by Peter Baker
When it came time for Clinton to talk, he was somber but not broken. I was proud to see you stand up for the Constitution today, he told the congressmen. Reflecting on Livingstons decision, the president said, It broke my heart, and echoed Gephardts plea from earlier in the day. We need to take the hatred out of our public life. And yet he could not conceal his own bitterness. He told a story about the 1994 elections and the difference between Democrats and RepublicansDemocrats think government achieves important goals, he said, while Republicans just like the power. Thats what this thing is about. Its about power. He also offered one more apology to the Democrats who had placed their own careers on the line to defend him, however reluctantly. I would give anything if you had not been in the position you were in today, and if I had not acted in such a way as to put you there.
After the East Room event, Clinton walked across the Colonnade to the Oval Office with Gore, Gephardt, and Podesta to prepare to head out onto the South Lawn and address the nation. Once again, to the surprise of the presidents aides, Hillary Clinton followed along. Apparently she intended to stand with him in public as well as in private.
When the scores of rank-and-file House Democrats had taken their place on the South Lawn, Clinton hugged his secretary Betty Currie, wiped his teary eyes, wrapped an arm around his wife, and at 4:15 P.M. marched out of the Oval Office to a spot just a few yards from the patch of grass where an awestruck Boys Nation teenager from Arkansas had shaken hands with John F. Kennedy more than three decades earlier. Shaking hands as he made his way through the crowd, Clinton put aside emotion and forced a smile intended to make him appear almost nonchalant, but his puffy left eye gave him away. His companions tried awkwardly to keep the mood almost casual, as if they were simply going out to address the latest wrinkle in a budget fight. The program reinforced the sense of a campaign-style eventthree speakers would go first and then the president, surrounded by a phalanx from his own party to cheer him on. With the television cameras rolling, they would bash the other party and take their case to the public.
Podesta briefly thanked the members for coming, and then Gephardt decried what he called a partisan vote that was a disgrace to our country and our Constitution. But it was Gore who unknowingly peeled back a bit of the presidents protective layer that day, offering unmodulated praise that had Clinton tearing up and biting his lip just a step behind the vice president.
What happened as a result does a great disservice to a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents, Gore intoned as aides winced at a phrase they instantly knew could come back to haunt the vice president in the 2000 race to succeed Clinton. There is no doubt in my mind that the verdict of history will undo the unworthy judgment rendered a short while ago in the United States Capitol. To the applause of the gathered Democrats, Gore introduced Clinton as my friend, Americas great president.
Clinton stepped up to the blue-topped lectern with the presidential seal, placed his hands on its sides, and stared forward. Intuitively conscious of the camera and how it caught him, the president mostly kept his chin up and his expression confident and poised, although as soon as he looked down for a second, a crescendo of shutters fired away, capturing a moment that in the morning newspapers would make him look somber and dejected, despite his best efforts. Standing near a magnolia tree planted by Andrew Jackson, the only president ever censured by the Senate, Clinton now pleaded for the same fate.
I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life, he said as the first lady nodded, and I have invited members of Congress to work with us to find a reasonable, bipartisan, and proportionate response. That approach was rejected today by Republicans in the House. But I hope it will be embraced in the Senate. In keeping with his stick-to-policy strategy, he quickly rattled off the issues he wanted to work on with the other party, from Social Security and Medicare to education and patients rights. We must stop the politics of personal destruction. We must get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity, and uncontrolled anger. That is not what America deserves. He then turned to the most important message of his brief appearance. Asserting that he had spent six years working to bring the parties together, he said, Its what I intend to do for two more, until the last hour of the last day of my term. He would not resign, he was saying, not under any circumstances.
I ask the American people to move with me, to go on from here, to rise above the rancor, to overcome the pain and division, to be a repairer of the breach, all of us, to make this country as one America, what it can and must be for our children in the new century about to dawn.
As the Democrats around him applauded, Clinton took Hillarys hand and headed back for the White House. His White House. They would not drive him out.
Stunned or not, House Republicans did not mourn for Bob Livingston for long. Even as he was making his unexpected announcement, some members were racing around the floor, trying to encourage Henry Hyde or Dick Armey to run for Speaker. Congressman Bill Paxon, DeLays adviser, did not wait for the speech to end either before ushering Denny Hastert into the whips office.
You either have to run or you have to leave, Paxon told him. Having turned down a draft to run for majority leader after the November election, Hastert could not turn down a top post twice and stay.
Hastert went to a phone booth to call his wife. Paxon did not wait and started spreading the word that Hastert would be the next Speaker. A group of lobbyist-lieutenants quickly assembled in DeLays office to begin organizing, including several veteran Paxon advisers and Hasterts best friend, lobbyist Dan Mattoon, who left his four children with a neighbor and rushed to the Capitol after watching Livingstons speech on television. Livingston and Gingrich weighed in on Hasterts behalf as well, and any momentary opposition quickly dissipated. But Hastert himself was still reluctant. He came back to DeLay and Paxon and told them that his wife did not want him to run. Paxon raced off to a phone and called the Hastert home himself, only to find that the Illinois congressmans wife was in fact supportive. The real hesitation, it seemed, was in Hastert himself. DeLay and Paxon confronted Hastert with what they had learned and he agreed to give it some more thought. Retreating to a side room off the floor, Hastert prayed alone for about fifteen minutes. Finally, he emerged to tell DeLay and Paxon that he would do it.
While support was solidifying for Hastert, however, the situation was still chaotic enough for imaginations to run wild. After the vote on Article I, Char lie Rangel, the liberal Democrat organizing the White House rally, found Pete King, the maverick Republican who had defied his party on impeachment, and asked to see him off the floor. They walked through the Speakers Lobby into a hallway, where Rangel laid out an idea: What if King ran for Speaker with the support of the Democrats and a handful of his Republican allies? Given all that had happened, the House could use a coalition leadership, suggested Rangel, who did not mention it but presumably thought that shared power might mean a chairmanship for himself, given his standing as the ranking Democrat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
It was clearly a ludicrous notion. Even if such a coup were feasible, it would only work once before the Republicans regrouped and tossed King out at the next opportunity. To King the proposal drove home the insanity of the day, showing just how far things had unraveled. He told Rangel he would think about it, but never brought it up again, fearing that the image of a liberal Democrat offering him the Speakership would only confirm to conservative critics within his own party that he was a traitor siding with the enemy camp.
It was all a moot point by now anyway. The fix was already in for Hastert. Some Republicans had even approached Livingston, asking him to reconsider, and he started to waver, thinking maybe he should not step down after all. DeLay quashed that thought. Its over, he told Livingston. Indeed, DeLay and Paxon had quickly rounded up enough votes to install Hastert without opposition. At a Republican conference meeting shortly after the last impeachment vote, they
had petitions for Hastert already printed and Gingrich lined up to speak on his behalf. As soon as Gingrich was done, operatives positioned at the end of each row handed out the petitions. Hastert walked out with sixty or seventy signatures and, for all intents and purposes, the Speakership. The Campaign won and Hastert installed, DeLay left for the airport and Houston. This is Dennys hour, he said.
Hastert seemed a little dizzy at the development. After one of the quickest political ascensions in modern times, Hastert was preparing to go home when a pair of Capitol Police officers arrived and informed him they would drive him. Hastert demurred. The officers insisted. Sir, one said firmly, well be driving you home. Only at that point did it sink in that the former wrestling coach was now the third-ranking official in the United States.
There was unfinished business at the White House too. After returning to the Oval Office, the newly impeached commander in chief met again with his national security team and decided to call a halt to the bombing runs over Iraq. The strike had already been extended one night longer than originally planned because bomb-damage assessments had indicated that initial runs had missed critical targets. With Ramadan arriving, Clinton did not want to risk antagonizing the Arab world by prolonging it. At 6 P.M., he summoned television cameras into the Roosevelt Room for his second nationally televised address of the afternoon to announce the cessation of hostilities. To his enemies, it was one more piece of proof that the raids were simply politicalas soon as impeachment was voted, he called them off. To his supporters, it was evidence that the president was able to remain focused on the job at hand and not shirk his duties because of his political problems. Either way, it was a whipsaw ending to a neck-breaking day. There will never be another day like this, John Podesta told Doug Sosnik as night fell.
At 6:30 P.M., Clinton called Pete King to thank him for all he had done on his behalf. It was a short conversation, maybe ten minutes, but the president sounded composed. History, he said, would show that King did the right thing. Then he asked after Kings wife, who was sick with pneumonia. She got on the phone briefly to hear his get-well wishes.
Mr. President, King said when he got the phone back, you should realize there are people in my party who just hate you.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We are fighting for the presidencyof the United States
The calls were ominous. Unless he left the president alone, Lindsey Graham was warned, he would be outed as gay. Some of the threats were telephoned anonymously to his district office in South Carolina. Another came in a conversation with a home state reporter who told him that Larry Flynt planned to claim Graham was secretly homosexual. The forty-three-year-old unmarried congressman had fretted privately with fellow Republicans during the fall that he would probably be confessing my sins before this is over, but this was going too far. A conservative from a conservative state, Graham knew that even such whispers could hurt him, and he quickly denied being gay. At least some of his critics accepted that, judging by other anonymous messages coming into his office at the same timethese callers threatened to expose various affairs he was supposed to be having with certain women.
With Flynts $1 million bounty still on the table and Bob Livingstons scalp on his belt, it was clear all the old rules had been discarded. Elected officials could be accused of being gay, they could be accused of being womanizers, and they could even be accused of being both at the same time. The microscope that had uncovered Clintons sins threatened everyone. Nor did the vote by the House end the anxiety for Graham or most of the other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. They had another task ahead of them. Under the Constitution, the House was charged with prosecuting the president in a Senate trial, and Henry Hyde had assembled a team of twelve other managers, as they were to be called, to join him in handling the case. He originally came up with a list of eight, but several committee members lobbied to be included and so he was left with an unwieldy bakers dozen. Hyde flirted with appointing one of the few Democrats who had voted for impeachment on the floor to present a bipartisan team, but Dick Gephardt did not want anyone from his caucus to participate because it would lend legitimacy to the prosecution. For newly appointed managers like Graham, the assignment meant a shot at historybut also the risk of watching their personal lives exposed or false rumors peddled so widely they became accepted as truth.
Asa Hutchinson had been lucky back in September when he was warned he would be the next target after Hydes old infidelity was disclosed; nothing ever came of it. Bob Barr, though, knew Flynt had lawyers scouring through his divorce records for evidence of unfaithfulness. Among the women Graham had been linked to in the gossip trade was Mary Bono, one of the committee Republicans who had not joined the team of managers. Hailing from the celebrity world, Bono faced numerous such rumors. Among others, she had been accused in the National Enquirer of having cheated on her late husband. Bono grew so infuriated at the charge that she hired a lawyer and paid him $5,000 to explore a possible lawsuit. She also was said to be dating Congressman Steve Buyer, her fellow committee Republican, who had joined Hydes team of managers.
In the cloakrooms, no one appeared more nervous to his Republican colleagues than Buyer. A forty-year-old former army lawyer who had served during the Persian Gulf War in 1990 providing legal advice at a prisoner-of-war camp, Buyer had first won his seat in the House two years later in the same election that elevated Clinton to the presidency. Buyer could be alternately charming and prickly but impressed compatriots as a serious legislator with a strong interest in military issues. Deservedly or not, he also had something of a reputation for flirting with attractive female congressional aides. And by befriending the recently widowed Bono, he had raised more than a few eyebrows among fellow Republicans, who figured that, even if nothing was going on, it was reckless to invite speculation. Both Buyer and Bono denied to associates that they were anything more than friends, but Buyer began to worry that Flynt had targeted him.
Fearing the worst, he decided to confess all to his wife, Joni. Buyer made a mental list of all the situations he had been in that could be compromising and disclosed it to her. While he did not tell friends in the House exactly how he had strayed, he left them with the distinct impression that he had good reason to worry. Look, there were all these accusations out there, Buyer told a fellow committee member. I was so nervous. I was so uptight. I even talked to my wife. Joni accepted what he told her and told him not to worry, that she had been unfairly impugned when she was younger, Buyer related. Then, with obvious relief, he sighed, Im a free man.
Trent Lott and Tom Daschle were determined to avoid the ugliness of the House proceeding. They wanted none of the rank partisanship and personal destruction they had witnessed on the other side of the Capitol. Shortly after the House vote, the two spoke by phone and were relieved to find each other of like minds. The two party leaders had not talked much since the November election, and Daschle was nervous about how aggressive Lott would feel, particularly given his outburst against the military strike on Iraq. Lott had no great love for ClintonYou cant trust this guy about anything, he told advisersbut the majority leader knew how to count and was convinced the Senate would not convict. Lott had been horrified to hear at a meeting with Senate lawyers on December 7 that a trial could drag on for more than four months. Nothing constructive could be accomplished by that, he concluded, only the same sort of political meltdown that the House had just experienced. Lott resolved to keep that from happening in the Senate. In their conversation, Daschle agreed to help copilot the plane to a safe landing.
Lott and Daschle were an unlikely pair of copilots. Although each had spent the last three decades on Capitol Hill and cared deeply about its institutions, they approached their jobs in drastically different fashions. Tall and exuberant with immaculately combed hair that never seemed to move even in a stiff wind, Lott led his caucus much like the former male cheerleader he had been on the sidelines at Ole Missconstantly smiling, clapping his hands, and egging on colleagues to do wha
t he wanted. Daschle, shorter and bookish-looking in his round-framed glasses, came across as Lotts studious cousin who seemed a little embarrassed by him and yet could not help liking the gregarious older man. Where Lott had a way of trying to dominate a room and relished establishing control of any situation, Daschle used the little end of the gavel when he ran meetings, preferring to sit back and listen until the group had collectively talked its way through a problem. Their paths to this point, though, were remarkably similar. Both had come to the capital from backwater states as young congressional aides, won election to the House, and later moved on to the Senate, where they beat tough competition to lead their respective party caucuses. Despite the partisanship that often flavored debate in the Senate, Lott and Daschle got along far better than either of their staffs wished.
Lott, fifty-seven, the son of a pipe fitter at a shipbuilding plant, earned bachelors and law degrees from the University of Mississippi and came to Washington in 1968 to work for a conservative Democratic congressman, William M. Colmer, who retired four years later and left his seat to his brash young assistant. In making his initial run in 1972, though, Lott switched parties and ran as a Republican, a rarity in those days in the Old South area around his hometown of Pascagoula. The dicey issue of impeachment confronted him almost right away as a junior member of the House Judiciary Committee, where he voted against throwing Richard Nixon out of office. During his years in the House, Lott worked closely with other firebrands, including Newt Gingrich, and won election to the Senate in 1988. After the 1994 election, Lott organized a conservative revolt to oust Bob Doles whip, Alan Simpson, by a single vote. After succeeding Dole as majority leader in 1996, though, Lott demonstrated a pragmatic streak, showing that he knew how to cut deals if he did not have the votes.
