by Peter Baker
The chairman was getting heat from the other side too. After announcing that he hoped to complete the inquiry by New Years, even though he would not commit to such a deadline in writing, Hyde found David Schippers in his office griping that they could never finish by then. They needed at least until the summer of 1999, Schippers said.
Well, I had to give them some sort of deadline, Hyde explained.
Well, okay, Schippers replied, but dont hold us to it.
This was not about polls, Gephardt had declared in the Dinosaur Room a month earlier, but when the moment of decision came, there was the presidents former pollster briefing House Democrats the morning of Thursday, October 8, just before they were to head out to the floor to debate the impeachment inquiry. Stan Greenberg, who had worked for Clintons 1992 campaign, delivered the same message the president had imparted to Vic Fazio, telling the nervous Democrats that they would not pay a political price for opposing the Republican plan, even in rural districts in the South. Four focus groups taken by Greenberg in Cleveland, Ohio, and Towson, Maryland, on September 14, three days after the Starr report was posted on the Internet, revealed a deep skepticism about impeachment in key demographic groups, especially women, who were the core of the partys support. A Democrat who supported a thirty-day inquiry would have an advantage of 18 percentage points over a Republican who voted for an open-ended investigation, Greenberg reported.
As the congressmen filed out and headed over to the floor, they grew energized. If the debate had been civil in the committee three days earlier, by the time it reached the full House it took on an angrier cast. Hyde opened the debate offering reassurances. While he did not want to formalize the restrictions involved in the Democratic alternative plan, he embraced the philosophy behind it. Believe me, nobody wants to end this any sooner than I do, Hyde told the House. But the Constitution demands that we take the amount of time necessary to do the right thing in the right way. A rush to judgment doesnt serve anybodys interests, certainly not the publics interests. As for wandering off into every possible area for investigation, he vowed, I will use all my strength to ensure that this inquiry does not become a fishing expedition.
Reassured by the poll numbers, feisty Democrats were in no mood to accept Hydes word and began firing up the rhetoric. Congressman Gary L. Ackerman of New York stood to suggest that the House adjourn to the witch-burning town of Salem. Another New Yorker, Jerrold Nadler, called the Republican inquiry a thinly veiled coup dtat. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California reminded House Republicans that they had elected Gingrich as Speaker even though he admitted making false statements during his ethics investigation. So many Democrats were itching to sound off that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut privately approached Julian Epstein, the Judiciary Democratic aide who was helping manage the clock, and told him she had forty women who wanted to speak. Epstein came up with an idea: All the women should line up and approach the microphone one by one to ask for permission to submit written comments to the record since they were not given enough time to speak under the Republican floor rules. The image of women shut out of the debate would carry a powerful message to the country about the unfairness of the process while reinforcing that the president still had the support of female lawmakers despite his abhorrent conduct with women. Gephardt loved the plan, and more than a dozen women trooped up to the microphone in a parade of defiance.
I rise against this pre-Halloween witch-hunt, snarled one, Congress-woman Corrine Brown of Florida.
The polarizing debate did nothing to win over Republicans, but it did bring a number of edgy Democrats back into the fold. The Boucher alternative was voted down on a 236198 vote that fell largely along party lines, while the Hyde proposal passed 258176. In all, thirty-one Democrats agreed to go along with Hydes inquiryfar less than the fifty that some White House and congressional strategists had feared, and less than a third of the one hundred identified by Gephardt back in August as possible votes for impeachment. The House had agreed to open only the third serious impeachment investigation of a president in American history, and yet for the Clinton camp it was something of a victory. They had held their Democratic losses to a minimum and succeeded in setting up the inquiry from the moment it was launched as a partisan exercise by the Republicans.
At the White House, Greg Craig won a $20 pool by guessing there would be only thirty-four defections, the most optimistic estimate among his fatalistic colleagues. The president himself publicly struck a note of serene acceptance. It is not in my hands, it is in the hands of Congress and the people of this country, ultimately in the hands of God, he told reporters. Personally, I am fine. I have surrendered this. But out of public view, he had anything but surrendered. In fact, he was fuming about the thirty-one Democrats who abandoned him. An aide gave him a list of the names and he pored over it, offering an instant analysis of the political situation of each of the defectors. This one didnt have to vote against me, he raged; I got 55 percent in his district last time. Same with this one. And that one doesnt have a real opponent in next months election.
Although the competing inquiry plans were not that different, neither Clinton nor Hyde had given in, despite substantial pressure from his own allies, guaranteeing the partisan vote. As a result, two things were beginning to happen. First, the Republicans had won the larger debate about whether the charges leveled against the president merited an inquiry. The bipartisan consensus now was that it did. All but five members of the House had voted to investigate Clinton; where they had divided was over how to conduct the investigation. Admittedly, some of the more liberal Democrats went along with their partys inquiry plan even though they felt none was justified, but that showed how the political landscape had been shaped to make further investigation the accepted course.
Second, however, the Democrats had won a different victory. They had transformed the issue, at least within their own caucus, from Clintons behavior to that of the Republicans. The outrage expressed on the floor this day was no longer directed at their own president, as it was when Joe Lieberman had spoken in the Senate a month earlier. Now it was directed at the majority party. It was becoming us versus them, which was exactly what Democratic leaders knew they needed. Win by losing, Gephardt had said. Nothing unifies like a common enemy. The big question now was which party would pay a price at the ballot box. Would Democrats be punished for seeming to side with a dishonorable president or would they be able to convince voters that Republicans were acting unfairly out of partisan spite?
The Republicans had killed Gephardts inquiry proposal, but the Democrats killed his censure idea. In the days since he had had Bob Bauer draft a secret plan to reprimand the president and strip him of his pension for five years, Gephardt had privately been trying to sell the concept within his own party without success. Lloyd Cutler never got back to Bauer, and White House aides privately dismissed Gephardts proposed sanctions as too severe. Worse still, the minority leader found that Democratic congressmen would not buy into the formulaelected officials did not like setting a precedent where their pensions could be taken away for bad conduct. Tom DeLay did not even have to rally his GOP shock troops to bury the plan because Gephardt abandoned it himself once he realized he could not muster his own party behind it. Any possibility of censure, he decided, would have to wait until after the election.
As it was, the White House was plagued by confusion on censure. Cutler was taking direction from Podesta and Ruff, but the president had not made clear exactly what he would be willing to accept. Then there was Hillary Clinton; some aides were told she was adamantly against any censure-plus plan that involved a financial penalty, even though the president at times seemed open to it. Besides, they knew, any censure deal had to be worked out not with Democrats but Republicans, and they were not talking. The situation was exacerbated by the strategic vacuum in the West WingErskine Bowles, Rahm Emanuel, and Mike McCurry were either gone or on their way out, Paul Begala had removed himself from much of the day-to-day skirmishi
ng as he struggled with his Catholic conscience, a burned-out Doug Sosnik had left for a long vacation, and those left behind were exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Greg Craig, trying to fill the void, spent his days on scouting missions on Capitol Hill, hoping to find a way to beat impeachment before it got out of committee. On Friday, October 9, the day after the House voted to launch an inquiry, Craig went to see Congressman Martin Meehan, one of the more independent-minded Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and a White House ally on campaign finance reform. Do we have any shot at any Republicans? Craig asked. What about Asa Hutchinson? What about Lindsey Graham?
Youre not going to get Asa Hutchinson in a million years, Meehan answered. Meehan had been turned off during deliberations on campaign finance by Hutchinsons insistence on promoting his own bill rather than working together. On impeachment, Hutchinson only wanted to look neutral, Meehan told Craig. The president would not get any committee Republicans, he declared.
Craig did not want to believe it. The White House team was still optimistic about the committee Republicans. All they needed to do was get three to switch and they would bury this thing before it ever got to the floor. Hutchinson and Graham had been meeting regularly with a couple of their Democratic colleagues on the committee, Howard Berman and Bill Delahunt, in what they called the breakfast club, an effort to find bipartisan accommodation. We think we can get Lindsey Graham, Craig told Meehan. Were having a dialogue with Asa Hutchinson.
The president was reaching out too. With everything swirling around him, he sometimes seemed frighteningly lonely and isolated. A couple of days later, on Sunday, October 11, Clintons agriculture secretary, Dan Glickman, called the White House around 6 P.M. to leave a message with the operator for the president: Just tell him Im thinking of him. Clinton called back just three minutes later, anxious to talk. It occurred to Glickman that the president was obviously alone, sitting around the White House without anyone else on a Sunday evening.
What can we do about this group in the House? Clinton asked.
Glickman had never been close to Clinton, but clearly the president would now turn wherever he could. Glickman had served eighteen years in the House and had many friends there. He told Clinton he would make some calls and see what he could figure out.
Indeed, the concerted effort to project the image of a president focused entirely on his job was still something of a faade. During the day, Clinton kept up an active schedule. But by night, often sitting by himself in the White House residence, Hillary keeping her distance, he surrendered to his distress, watching hours of television news or talk shows and phoning allies at home to vent and seek solace. In the bedrooms of senior Democrats around town, anytime the telephone rang at 11 P.M., midnight, or even later, they knew who it would be even before picking up the receiver. The president would talk late into the night, alternately bemoaning how this had decimated his family and lashing out at Starr, Republicans, and the conspiracy to entrap him. The next morning, Clinton would often arrive at the Oval Office with some suggested new strategy or piece of political intelligence to pass along to aides, who were then charged with vetting the ideasand deducing among themselves who had planted the ideas with the president in the dead of night.
***
The uncertainty and anxiety within the Republican fold was growing. One night in mid-October, Newt Gingrich was back at Bullfeathers, the Capitol Hill bar where he met with advisers the night before the Starr report was released. Across the room he saw two fellow Republicans walk in, Steve Buyer and Mary Bono, both members of the Judiciary Committee. Gingrich wandered over and joined them at their table. He might have expected light companionship from two junior members. What he got was a double serving of anxiety.
Im very concerned about this. What are we doing here? Bono asked the Speaker.
The widow of the late celebrity congressman Sonny Bono, she had just won his seat following his death in a ski accident earlier in the year, and Gingrich had immediately put her on the Judiciary Committee in the apparent hope that she might soften the harder edges of the panels otherwise all-male Republican contingent. At the moment, though, it was the Speakers hard-edged approach that she was worried about. She thought there ought to be a meeting among the key Republicans to decide what their strategy would be. She was discouraged by what she had seen from the party leadership and concerned that Gingrich viewed impeachment only as a political tool for the election. The Republicans on the committee had a responsibility to evaluate the case seriously, she told him. She did not feel the leadership understood how hard it was for them.
Buyer was equally candid with Gingrich. A Persian Gulf War veteran finishing his third term in the House, Buyer complained that the leadership had mishandled the impeachment issue from the beginning and was in danger of being burned badly. As Buyer saw it, Gephardt had suckered Gingrich into releasing all the evidence, including the grand jury videotape, without consulting all the Republicans on the committee. As a result, the public had concluded that Republicans were acting vindictively. Buyer told Gingrich that he was deeply disappointed that the Starr report was not sent immediately to the Judiciary Committee.
This is white-hot, Buyer told the Speaker. Stay out of it and let the committee do its business, Buyer advised. Ill tell you whats bothered me. This is evidence. This is about the presidents fitness to serve and should be viewed that way. He was looking at it as a lawyer, Buyer said, but the leadership was looking at it like politicians. My district is the heartland of America, Buyer added, and it takes a lot to move these folks. If their emotions are stirred, the lesson is, dont touch it.
Gingrich listened politely, but did not agree. This was good politics, he insisted. They were going to pick up twenty-two seats and strengthen their control of the House, he predicted. That was the most important goal at the moment.
***
Despite the vote to authorize the impeachment inquiry, Clinton scored several dramatic political victories on the policy front over the next few weeks that would play an important role in determining whether he would survive. After months of haggling over the first surplus budget in three decades, the president engaged in a bit of brinksmanship with Republican congressional leaders, who were so anxious to go home and campaign that they accepted what many in their rank and file viewed as a bad deal. Eight spending bills were rolled into a mammoth, forty-pound, four-thousand-page package that busted spending caps and was forced through on quick floor votes before members could even digest the highlights summary, much less the fine print. Clinton got many of his priorities, including money for the International Monetary Fund and the start of a program to hire one hundred thousand schoolteachers. Aides crowed that the president could still flex his political muscle even at a time of supposed mortal weakness.
What was consciously overlooked in the jubilation at the White House was that the vast bulk of the domestic agenda put together by Erskine Bowles and his team in the heady days of January had long since been tossed overboard, including antitobacco legislation, Medicare coverage for younger retirees, campaign finance reform, child care tax breaks for working parents, a health care patients bill of rights, and an increase in the minimum wage. Clinton managed to look good in the endgame of the budget talks only because a week before the finale his aides got together, crossed everything off the priority list that was clearly dead, and drew up a list of a dozen programs that already appeared likely to be funded. Once again playing the expectations game, the White House released the truncated list publicly, and when Republicans went along with most, as already seemed likely, it was cast as a tremendous victory.
Still, in the context of the moment, the details hardly mattered. What mattered were the visuals. What mattered were the emotions. For a week, Clinton appeared at repeated campaign-style rallies alongside his partys congressional leaders, Gephardt and Daschle, fighting for some poll-tested policies popular with the voting public. On Thursday, October 15, the day he wrapped up the budget nego
tiations, the president loped out of the Oval Office for a triumphant victory appearance on the South Lawn and then boarded a helicopter to fly off to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to try to broker a settlement among squabbling leaders in the Middle East. The image could not be more powerfulwhile the Republicans focused on scandal, the president was sticking to his day job, winning a budget fight and making peace around the world. When he emerged eight days later from the Wye River Conference Center in Maryland with a dramatic deal between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, it only reinforced the message to the public, and just eleven days before the midterm congressional elections. To make matters worse for the Republicans, radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives began bashing the congressional leadership every day for what they saw as a capitulation to Clinton on the budget.
While he could broker peace in the Middle East, Clinton could still not find a way to negotiate a truce with Paula Jones. The unwelcome $1-million bounty from Abe Hirschfeld, the New York millionaire, had bollixed up the talks. On Saturday, October 17, Jones lawyer James A. Fisher proposed to Clintons lawyer, Bob Bennett, that they settle the case for $2 millionhalf from Hirschfeld and half from the president. Bennett called back the next day to dismiss the suggestion and to threaten to take the presidents last $700,000 offer off the table as well. The impasse meant that the two sides would return to court at least one more time. On Tuesday, October 20, both legal teams presented arguments to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul, Minnesota, over whether Joness lawsuit should be reinstated. Based on their questioning, two of the three judges on the panel seemed to be leaning toward reviving the case. Bennett flew back from St. Paul determined to find a way around the settlement standoff.
Greg Craig and the presidents other lawyers were trying to figure out the rules of engagement on the main battlefield. With most members of Congress out of town campaigning for reelection, the attorneys took advantage of the momentary respite to meet with senior Judiciary Committee officials at 2 P.M. on Wednesday, October 21. Tom Mooney, Hydes chief aide, passed out copies of the resolution and procedures, emphasizing that they had been adopted verbatim from Watergate, when he worked for the minority staff.
