be removed from office for the first time in American history for high crimes and misdemeanors. Republicans were crying about the rule of law, Democrats about partisan witch-hunts. Livingston tuned out the raging speeches and brushed past the milling congressmen. Finally he made his way to the door leading to the Republican cloakroom and ducked inside. Here he hoped to find a few moments of peace.

  With a row of phone booths, a few worn leather couches, a coffeepot, and a droning television, the L-shaped cloakroom on most days was a useful, if inelegant, hideaway from the monotony of legislative business. At this moment, it was also an effective refuge from the political storm that had swirled around Livingston in the last few days. It was Friday, December 18, 1998, and Livingston stood on the precipice of power, slated to become the next Speaker of the House. And yet he had the look of a haunted man, hiding from the swarm of television cameras staking out his office elsewhere in the Capitol. His tall, lanky form slumped into a chair in the cloakroom. His face was drawn, his eyes looked empty. Just two nights before he had been forced by a pornographer to publicly confess to marital infidelities, and now he presided over impeachment proceedings that had their origins in President Bill Clintons own sexual indiscretions. As if the situation were not surreal enough, suddenly the country was at war half a world away as Clinton ordered American warships and planes to bombard Saddam Husseins Iraq.

  Pen in hand, Livingston had been scribbling on some paper, trying to work on his speech for the impeachment debate, but he felt it was missing something important. He got up and squeezed himself into one of the cloakrooms phone booths and made a few calls. Finally, the weight of it all just hit him. The world had gone mad, it seemed to Livingston. How could all of this be happening at once? Across the room he spotted an aide walking into the cloakroom and gestured for him to come over.

  Weve got to stop this, Livingston said. This is crazy. Were about to impeach the president of the United States.

  Livingston had lost his nerve. He could not go through with it. He instructed his aide to summon the other members of the House Republican leadership for an emergency meeting in an hour. Were going to have a censure vote.

  The import of those words was instantly clear. It meant no impeachment. It meant surrender. At the behest of his partys conservatives, Livingston had been blocking attempts by Clintons Democratic allies to offer a nonbinding resolution on the floor that would reprimand the president rather than impeach him. If the House were allowed to vote on such a censure measure, moderate Republicans would have a vehicle to express their disapproval of Clintons behavior without feeling compelled to go along with those seeking to make him the first president impeached in 130 years. Censure would pass and impeachment would failat least that was the conventional wisdom. Five days earlier, prodded by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, the powerbroker from Texas who had helped him secure the Speakership in the first place, Livingston had announced he would not permit such a vote. Now, almost literally at the last minute, he was changing his mind.

  Livingstons aide, Mark Corallo, was alarmed. A feisty former military man, Corallo was convinced that Clinton was guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice for trying to cover up his affair with onetime White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky. Whats more, just that morning Corallo had been told by a friend about an even more explosive allegation contained in the locked vault at the Gerald R. Ford House Office Building where the secret evidence sent by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr was stored, a sensational if uncorroborated charge that Clinton had sexually assaulted a woman more than twenty years earlier when he was the attorney general of Arkansas. Corallo had rushed over to the cloakroom to tell Livingston, when he found the new Speaker dispirited and ready to give up.

  Wait a minute, Corallo told Livingston. You need to go to the Ford Building and see the evidence.

  No, Ive heard about some of it, Livingston replied. People have told me.

  No. You need to go look. Boss, we have a rapist in the White House.

  The nation was not yet familiar with the name of Juanita Broaddrick and her harrowing tale of a motel room encounter that had left her with a swollen lip and a terrible secret that two decades later would be splashed out in the nations newspapers and television sets despite the presidents denial. At that point, Broaddrick had refused to speak about it publicly, and her case had only been hinted at cryptically in the newspapers. Livingston had heard the story, at least wisps of it, in the hallways of the Capitol, but he stood quietly and listened as his aide poured forth indignation.

  If you allow a censure vote, he gets away with it, Corallo argued. He has flouted the law. He has attacked you and everything we stand for. We may take a short-term hit in the polls, but in the long run, well be remembered as the guys who stood up for the rule of law.

  Livingston thought about it. A tough-minded, fifty-five-year-old former criminal prosecutor, he believed in the rule of law as strongly as anyone. Certainly he had no great affection for Clinton. But this was the president. Livingston was, at heart, an institutionalist who had been raised to respect the office. His family tree extended to the beginnings of American democracy, including a forefather who had administered the presidential oath of office to George Washington. Livingston knew impeachment was not something to be undertaken lightly. And after a quarter century of political ladder-climbing, after swallowing his own sense of loyalty to push his friend Newt Gingrich out of the Speakers chair in a postelection coup, this was hardly what Livingston wanted to do in his first act as the leader of the House. He had dreamed of using his newfound position to trim back government and cut taxes. Those were the driving passions that had fired his two decades in Washington, not partisan thirst for revenge against the likes of Bill Clinton.

  Yet Livingston knew that it was too late to turn back. If he could not convince his own aide to halt the barreling locomotive of impeachment, how could he bring along a conservative Republican conference anxious to throw Clinton out of office? Maybe in the days or weeks before, another outcome had still been possible, but no longer. The debate had started; the vote was scheduled for the next day. Besides, Livingston concluded, Corallo was right. However unpleasant it was to deal with,
in Livingstons mind the president had committed serious crimes that the House had to confront directly. To let Clinton off, Livingston decided, would set a dangerous precedent that future presidents could do as they pleased with no accountability.

  So what youre saying, Livingston finally said to his anxious aide, is we have to impeach the bastard.

  Yes, Im saying we have to impeach the bastard.

  Okay, Livingston sighed. We wont have a meeting.

  Livingston did not tell his congressional colleagues about his eleventh-hour moment of doubt and quickly put it out of his own mind as well. Little did anyone realize that barely twenty-four hours before Clinton would be impeached, the one man who could have stopped it very nearly did. Small wonder that he hesitated. The months of scandal and turmoil had taken their toll in Washington. Lives had been wrecked, careers ruined. The nations politics had been warped into something almost unrecognizable. All the rules had been rewritten. A president could be caught enjoying sexual favors in the Oval Office suite from an intern barely older than his daughter, then lie about it on national television, cover up his misconduct, and yet soar to record heights in political popularity polls. A special prosecutor could force a young woman to divulge her most intimate secrets, haul her mother into a grand jury, and even compel the Secret Service agents who guard the president to break their code of silence, all without anyone able to tell him to stop. A Speaker of the House could seek to use the presidents wrongdoing to his advantage in an election, only to endure a devastating defeat and find himself forced from power just days later, all the while conducting his own secret, five-year extramarital affair. And now his successor faced his own moment of truth.

  For all of the titillation about thongs and cigars, the story of the impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton was not so much about sex as it was about power. It may have started with an unseemly rendezvous near the Oval Office, but it mushroomed into the Washington battle of a generation, ultimately dragging in all three branches of government. It tested the boundaries of Americas constitutional framework and challenged the precepts of nearly every major institution of public life. And the consequences went far beyond whether Clinton would stay in office or notfor good or ill, the decisions made by the House and Senate would redefine the limits of presidential and congressional power for decades to come. Just as lawyers and lawmakers cracked open history books to study the precedents set by Andrew Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, another set of national leaders in the future will search for lessons from the six-month showdown between the Democratic president and the Republican Congressfrom August 1998 when Clintons fate was thrown into the congressional arena by his admission that he had misled the nation, through his impeachment by the House in December, and finally to his eventual acquittal by the Senate in February 1999.

  The impeachment and trial had their origins not merely in the lust of a chief executive or the animosity he generated in his foes, but in a fast-changing, scandal-soaked Washington culture that had grown coarse and corrosive over the years. With the advent of the independent-counsel law following Watergate and the political wars that helped destroy the reputations of Supreme Court nominees Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas, House Speaker Jim Wright, and would-be defense secretary John Tower, attack politics had become more the norm than the aberration, a trend exacerbated by the development of multiple twenty-four-hour cable news channels hungry for conflict to fill dead airtime. At the Clinton White House, life under the microscope of a half-dozen special prosecutors had so jaded the presidents advisers that when counselor Paul Begala joined the White House staff in 1997, he put an attorney on retainer even before his first day on the job. Was that the fault of Clinton or Starr? The Republicans or the media? There were plenty of directions in which to point fingers.

  Clinton opened his second term vowing to bring the parties together, to become the repairer of the breach. But the last half of his presidency demonstrated that the breach was wider than anyone had ever anticipated. The impeachment and trial represented the triumph of partisanship on both sides of the aisle. Led by the White House, the Democrats made a calculated decision to promote partisanship and then use it as a shield for the presidentdemonizing his critics, resisting every GOP move, and even manufacturing disagreements where none existed, all to prove the political perfidy of the other side. Despite the private doubts of their own leaders, the Democrats resolved not to seriously consider removing a president who remained at lofty heights in the opinion polls. For their part, Republicans allowed revulsion at Clinton to consume them so much that they turned away from opportunities to work together with the opposition toward a bipartisan conclusion. The clearest lesson from Watergate was that impeachment had to be bipartisan to work, and yet the GOP majority pushed forward with little serious effort to win over Democrats, unwilling to consider any solution short of the ultimate goal. For both sides, impeachment, in the end, turned out to be another campaign to be won. Compromise was for the faint of heart.

  In another era, Washington might have found a consensus resolution without the political equivalent of nuclear escalation. There was a time when the powerbrokers in the nations capital could have settled on a proper course of action and then made it happen behind closed doorswhether the right answer was impeachment, resignation, censure, or some other outcome. In 1974, Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and John J. Rhodes went to the White House to convince Nixon to resign rather than face certain impeachment by the House. In 1987, Democratic leaders agreed to forgo impeachment proceedings against Ronald Reagan for the Iran-contra affair once former senator Howard H. Baker Jr. took over as White House chief of staff, pledging to put things back on track. But by the Clinton era, Washington had become such a polarized place that when the citys wise menformer senators, one-time White House officials, and even ex-presidentstried to intervene to bring the two sides of the Clinton clash together, they were ignored. In the current generation, outsiders such as Bill Clinton and revolutionaries such as Tom DeLay cared little what the party elders inside the Beltway thought.

  The Clinton impeachment saga was also the story of real people making it up as they went along, uncertain about what was the right answer. For every James Carville, the consultant who would defend his president to the last by tearing down his attackers, there was an Erskine B. Bowles, the White House chief of staff who wrestled with his own sense of betrayal and despair. For every Tom DeLay, who never wavered from his relentless campaign to drive Clinton from office, there was a Bob Livingston, who struggled with genuine doubts and conflicting imperatives until the bitter end. In hindsight, it would often seem that everything was inevitablethat the House was always bound to impeach and the Senate was always fated to acquit. But that was not the way it felt to those waging the battle at the time. At any number of points, events might easily have turned out differentlyincluding the moment when Livingston entertained second thoughts as the House opened its historic debate.

  Robert L. Livingston Jr. grew up in modest circumstances and a broken home in New Orleans, raised by a mother alone from an early age after his father abandoned the family. After dropping out of Tulane University, he signed up with the navy for a four-year hitch, which included a tour aboard ship in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis, before returning to school. Making tuition money as a welders assistant at the local shipyards, Livingston earned undergraduate and law degrees at Tulane and met a bright young man studying for a doctorate named Newt Gingrich. Livingston went to work for a succession of local, state, and federal prosecutors over the next half-dozen years, cementing his affinity for institutions and order. But the young lawyer did have a wild side. He liked to gamble at an illegal casino and carouse deep into the evening at the dives in the French Quarter. Once when he returned home late, he found his dinner left for him outside the front door by his unamused wife, Bonnie.

  By 1976, the political bug had bitten, and with the encouragement of his boss, the Democratic state attorney general, Livingston decided
to run for Congressbut as a Republican. He and Bonnie spent their entire life savings of $5,000 in a futile bid in a historically Democratic district, but when the man who had beaten him, Congressman Richard Tonry, resigned a year later amid a vote-fraud scandal, Livingston won the 1977 special election for the seat. In Washington, he quickly earned a reputation as a serious, fiscally conservative, pro-defense legislator who worked hard to steer federal money to the shipyards where he had once labored. After Republicans took over in 1994, Gingrich, his old acquaintance from Tulane, reached past other, more senior members to give Livingston the gavel of the most powerful panel in the House, the Appropriations Committee, which divvies up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars each year. Eager to make a point, Livingston showed up at his first meeting as chairman hefting a machete in one hand and an alligator knife in the otherall to show what he planned to do to the bloated federal budget.

  But in a town of one-dimensional politicians, Livingston proved to be more complicated. True to its long tradition, the Appropriations Committee under Livingston remained an island of bipartisanship even amid the fervor of Gingrichs revolution. The institutionalist in Livingston cherished relationships across the aisle; sometimes he would break out harmonicas with his friend, Democratic congressman David R. Obey, in the middle of a committee meeting. Yet the rebel in Livingston would lead the charge during the budget battle that shut down the federal government in 1995. We will never, never give in! he thundered on the House floor. We will stay here until doomsday! The videotape of his defiant outburst was played over and over on television until he became a symbol of Republican intransigence. His own mother later told him never to do that again because he looked like a raving lunatic.