by Peter Baker
At a news conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem the next day, Sunday, December 13, the emotionally drained and frequently angry Clinton was the picture of calm, answering the questions he knew would come his way with a stoic equilibrium. He tried to shame the Republican leaders into allowing a censure vote. You ought to ask them whether theyre opposed to it because they think that it might pass, since, apparently, somewhere around three-quarters of the American people think thats the right thing to do.
Asked if he would follow Nixons example and resign to avoid an impeachment vote by the full House, Clinton did his best to leave no room for doubts about his determination: I have no intention of resigning. Its never crossed my mind.
Clinton answered the question even before it was put to him by political leaders back home. On the Sunday television talk shows, taped hours later because of the time difference, Clinton was urged to step down by three House leaders, DeLay, Hyde, and Majority Leader Dick Armey. He could really be heroic if he did that. He would be the savior of his party, Hyde said. I would just hope that the president would put the American people ahead of his own ambitions and resign, added DeLay. The entreaties came on different shows in response to obvious questions by the hosts and, unlike the censure letters the night before, were not orchestrated in advance by the leaders or their staffs. Indeed, DeLay had been warned not to go on the show by his friend Congressman Bill Paxon, who told him he would risk becoming the public face of impeachment again. But at the White House, it seemed to be clear evidence of a strategy by the Republicansfirst to downplay the importance of impeachment by the House, characterizing it as merely an indictment, then after the vote to point to the impeachment as a reason for the president to resign. Clintons aides resolved to try to defuse any momentum for resignation. That was the larger threat to his survival.
But the president was not yet ready to give up in the House. While the rest of the Middle East slept, Clinton worked the phones. It was still early enough back home to get in a few calls and try to figure out where he was. At 2:25 A.M. Israeli time (7:25 P.M. the night before in Washington), the president rang up Pete King, the New York congressman who had been helping him try to corral other GOP defectors.
I know you must be going through hell, King told him. Im thinking of you.
Clinton thanked him and asked about the undecided Republicans. King told him that Al DAmato had been speaking with Congressman Sherwood L. Boehlert, another middle-of-the-road New York Republican, who expressed concern that if impeachment was defeated, the president would be getting away with something that other people would be indicted for.
At that, Clinton bristled. I never committed perjury, he insisted, urging King to tell Boehlert that all the expert witnesses concurred, including former Republican prosecutors.
King agreed to call and then mentioned another moderate New Yorker he had information about. Congressman John M. McHugh was against impeachment if given the option to vote for censure, but without that alternative, he would probably have to vote to impeach, King told the president.
Well, how many votes do we have? Clinton asked.
Well, King said, at least six or seven. In addition to himself, there was John Porter, Chris Shays, Mark Souder.
Clinton interrupted. How about Forbes? Is he with us?
Mike Forbes very much wanted to vote against impeachment, King replied, but he was under tremendous pressure from his mentor, Bob Livingston.
How about Jack Quinn?
King thought Quinn was getting a bit nervous but would still stand with Clinton. The president agreed with that assessment, telling King about his phone conversation with Quinn the other night.
As they talked, the president seemed fervent, focused on what was happening, but not allowing himself to admit how serious the predicament had become. They went through some more namesMike Castle, who was leading the explorations into censure for the House Republican moderates, Bob Ney, Frank Riggs, Anne Northup. Clinton knew exactly how many votes he had gotten in each of their districts and came up with reasons why this one or that one would stick with him, how if he could only explain to them that he had not done what he was accused of, everything would turn out okay. Clinton said he thought he could hold his Democratic losses to three or four and would need fifteen Republicans, though he wanted to get eighteen. Two-thirds of the Democrats who had voted with the Republicans to launch the inquiry back in October were now circulating a letter opposing impeachment, Clinton said. King filled him in on some new poll numbers showing that 58 percent of Americans supported censure. That was wrong, Clinton interjected. The number was 70 percent.
They hung up at 7:46 P.M. Washington time. King was even more worried. Clinton did not seem to understand just how perilous his situation really was.
Up in Buffalo the next morning, Monday, December 14, Jack Quinn, the presidents Republican friend, convened a previously scheduled 10 A.M. meeting of his local labor roundtable, a group of union leaders from his district who advised him from time to time. Just the existence of such a council indicated that Quinn was no ordinary Republican. But by now, he knew what he was going to do on the big vote and knew his union supporters would not like ithe had to vote for impeachment. Quinn had gotten little sleep in recent days, and his wife found him pacing in the backyard, wrestling with the decision. He had talked it through ad infinitum with his family. In the end, he concluded he had jumped too fast the month before when he said he would vote against impeachment. He had not really focused on the evidence. Without the option of censure on the table, what other choice did he have to hold the president accountable?
As the thirty or so labor leaders filed into his district office and snacked on doughnuts, Quinn found himself in a box. He had promised White House lobbyist Susan Brophy over the weekend that he would not announce any decision without informing her first, but he had not been able to find Brophy that morning. The union leaders would surely ask, but he could not tell them and he could not cancel the meeting. So after much talk about the minimum wage and the Davis-Bacon Act, a man from the AFL-CIO finally got up and asked the question of the hour: What are you doing on impeachment? Quinn danced as nimbly as he could about how hard a decision it was, without giving a definitive answer.
His father was not fooled. Youre voting for impeachment, arent you? he asked in the car afterward.
Yes.
Anybody in that room knew that.
Across the country, several dozen swing Republicans were grappling with the same decision. Because Congress was still in recess, the 435 members of the House were scattered in districts far and wide, unable to compare notes in the cloakroom or talk things through on the floor. All of them knew it could easily be the most important vote of their political careersand that those careers could possibly hang in the balance. All of them knew that history would judge them as much as their constituents. The key was a small bloc of thirty-four mostly moderate Republicans who had not committed one way or the other, particularly in the centrist New York delegation. They were approaching their deliberations in different ways. Some secluded themselves in their homes or offices, studying evidence books or searching their souls. Others reveled in the media attention available to any who accepted itendless rounds on Geraldo, Chris Matthews, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, even the big gorillas in Washington politics, the Sunday network talk shows. They read The Federalist papers, they consulted advisers and relatives, they stopped to talk with voters in the street.
They received no shortage of input. The telephones at the Capitol and in their district offices rarely stopped ringing. Voice-mail boxes were filled to capacity and fax machines churned out one missive after another. The congressional E-mail system was so overloaded that the server periodically went on the blink. Congresswoman Constance A. Morella of Maryland, perhaps the most liberal Republican in the House, received twelve thousand E-mail messages over the weekend. Heather Wilson, the newest member of the House thanks to a special election in New Mexico les
s than six months earlier, was fielding a thousand phone calls a day at her offices. Much of this was orchestrated by the predictable groups, the labor unions and liberal advocacy groups on the left and the conservative Christian organizations on the right. But many of the calls were from genuinely outraged votersoutraged at Clinton for his abuses in office, outraged at Starr for poking around in someones sex life, outraged at the Republican Congress for wasting its time on something so trivial, or outraged at opposition Democrats who were willing to sell their souls for the presidents survival.
One quarter not heard from much was the White House. While Clintons aides and friendly former congressmen were reaching out to the undecided Republicans, they were not employing the full arsenal at the presidents command. Clinton himself was afraid to call Republicans uninvited for fear of looking as if he was improperly applying pressure, and Vice President Gore was largely limiting his calls to Democrats. Some aides had urged senior White House officials to put together an off-the-books private organization to drum up grassroots pressure on Congress, but John Podesta opted to leave that to allies such as the labor unions and the liberal civil rights organization People for the American Way. Cabinet secretaries with long experience on Capitol Hill, including Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, were pushing for a more aggressive effort to organize moderate Republicans, but the president resisted because Pete King had advised against such overt lobbying. At one point, Podesta called Richardson to tell him to stop calling House Republicans. Im asking you to chill, the chief of staff instructed.
Like Clinton, DeLay recognized that he could not be seen exerting direct pressure. But he was not about to let up when The Campaign was so close to fruition. Besides his public statements advocating impeachment, DeLay had privately been coaching Hyde since the election, advising him on media relations and assisting with logistics. DeLay had sent copies of Starrs November 19 statement before the Judiciary Committee to each member of the Republican conference and was organizing committee members to do what he could not do himselfwhip their fellow congressmen as the vote on the floor approached. The committee staff was provided with whip cards and taught how to divide up the caucus to focus on key congressmen who would move whole blocs of members. DeLays aides were also enlisting prominent Republican fund-raisers and party officials to help persuade those on the fence. They had obtained a list of every campaign treasurer for every Republican congressman in case they needed it, although they were holding off using it since events were moving in DeLays direction already. Improvisation was the name of the game. When word reached him that lame-duck congressman Jon Fox, who had lost reelection the previous month and was traveling with the president on his Middle East trip, was leaning against impeachment, DeLay knew better than to call himself. Instead, he enlisted Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of a conservative organization outside Seattle called Toward Tradition, whose mission was to ally Jewish and Christian Americans in the cultural wars. DeLay asked Lapin to lobby Fox, as well as several other wavering Republicans. Lapin tracked down Fox and told him the country would be better off morally by getting rid of a leader who used the Oval Office for sex while talking on the phone with congressmen about foreign policy.
For some of the undecided House Republicans, even those who had earlier declared themselves against impeachment, the last few weeks had forced them to focus more intently on the evidence as it became increasingly clear they would have to cast a vote. They could no longer simply brush it off on the assumption that the election meant the issue would never reach them. They had to read some of the material. They had to figure out how they would explain a no vote. They watched as colleagues they trusted and respected came to the same conclusion: Clinton was guilty and should go. A certain peer-pressure momentum began to build.
For some, the evidence played little or no apparent role. They would announce their decision to vote to impeach but cite no specifics. Benjamin A. Gilman, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, decided to vote for two of the four articles but could not explain why those two charges were stronger except to say that he did not see sufficient evidence in the others. Even Congressman Tom Campbell of California, a courtly, thoughtful Stanford Law School professor who had bucked Newt Gingrich in the past, could not identify which of the presidents statements to the grand jury constituted perjury and instead simply referred reporters to Starrs report. I couldnt say off the top of my head whether there were three specific statements that amounted to perjury or not, he said in answer to a question.
As they searched for a decision, the undecideds were well aware of the poll numbers. The public rather firmly did not want Clinton impeached, as much as they did not like or admire him personally anymore. A survey taken for the Washington Post and ABC News on Tuesday, December 15, was typical of the findings60 percent opposed impeachment, compared with 39 percent who favored it. Voters favored censure over impeachment 57 percent to 36 percent. Still, although his job approval ratings continued to defy gravity, the weeks of attention to Clintons misadventures had taken a toll, driving up his negative personal ratings to the second-highest level ever in this poll; 56 percent had an unfavorable impression of Clinton as a person, just one point below the all-time worst four months earlier, after he testified before the grand jury and admitted that he had misled the nation about his relationship with Lewinsky.
What those overall numbers did not reflect, however, was the arithmetic in individual members districts. Gerrymandering over the years meant that Republican districts were generally more conservative than the nation as a whole, meaning that, for many, considerably more than 39 percent back home supported impeachment. Moreover, as they calculated the consequences of an impeachment vote, the most serious threat to many moderate Republicans appeared to be not the possibility of losing in a general election, but the prospect of facing a conservative challenger in a party primary. Even if just 39 percent of the voters as a whole supported impeachment, they would almost certainly represent a large majority among Republican primary voters, and angry conservatives would be far more motivated to turn out.
Reassured by pollster Mark Penn, Clinton was trying to play on the broad public support for censure. On that Monday, December 14, while Jack Quinn was making up his mind, both the president and vice president appealed for compromise. I dont believe its in the interest of the United States or the American people to go through this impeachment process with a trial in the Senate, Clinton said while visiting Gaza in the Middle East. Gore chimed in back in Washington, What the leadership of the Congress has done is to prevent any kind of compromise along the lines that the American people want to see. And instead, they threaten to put the country through this long ordeal. But the tide was breaking rapidly against the absent president. The same day, three Republican congressmen on the White House target list disclosed that they would vote to impeach Clinton. When combined with other recent announcements, that meant he had already lost twelve of those key thirty-four members. If the White House lost five Democrats, as officials expected, then it had to pick up sixteen Republicans. At the moment, they were nowhere to be found.
At 7 P.M., Jack Quinn finally got in touch with Susan Brophy, the White House lobbyist, to tell her he planned to vote against the president when the articles of impeachment came to the floor later in the week. He explained that the more he learned about the seriousness of the charges, the more he realized that his conscience told him he had to vote yes.
Stunned, Brophy pleaded with him to change his mind. Jack, if you go, youre going to take everybody with you.
But Quinn would not be persuaded. Brophy desperately turned to the only option left. Cant you wait? she asked. You can do it and cripple us if you do it right away. Put off the announcement until Wednesday or Thurs day. That might minimize the damage and allow other moderates to come to different decisions in the meantime, she hoped.
Quinn said no, he could not do that. He knew he would take political hits in his
liberal-leaning district and figured he had to get the news out as early as he could to give constituents a chance to vent over the next few days. Besides, he knew what would happen if he gave the White House another two or three daysthe president would call, the vice president would call, it would be emotionally excruciating. Why make his life any more miserable?
After they got off the phone, Brophy sank into the cushions of a couch in Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Ricchettis office and cried. Back in Buffalo, Quinn made two more callsone to Peggy Taylor, the national AFL-CIO lobbyist, to explain his decision to her, and the other to Pete King, his fellow New York Republican congressman. He told King that he had not knuckled under to the party leadership; in fact, he had not even heard from DeLay or Dick Armey. He was not being threatened with a primary opponent back home. But King got the sense that Quinn felt overwhelmed by the fervent opposition to Clinton among his friends and relativesdecent people offended by what the president had done. Quinn had not expected that and had never been exposed to that sort of intensity.
The pressure got to me, Quinn told King.
At the White House, no one was buying that. It must have been DeLay who had gotten to Quinnthat was the only explanation. The notion that the evidence suddenly changed his mind just did not wash; no new evidence had emerged since Quinn had first said he would vote against impeachment in November. For the presidents aides, there was no other possible reason for him to flip-flop but rank politics. And the message was clear to every other Republican who might be thinking of standing with Clinton: dont defy Tom DeLay. They alternated between rage at Quinn and deep depression.
Clinton was still in Israel, but someone had to tell him the bad news. By now, it was the middle of the night in the Middle East, so the task waited until morning. Doug Sosnik got the report by telephone and entered the presidents Jerusalem hotel suite before the first event of Tuesday, December 15. Quinns gone south on us, he told the president. Clinton knew instantly what that meant: It was over. He was going to be impeached. It hit Clinton like a punch in the stomach, Sosnik later told a colleague.
