The Breach

by Peter Baker

  It seemed for a moment as if all the air had been sucked out of the chamber. No one moved at first, no one knew how to respond. You resign! the Democrats had shouted moments before, and now Livingston had done just that. Rarely in Washington did a major political earthquake strike without some warning, but this was that unique event that had caught nearly everyone by surprise. Dick Armey and other GOP leaders leapt up and surrounded Livingston as he departed the room, while members on both sides of the aisle rose to their feet and applauded, unsure what else to do. Just a few feet from where Livingston had spoken, Congressman Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, cried openly. The first one to chase after Livingston to his office at the Appropriations Committee was Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., the son of the civil rights leader, who represented Illinois in the House. Jackson was crying too and wrapped his arms around the tall Republican in a tight bear hug.

  Bob, dont do this, he implored.

  In his own office just off the floor, Gephardt had been sitting behind his desk in shirtsleeves, reading aloud the speech he planned to deliver that morning. He had been working on it for some time, even rereading John F. Kennedys Profiles in Courage for its account of a key senator in the Andrew Johnson trial. Gephardt had heard a rumor about Livingston a few minutes before, but had discounted it. Suddenly, Dan Turton, a floor assistant, burst into the office and told everyone to turn up the volume on the bank of four television sets next to the desk. Gephardt turned to his right and watched four images of Livingston declare that he would not take office as Speaker. The minority leader was dumbfounded. Everything was spiraling out of control. Missiles were raining down on Baghdad, the president was about to be impeached, and now the next leader of the House of Representatives was stepping down to atone for adultery. Gephardt immediately thought it was the wrong decision, that Livingston should not do it. It was bad for the nation and bad for the institution. Whats more, Gephardt worried that the Democrats had made themselves look terrible, almost as if they had goaded Livingston into doing it.

  Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II of Massachusetts and other Democrats rushed into Gephardts office, urging him to go out to the floor and speak immediately. Dick, youve got to get out there, said Kennedy. Theyre calling for you. This has to stop. Conyers even announced on the floor that next up to speak would be Gephardt. But the minority leader refused to go. This was a moment of great import and he wanted to make sure he got it right. Gephardt dispatched Turton to inform Conyers that he was not coming out yet and assigned aides Laura Nichols and Erik Smith to throw out his first speech and start drafting an entirely new one. The one line he told them he wanted to keep was his conclusion: May God have mercy on this Congress, and may Congress have the wisdom and the courage and the goodness to save itself today.

  At the White House, the shock at Livingstons announcement was flavored with a gut-churning sense of panic. Aides who turned up the volume on the television in John Podestas office when they saw Livingston suddenly feared that it could alter the political dynamics and stoke public pressure for Clinton to resign too. They had braced themselves for the inevitability of impeachment with the comforting knowledge that the president still seemed assured of remaining in office as long as the situation was polarized along party lines. Yet if Livingston stepped down, maybe people would want a clean slate and demand that Clinton go too. It did not seem far-fetched at the time. It seemed like a real moment of danger.

  Clinton had been in the residence when it happened and rushed over to the Oval Office to watch in the adjoining dining room with Podesta and Doug Sosnik. None of them could believe that a second House Speaker had fallen as a result of all this. At that moment, press secretary Joe Lockhart rushed in and insisted they had to move immediately to stanch any new resignation drive. Ive got to go out and say something, Lockhart said. We cant leave this hanging.

  The president said the Livingston resignation was bad for the country, and Lockhart asked him to talk out loud about it so he would know what to tell the media. Lockhart scribbled down the presidents words on a White House stationery card he had grabbed: POTUS likes and respect Live enjoyed working as chmn of Appropriations Committee strongly disagree with pol of pers-destruction . . . whether Dems or Republican. Politics of personal destruction has to stop wishes he would reconsider. Lockhart rushed out of the room to deliver a variation on those themes to reporters in the briefing room.

  Suddenly the virtues of Charlie Rangels proposed rally around the president to be held later in the day became far clearer to White House aides. Surrounding Clinton with his fellow Democrats would keep him from looking like a lonely, latter-day Richard Nixon talking to the paintings on the wall. This was a town that could smell weakness. They wanted him to appear vigorous, unbowed and resolute, supported, not abandoned, by his allies. The picture of a president with loyal members of his party would convey an image to the country of business-as-usual politics in which impeachment was simply another partisan fight. And by emphasizing that the House Democrats were unabashedly sticking with Clinton, they hoped to send a signal to Senate Democrats that they should do the same, for as long as they held most of their forty-five members of the upper chamber, there would never be a two-thirds vote for conviction.

  Back in the House chamber, prepared speeches now seemed so inadequate to the moment that they were largely tossed aside. If ever members spoke from the heart, this was the time. Even hard-charging Tom DeLay found his eyes again filled with tears as he got up to speak about Livingston.

  There is no greater American in my mind, at least today, than the gentleman from Louisiana because he understood what this debate was all about, DeLay told the House, his voice quavering as the low-grade chattering around the chamber came to an abrupt halt. It was about honor and decency and integrity and the truth, everything that we honor in this country. After four months, The Campaign was on the verge of victory, and yet the collateral damage now included two Speakers from his own party.

  For the Democrats, their leader absent, toiling away in a back room in search of the right phrase, it fell to the unlikely Jerrold Nadler, the hefty, bombastic congressman from New York Citys Upper West Side, who had hectored Henry Hyde during the committee debate, to give voice to the emotion of the day. Mr. Speaker, I am even more depressed today than I thought I would be yesterday. I believe the resignation of the gentleman from Louisiana, while offered in good faith, was wrong! Nadler declared at the top of his lungs. Democrats spontaneously stood and applauded. It is a surrender, it is a surrender to a developing sexual McCarthyism!

  Hyde lumbered up to the lectern. My friends, those of us who are sinners must feel especially wretched today, losing Bob Livingston under such sad circumstances, he said, a not-so-veiled reference to his own thirty-year-old infidelity. But Hyde stressed the difference between private and public acts, between what Livingston had admitted doing and what Clinton still would not. When the chief law enforcement officer trivializes, ignores, shreds, minimizes the sanctity of the oath, then justice is wounded, and you are wounded, and your children are wounded.

  In the midst of all this, Livingston reappeared on the floor and quietly found a seat in the third row on the far side of the chamber. Congressman Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican and new member of the House leadership, came over, shook his hand, and sat next to him. Others came by with a pat on the back or a whispered encouragement.

  At 11:30 A.M., nearly two hours after Livingston had dropped his bombshell, Gephardt finally emerged from seclusion and approached the microphone in the well of the chamber. He started by calling Livingston a worthy and good and honorable man, prompting a standing ovation on both sides of the aisle. Gephardt, the boyish-looking congressman who after twenty-two years was now becoming something of an elder statesman in the House, looked over to Livingston, who nodded slightly in acknowledgment. I believe his decision to retire is a terrible capitulation to the negative forces that are consuming our political system and our country, and I pray with all my heart th
at he will reconsider this decision. That triggered another bipartisan ovation. We need to stop destroying imperfect people at the altar of an unobtainable morality. We need to start living up to the standards which the public in its infinite wisdom understands, that imperfect people must strive towards, but too often fall short. We are now rapidly descending into a poli tics where life imitates farce, fratricide dominates our public debate and America is held hostage to tactics of smear and fear. Then Gephardt pleaded with great passion for the Republicans to join the Democrats for a bipartisan censure of the president that would begin to heal the wounds. We are on the brink of the abyss. The only way we stop this insanity is through the force of our own will. The only way we stop this spiral is for all of us to finally say, Enough.

  This time Gephardt brought only his own caucus to their feet, but they remained upright and cheering for many long minutes. They clapped and whooped and hollered as if he had just won an election. To many of them, it was the best speech that the often-overscripted Gephardt had ever given in his careerpoignant, powerful, and to the point. In effect, Gephardt had vented for them, and as he moved down the aisle to leave the chamber, he was surrounded by congratulating colleagues.

  While heartening the Democrats, though, Gephardts forceful words did not move any Republican votes. Barely an hour later, the House rejected Gephardts parliamentary maneuver to force a vote on censure, 230204. Acting on their prearranged plans, the Democrats then marched out of the chamber as voting began on Article I, gathering on the steps of the Capitol to stage a brief protest rally, then turning around and parading back in before the fifteen-minute voting period expired. As the congressmen inserted their voting cards and pressed the buttonsgreen for yes, red for nothere were few outward clues to the gravity of the occasion. It was not silent or somber. Indeed, the chamber echoed with the chatter of a hundred casual conversations and some laughter, as members milled around and passed the time between votes as if trudging their way through an appropriations bill. Strangely, it seemed more like a bus terminal than a funeral parlor.

  When the vote tally came in at 1:25 P.M., Ray LaHood could barely be heard above the din as he announced the result.

  The article of impeachment is adopted, he declared.

  With that, William Jefferson Clinton became only the second presidentand the first elected chief executiveever impeached by the House of Representatives. No matter what happened next, no matter how the Senate received the case, that vote had seared the word impeached onto Clintons legacy. For a man who had plotted his whole life to win the White House and then, once he did, obsessed about his place in history, there could be no greater punishment. In better times, Clinton used to complain to friends that he wished he had been a wartime leader so that he could have had the opportunity to earn admission to the pantheon of Americas greatest presidents. Deprived of that, he had hoped to go down in history as another Theodore Roosevelt. Now he might be remembered as another Andrew Johnson.

  As everyone had expected, the vote on the charge of grand jury perjury split sharply along party lines228 for and 206 against. Five members of each party broke ranks, including Pete King, the presidents Republican ally, Chris Shays, who had met with Clinton the day before, and Mark Souder, who had joined Shays to study the secret evidence. Voting no with them were fellow Republicans Connie Morella of Maryland and Amo Houghton of New York. The Democratic defectors canceled them out: Paul McHale, the retiring congressman from Pennsylvania who had been the first Democrat to call for Clintons resignation, plus four Southern conservatives, Charlie Stenholm and Ralph Hall of Texas, Gene Taylor of Mississippi, and Virgil H. Goode Jr. of Virginia.

  The House then moved immediately to Article II, which accused Clinton of committing perjury in his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Even to his own lawyers, the factual evidence that Clinton lied under oath was far stronger in his civil testimony than in the grand jury testimony cited in Article I, and yet a couple dozen Republicans had decided to sacrifice this second article. Lindsey Graham had set the stage for that by voting against it in committee. On the floor over the last three days, many Republicans had approached Graham and other colleagues on the Judiciary Committee and said they wanted to split the difference. Many were already sure they would vote against Article IV, the abuse of power charge, because it seemed so overreaching, but they wanted to vote against two articles to show voters back home that they had given careful consideration to the case and were not knee-jerk partisans. So if they could only have two of the four, the committee members were asked, which two did they want? After consulting with David Schippers, their investigator, Graham, Bill McCollum, Jim Rogan, Steve Buyer, and others spread the word: give us Articles I and III. The third article, alleging obstruction, was the broadest of the group. If they lost the Jones perjury article, Schippers advised the GOP committee members, they could still bootstrap it into the obstruction count during the Senate trial.

  So at 1:42 P.M., the House rejected Article II, 229205, a sacrifice to political strategy. This time, twenty-eight Republicans left the fold. Seventeen minutes later, the House passed Article III, 221212, giving Schippers the obstruction count he wanted. Mark Souder, still bothered by the Juanita Broaddrick allegations, voted for this article, while eight other Republicans who had supported Article I switched to vote no. At 2:15 P.M., Article IV went down to crashing defeat, 285148, amid a Republican jailbreak that saw fully a third of the caucus buck the party line.

  As the first vote was being taken, Clinton was in the Oval Office conferring with the Reverend Tony Campolo, one of three ministers he had asked to counsel him about his personal failings. Doug Sosnik sent Betty Currie in with a note to let Clinton know the roll call had begun, but by the time the pastoral session was over, the president had missed the vote entirely. To watch the final three votes, Clinton retired along with Sosnik and John Podesta to the adjoining dining room, scene of so many meetings with Monica Lewinsky that would ultimately lead to this day. Clinton remained stoic. As the vote on Article IV arrived, so did Vice President Gore.

  Its not fair, what theyve done to you, Gore told him.

  Clinton did not think so either. This was not about what he had done; this was about what they had done. The president defiantly refused to feel shamed by being impeached. He was the victim, not the culprit. And yet, while he was determined not to show it in public, this was as painful a day as he had ever had in his life. His friend and fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, who had made it his mission to buck up Clinton during moments of despair, called to see how he was doing. The president launched into a fifteen-minute tirade about how people did not understand how this was tearing away at him.

  I have a knot in my gut, he told McAuliffe, about what this had done to his family.

  Within an hour, a ragtag caravan of two buses and assorted cars began depositing Charlie Rangel and eighty other House Democrats at the White House to rally around their besieged leader. They gathered first without the media in the East Room, milling around the incongruously festive Christmas decorations. Because the room was decked out for holiday parties, no stage could be set up in the usual spot underneath the gold curtains, and no chairs could be brought in for the audience to sit. Instead, Clinton and the others who would address the group stationed themselves in the southeastern corner of the room and the congressmen simply crowded around them. The mood seemed more like an Irish wake than a Protestant funeral, a strange blend of gallows humor and sympathy for the dead. The lawmakers and White House aides chatted amiably and laughed nervously, not sure how one was supposed to act when ones president had been impeached. When Clinton entered, he accepted condolences and encouragement alike.

  The House people have good instincts on this, and thats how the history books will be written, Julian Epstein, the Judiciary counsel, told the president.

  Clinton looked exhausted and emotionally spent, but not outwardly distraught. He gave the impression of someone who had already digested his fate and was turning over in his m
ind how to go on.

  While all eyes were on the president, some of Clintons aides did a double take when they saw who else had shown up. Hillary Clinton, who had been so effective at firing up the troops that morning, arrived at the East Room to shake hands and stand by her husbands side. Senior White House officials were surprisedshe had not been listed for the event and had not given any indication that she planned to attend. None of the presidents men would even think of asking her to, even if they believed she would agree. That she had chosen to come on her own, after months of barely speaking to Clinton, was a much welcomed development.

  The speeches that followed sounded more like election-eve invigoration than election-night concessions. There was none of the morose meanderings of a Nixon as he flashed his fingers and boarded Marine One to depart the White House for good. Gephardt captured the spirit of the crowd with another passionate speech urging defiance.

  You cannot, you must not, you cannot, you must not, you cannot, you must not resign, he implored the president. We will stay with you and fight with you until this madness is over.

  Gore told the assembled Democrats that he and Gephardt had arrived in Congress on the same day twenty-two years earlier, and in all that time he had never heard a finer speech than that delivered on the floor by the minority leader earlier that day. History will judge you as heroes, Gore assured the congressmen. There was a lot of huggingClinton, his eyes watering noticeably, embraced Gephardt, the man who was once ready to toss Clinton overboard if he had to. So did Gore, Gephardts onetime ostensible rival for the next presidential nomination.