by Peter Baker
At 12:21, the vote was in. On this article of impeachment, Rehnquist intoned, forty-five senators having pronounced William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, guilty as charged, fifty-five senators having pronounced him not guilty, two-thirds of the senators present not having pronounced him guilty, the Senate adjudges that the respondent, William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, is not guilty as charged in the first article of impeachment.
The faces around the room registered no reaction. Everyone knew the result before walking in, so now they were simply going through the motions of making it official: Clinton would stay in office. Indeed, Rehnquist was reading lines from a script prepared for him by staff members, who had offered him instructions on how to announce an acquittal vote and end the trial (Chief Justice bangs the gavel, it directed) but did not even bother to outline what he should do should there be a conviction. At the White House table, the lawyers sat stone-faced, determined not to give the slightest hint of relief, much less celebration. It was, as Joe Lockhart had promised, a gloat-free zone. At the House table, the managers stared grimly. Jim Rogan, Lindsey Graham, and a few others had taken out the long, narrow vote cards used by the Senate and were recording checks by each name for their own record of history. Asa Hutchinson sat with his left arm folded across his chest, his right hand stroking his chin.
As the clerk read the second article aloud, Lott moved to the back of the chamber to find Specter and make one last effort to salvage some measure of vindication for the House and for Republicans. How are you going to vote on the next vote? Lott asked Specter plaintively, still hoping for a 5049 tally on obstruction. Would he vote some way that would be recorded as present?
Specter said he was going to vote the same way.
Disappointed, Lott said okay and walked away.
The clerk began calling the roll again. This time when Specter provided his own unique wording, the clerk read it back verbatim. Four other Republicans joined him in supporting acquittal on Article IIChafee, Collins, Jeffords, and Snowe. It was a down-the-middle tie, 5050. Lott did not get his majority.
On this article of impeachment, Rehnquist said at 12:39 P.M., fifty senators having pronounced William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, guilty as charged, fifty senators having pronounced him not guilty, two-thirds of the senators present not having pronounced him guilty, the Senate adjudges that the respondent, William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, is not guilty as charged in the second article of impeachment.
The chair directs judgment to be entered in accordance with the judgment of the Senate as follows: The Senate, having tried William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, upon two articles of impeachment exhibited against him by the House of Representatives, and two-thirds of the senators present not having found him guilty of the charges contained therein: It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said William Jefferson Clinton be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges in this said article.
The trial was done. President Clinton was not guilty. And more important, at least to Lott and Daschle, the Senate had survived. For the next few minutes, they celebrated. Rehnquist congratulated the senators, praising the quality of the debate and the manner in which the majority leader and the minority leader have agreed on procedural rules in spite of the differences that separate their two parties on matters of substance. Lott and Daschle responded in kind, presenting Rehnquist with a plaque adorned with a golden gavel usually given to senators who had served more than one hundred hours in the presiding chair.
I am not sure it quite reached one hundred hours, but it is close enough, Lott joked.
It seemed like it, Rehnquist replied dryly.
At 12:43 P.M., the Senate adjourned sine die as a court of impeachment, and a squadron of six senators escorted Rehnquist from the chamber. The sergeant at arms was to similarly escort out the House managers, but Henry Hyde had already escaped through the back door and had to be called back into the chamber to repeat his exit formally down the center aisle. The White House lawyers just stood there awkwardly, unsure what to do next. Without the standing of a chief justice or a member of Congress, they were not entitled to an escort committeeeven though they had just won the case.
Ill escort you guys, Don Nickles, the majority whip, who sat in front of their table, offered cheerfully. But being lawyers and not politicians, they simply slipped quietly out the back.
The tension had broken. Six weeks of stress and uncertainty had ended. The political fratricide everyone had feared had been averted. Even though his side had not succeeded in getting even a simple majority, Lott grinned exuberantly and offered thanks to the staff. Daschle followed suit and then the two men met in the middle of the aisle to shake hands.
We did it, Daschle said.
We sure did, Lott answered.
A surreal postscript followed over the next twenty-five minutes. At first, this too went according to a prepared script, right down to the lines each player would utter in a parliamentary dance intended to cover both sides. Senator Dianne Feinstein, having failed to gain enough bipartisan support for her censure resolution, introduced it for a vote anyway, knowing it would fail. Senator Phil Gramm, the designated Republican censure-killer, stood up to object that the matter was out of order, and a roll call was announced. Unlike during the just-completed trial, a parade of senators sauntered casually to the front desk to record their votes. Others milled around, bantering and laughing aloud. Almost no one remained in his or her seat. Feinstein and staunch conservative John Ashcroft shook hands and talked in the center aisle. John Kerry, Chris Dodd, and Gordon Smith laughed cheerily together on the Democratic side. Lott joked with John Edwards. Pat Moynihan combed his hair in the back of the chamber, while Bill Frist wandered up to the gallery to sit with his wife and kids. The decorum of the trial was now gone. It was back to business as usual.
A few minutes later, the vote was announced, 5643a majority, but not the two-thirds needed to suspend the rules. There would be no censure. But there would be one final warped act in a warped drama. A bomb threat phoned into the Capitol prompted police officers to usher senators and everyone else out of the buildinga precaution so rare that longtime staffers could not remember a precedent. The senators emerged into the unseasonable 74-degree day and continued chatting on the lawn as if summer camp were ending. Daschle escaped to a museum while waiting for permission to return.
The mood was striking. Somehow, out of all this, good will had emerged among the senators from both parties. Perhaps it was all the enforced togetherness, which was so unusual in the frantic pace of ordinary legislative life. Perhaps it was the shared experience of being shot at and missed. Either way, after months of bitterness and bile, there was optimism. Ironically, having been through this crisis may make it easier, not harder, for us to work together, Susan Collins wrote in her diary that night. This experience has changed each of us individually, and as a Senate, forever.
Maybe. And maybe not. In modern Washington, working together went against the grain; partisanship was the tactic of the day, keeping your own caucus together and accusing the other side of politics. For all of the camaraderie of the moment, plenty of people in the room knew that working together was not necessarily in their own interests. Bob Bauer, Daschles lawyer, who had seen the process from the beginning since his March 1998 strategy memo to Dick Gephardt advising that the Democrats transform the battle into a fight over process, watched as the high spirits flooded the chamber.
Jesus, he said to a Democratic aide standing next to him, how long do you think this era of good feeling will last?
The aide did not hesitate. Not long, I hope.
EPILOGUE
The country didnt wantan impeachment
From the arched window of the sitting room outside her bedroom in the White House, Hillary Clinton could see a burst of sunshine warming the nations capital. The gray gloom of winter had dissipated and springlike temperature
s seemed to herald a season of renewal. At that moment, the Senate was gathering on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to vote to acquit her husband of the two articles of impeachment, freeing him to spend the last 708 days of his presidency rehabilitating himself. But the first lady had a new beginning of her own in mind on this Friday, February 12. Joining her for a secret meeting was Harold Ickes, the former deputy White House chief of staff who had masterminded Bill Clintons reelection in 1996 and later explored whether the president should resign in the wake of the Starr report. Ickes had been summoned to advise Hillary Clinton about whether she should embark on a political career of her ownspecifically, a campaign to join the same Senate then passing judgment on the series of events that had started when Bill Clinton cheated on her.
Hillary Clinton had her eye on the seat being vacated by retiring senator Pat Moynihan, and no one knew New York politics better than Ickes. After a couple of hours discussing the vicissitudes of running a campaign in a state where she had never lived, he and the first lady retired to the family dining room to continue the conversation over lunch. Shortly afterward, the president wandered in and planted himself at the wooden table. He set out a piece of paper on which he had scratched out a statement in longhand about the Senate verdict, a few carefully chosen words that he planned to deliver in the Rose Garden later in the afternoon. While Hillary Clinton and Ickes chatted about the New York electoral map, the president edited his statement. Occasionally he threw in his own assessment of her prospective campaign, recalling with freakish precision, for instance, how many votes he got in Herkimer County in upstate New York in 1992 and 1996. The first lady and Ickes eventually returned to the sitting room before finally wrapping up a marathon four-hour session, almost oblivious to the action taking place on the Senate floor.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal had paradoxically transformed Hillary Clinton into one of the nations most popular political figures. The first lady who had alienated much of the public with her uncompromising and unsuccessful campaign to reshape the nations health care system in the first Clinton term had been resurrected in the second as the wronged wife who stoically stood by her man. However unhappy she might have been at the antifeminist reasons for that image evolution, Hillary Clinton now found the door to elective office opened to her for the first time in her life even as the end of her husbands career was now in sight.
Finished with editing, the president scooped up his paper and headed over to the West Wing. Two hours after the final Senate vote, he emerged from the Oval Office into the Rose Garden, this time alone, unlike on the December impeachment day when he was surrounded by his wife, Vice President Gore, and dozens of congressional allies. Heeding the spirit of Joe Lockharts gloat-free zone, Clinton did his best to remain solemn and unsmiling.
Now that the Senate has fulfilled its constitutional responsibility, bringing this process to a conclusion, I want to say again to the American people how profoundly sorry I am for what I said and did to trigger these events and the great burden they have imposed on the Congress and on the American people, he said, gripping the presidential podium. I also am humbled and very grateful for the support and the prayers I have received from millions of Americans over this past year. Now I ask all Americansand I hope all Americanshere in Washington and throughout our landwill rededicate ourselves to the work of serving our nation and building our future together. This can be and this must be a time of reconciliation and renewal for America. Thank you very much.
Clinton turned to leave and took one step before the booming voice of ABCs Sam Donaldson called after him, In your heart, sir, can you forgive and forget?
The president paused, looking down with a slight smile as if considering whether to take the bait, and then pivoted back to the podium. His aides tensed. He was not supposed to veer off script and detract from the carefully crafted message.
But Clinton kept to the days theme. I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it, he said simply, then turned away again to march back to the Oval Office.
Do you feel vindicated, sir? NBCs David Bloom cried out, but the president ignored him.
The answer to that last question would have to come another day. Perhaps it was fitting that Hillary Clintons campaign for the Senate would begin the day Bill Clintons trial ended, for in her race were the seeds of what the president hoped would be his vindication. Even though he would not be on the ballot himself, he wanted the 2000 elections to serve as his platform for political absolution. The public would decide whether to reward or punish the House managers who had so aggressively prosecuted him. The bellwether became Jim Rogans hotly contested reelection contest, where both candidates tapped into the lingering emotions from impeachment and vast sums of money poured in from around the country to refight the battle. Yet most of the managers faced little political trouble as a result of their service; Lindsey Graham became the most popular elected official in his state, while Democrats could not even find a candidate to run against Asa Hutchinson in the presidents home state. For Clinton, revenge would have to lie on other ballots. If the public were to send his wife to the Senate, install his vice president at the White House, and vault his legislative saviors into power at the Capitol, it could be portrayed as the ultimate repudiation of Tom DeLay and The Campaign. But if all three were to lose, Clinton knew he risked a historical judgment as a failed president who cost his party for years to come, a skilled leader whose own fatal flaws kept him from living up to his once-great promise.
To shore up his legacy, Clinton vowed to spend every remaining day in office focused on the duties of office. But it would not be so easy. Despite nearly unanimous desire in Washington to move on following the Senate acquittal, Clinton found it difficult to escape. Six days after the vote, he flew to New Hampshire to celebrate the seventh anniversary of one of his greatest political victories, the night he rescued his foundering presidential campaign in the 1992 primarya campaign hobbled in the first place by revelations of Clintons affair with Gennifer Flowers. Yet even on this bright occasion, he was confronted with the costs of his actions. Paul Begala, the tormented aide who had almost quit the previous fall, chose that moment to tell Clinton in a private huddle that he would resign now that the threat to the presidency was over. Begala could not even wait a full week to bolt. He told friends he would never look at Bill Clinton the same way again.
The day after that, Friday, February 19, the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Juanita Broaddrick on its editorial pages, the first public comments by the Arkansas woman who maintained Clinton had raped her in 1978. The Washington Post followed with a front-page article a day later, and finally, on February 24, NBC aired Lisa Myerss month-old interview with Broaddrick on its Dateline newsmagazine program. He forces me down on the bed, a teary Broaddrick recounted to Myers. I just was very frightened and I tried to get away from him and I told him no. . . . He wouldnt listen to me. Asked about the charge at a news conference the same day, Clinton referred the question to his lawyer, David Kendall, who issued a statement calling Broaddricks allegation absolutely false. Neither Kendall nor any White House aides denied that Clinton and Broaddrick had met or even that they had a sexual encounter; the unspoken implication of the denial was that whatever happened between Clinton and Broaddrick in the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock that day twenty-one years earlier, it did not constitute rape. Broaddrick was not the only one to go prime-time. Lewinsky finally spoke out in a strangely bubbly interview with Barbara Walters on ABC, timed to coincide with release of her book, Monicas Story, and an international publicity tour. Soon, she would take to selling handbags over the Internet.
Two months to the day after his acquittal in the Senate, a federal judge handed down a different verdict. Judge Susan Webber Wright, who oversaw the Paula Jones case from start to finish, held Clinton in contempt for giving intentionally false testimony in his January 17, 1998, deposition when asked about his relationship with Lewinsky. Never before had a president been held in c
ontempt of court. Wright summarily dismissed Clintons defense against the charge that he lied under oath, writing, There simply is no escaping the fact that the President deliberately violated this Courts discovery Orders and thereby undermined the integrity of the judicial system. While saying there were other examples of possible misconduct, she singled out two statements that were clearly false on their faceClintons assertion that he did not remember being alone with Lewinsky and his denial that they engaged in sexual relations. She gave no credence to the presidents later explanation that he did not interpret his encounters with Lewinsky to constitute sexual relations, and she directly rebutted Clinton defenders who argued that testimony about Lewinsky was not material to the lawsuit in the first place. The judge, who personally supervised the presidents deposition, seemed most peeved by his hairsplitting suggestion that he had tried to give misleading but literally true answers under oath because he deplored the Jones lawsuit and its sponsors. It is simply not acceptable to employ deceptions and falsehoods in an attempt to obstruct the judicial process, understandable as his aggravation with plaintiffs lawsuit may have been, Wright wrote. She ordered the president to pay the Jones team $90,000 to compensate for his false testimony and referred him to the Arkansas Supreme Court disciplinary committee, which in May 2000 would recommend that Clinton be disbarred.
But the president remained unrepentant. In interviews after the trial, Clinton made clear he saw the impeachment process as nothing more than an illegitimate political vendetta. I do not regard this impeachment vote as some great badge of shame, he told CBSs Dan Rather a month after the trial ended. I do not, because it wasI do not believe it was warranted and I dont think it was right. He portrayed himself as a heroic figure for refusing to resign in the face of the charges lodged against him. I made a personal mistake and they spent fifty million dollars trying to ferret it out and root it out, because they had nothing else to do, because all the other charges were totally falsebogus, made upand people were persecuted because they wouldnt commit perjury against me, he told ABCs Carole Simpson in November 1999. Five months later, Ken Starrs successor as independent counsel, Robert W. Ray, suggested that he might indict Clinton after he left office, provoking a revealing public diatribe by the president. On the impeachment, let me tell you, I am proud of what we did there, because I think we saved the Constitution of the United States, he told a newspaper editors conference in April 2000. Im not ashamed of the fact that they impeached me. That was their decision, not mine. And it was wrong. He saw the impeachment merely as one of the major chapters in my defeat of the revolution Mr. Gingrich led.
