by John Kerry
Now the internet was the new catalyst added into that volatile crucible. Bottom line: whoever Matt Drudge was, and wherever he had come from, after January 17, 1998, he would never again be just “some guy on the internet.”
We were about to enter a bizarre period in American political life.
All my instincts about politics and prosecutors told me we were headed toward a very dangerous place. Sure, it sounded like a cheap paperback thriller: the president of the United States, an intern, a new phase of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr’s ongoing investigation. But as surreal as it sounded, unless it was a complete fabrication, as a former prosecutor, I knew that Starr wouldn’t be going down that road if he didn’t have some credible evidence of an affair, evidence he believed would give him leverage in his investigation.
While it struck many as a strange Republican fixation, Starr’s investigation was deeply entwined with the overall delegitimization strategy.
It began in the spring of 1994, almost four years before the Drudge Report popped its salacious headline. Initially it was a simple investigation into an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater, dating back to 1979. At the Clintons’ request, after the First Lady held a news conference stating they had nothing to hide about Whitewater, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special prosecutor to investigate. Months after that, his work was curtailed after the independent counsel law allowed the appointment of a new special prosecutor, one who hadn’t been appointed by Clinton’s attorney general. A three-judge panel chose Judge Kenneth Starr to play that role, and he had been investigating, and investigating, and investigating since the summer of 1994.
Now, closing in on the four-year anniversary of the Starr investigation, Washington was igniting in scandal.
I was relieved when, nine days later, President Clinton angrily looked into a bevy of television cameras and denied the allegations emphatically. The words are now indelible in everyone’s memory: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Less remembered is how the president concluded his statement: he said he had to “go back to work for the American people.”
But that wasn’t going to be easy. There was already a feeding frenzy at our end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Reporters were chasing all of us about one topic and one topic only. Inside the caucus meeting, the overwhelming sentiment was clear: there was near unanimity that the Starr investigation had gone on for almost four years without any finding of any wrongdoing and it was becoming abusive. But there was equally powerful concern that the president had better be telling the truth regarding the intern.
I looked around our caucus. I saw the faces of the frustrated: colleagues who knew well that the Republicans had been out to bring down the president from day one, but colleagues who also knew that whatever the cause, it wasn’t fulfilling to be trapped in hyperpartisanship. No one had come to Washington for this.
There’s always a tension between a president and his colleagues down the road in Congress, even those of the same party.
I’d had a good, constructive relationship with the Clinton White House. I didn’t know the president that well on a personal level. I wasn’t among his friends from home who would join him at the White House to swap Arkansas stories. But I liked him. When he vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard, he and his family came over to Naushon for a day of quiet. The president and I enjoyed a long horseback ride, just the two of us, with a lone Secret Service agent trailing two hundred yards behind us. It was a rare moment of genuine privacy. The president had a great gift for storytelling and a unique instinct and talent for communication. When President Clinton and the First Lady campaigned for me in 1996, it made a difference. I was lucky to have their help.
But I also understood the frustration of my colleagues. Ted Kennedy felt health care reform had been botched badly, and he lamented that the White House had insisted on its own approach, instead of joining with Bob Dole in 1993 on something that would have actually looked much more like Obamacare.
But it wasn’t just Teddy who had been frustrated. Many of us who were of the president’s generation had been burned when, in the first term, he listened to the insiders and “old bulls” and punted on tackling serious campaign finance reform. Joe Biden, Bill Bradley and I had been leaders in the campaign finance reform efforts in the Senate. We had crafted a thoughtful approach based on a combination of public and private contributions with limitations that would have greatly reduced the power of money to set the agenda in American politics. The three of us requested and received a private meeting with the president in the Oval Office. Each of us made the strongest pitch we could to him. He listened intently. We told the president that he could restore and reinvigorate our democracy by safeguarding the ability of average folks to be heard. If the grassroots had more ability to set the agenda in Washington, we would all do better.
We also expressed our view that the stranglehold of money would stand in his way of achieving health care reform as well as other parts of his reform agenda. The president expressed his appreciation and support for our efforts. He said he would give it thought. We left there encouraged, believing we had a real shot to win.
In the following days the president was importuned by powerful chairmen in the House as well as some senators and some members of the leadership for whom the current system of fund-raising was a power base. They liked raising money in large sums without doing a lot of travel and organizing. It was simpler and it allowed them to be “helpful,” which most likely could translate into a favor to be collected someday in the future. The system had a pretty powerful vertical structure; it was not about to transform easily, and the leadership had little appetite to upset it. Regrettably, the president felt he needed those old bulls to help him carry the day on health care. Many told him he wouldn’t get health care if he did finance reform. In the end, the president got neither.
It’s part of why Bill Bradley, David Boren and some others I had worked with stepped away and retired. The money chase sickened them. Ironically, a number of the key committee chairmen and members of the leadership who counseled Clinton against reform wound up losing their seats in the ’94 elections at the same time the president also lost the majority in both houses of Congress. Most significantly, we lost a unique moment to get the money out of politics, which many believe might well have changed our politics and saved Congress from itself.
But we were where we were. I thought President Clinton had done a good job with a very tough hand. There’s not enough appreciation for how difficult it was to be a Democratic president in the 1990s or, frankly, a Democrat in Congress.
Still, it didn’t excite me to think that I’d gone through the bruising reelection battle with Weld, accumulating almost $3 million in campaign debt, only to find that the Washington I’d fought to return to would be consumed by a sex scandal.
So, like my colleagues, I came back to that one thought: He better be telling the truth. This was affecting our ability to do our job too.
For months, the drip-drip of leaks continued: tapes, a dress, DNA evidence.
Then, in mid-August, while Congress was in recess and I was back in Massachusetts working in the state, the dam broke. Bob Shrum was summoned to the White House to help on a presidential address to the nation. Bob told me he was arguing for an apologetic, remorseful tone. What the president ended up delivering was much more heated and confrontational after an initial apology. Clinton explained that his previous answers had been “legally accurate,” but that he and Monica Lewinsky did have a relationship after all. But he flashed palpable anger, ripping into a partisan effort to undermine his presidency and attempting to take back his private life for himself and his family.
It was one of those moments in politics that makes you angry at everyone. What the president had done was wrong. Just hearing about it made you wonder what on earth he was possibly thinking. I was furious that a president who knew how much the Republicans were out to destroy him had giv
en them a weapon to use. I was angry that he’d lied about it to people who then defended him. Tom Daschle was on the ceiling about it. He felt he had put his caucus on the hook for a lie. I felt terrible for Al Gore, who had personally vouched for the president and would inherit the baggage if he were the next Democratic nominee.
But I was also furious at the Republicans who had spent all these years pursuing conspiracy theories about everything from Whitewater to Vince Foster’s suicide until finally they found some piece of truth with which to beat the president over the head. If they’d discovered some illegal business venture or bribes or corruption unrelated to Whitewater but in the same ballpark, fine. My prosecutorial background would have made me perfectly comfortable with that kind of investigatory connection. But this felt like a sordid journey no one wanted to share.
But the issue wasn’t going away. A few days later, President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in response to al-Qaeda’s attack earlier that summer on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A congressman from Nevada made headlines comparing the strike to the movie Wag the Dog, in which a president starts a war to distract from a sex scandal. The partisan line of attack was an insult to the American troops flying that bombing mission.
Still, we were all stuck waiting for Starr to conclude his investigation.
President Clinton was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, trying to stay out of sight. I can’t imagine what a painful trip it was for his family. But on August 27, the president broke off from vacation and headed to Worcester for a public event on crime prevention and youth violence.
These were issues I’d worked on closely with the administration. Despite my anger and frustration, I knew I needed to join him for this event. If I stayed away, it would be a public signal that I didn’t want to be anywhere near the president. It might even have signaled I would end up in the camp calling for him to resign. I couldn’t allow the president’s mistake and the Republican effort to make it the lone issue in politics keep me away from an event in my state on an issue important to me. I thought it was important to be there.
Ted Kennedy, Congressman Jim McGovern and I rode with the president in his limo for the six-mile ride to the event. It felt like a sixty-mile ride.
The president wasn’t getting any sleep. I thought he was pretty raw. He was very open about where he found himself. It was the most vulnerable I had ever seen him. He wondered if he needed to apologize more. He knew he had created a mess for himself, for friends, for his party, but mostly I sensed he was in genuine agony over the impact on Hillary and Chelsea. I wondered what it was like for him to look out the window of the limo and see the signs waving in support or opposition, with the occasional personally insulting placard about the most personal, private failing of all.
I was glad I went. But I cringed at the media circus. They were measuring how close we stood to the president, how many supporters were crowded outside versus how many detractors. Meanwhile, the educators, who had hoped this might be a chance to reach the public about school violence and rescuing kids before their lives spiral out of control, could only have been sorely disappointed about the feeding frenzy that drowned out their concerns.
A couple of weeks later, Starr submitted his three-thousand-plus page report to Congress. It was seedy. I thumbed through it, and as much as I was upset at the president, I found the forensic detail in which the scandal was recorded to be troubling. It struck me that there were a lot of people in Washington and in government who wouldn’t want their life put under that microscope. There was a creepiness to partisans foaming at the mouth on cable about every sordid detail. The calls for impeachment and resignation grew.
I wondered whether there might be a chance to create closure. The longer the scandal was drawn out, the longer Capitol Hill would remain paralyzed. I couldn’t imagine that most Republicans really wanted this issue to consume Washington interminably. I also knew that the longer their chief partisans kept the issue center stage, the more their own private lives would be fair game to the press. Already rumors were swirling about the Republican Speaker of the House.
Did they really want this to be the dominant issue? Fritz Hollings and I rode together on the Senate subway to a vote. “Woo-wee, you impeach a president about an affair, you’d have a whole lot of impeached presidents,” he said, and laughed.
I also knew that like anything in politics, there was an issue of morality and there was an issue of math. The GOP controlled both houses of Congress. Winning an impeachment vote in the House with a simple majority was achievable, but it would endanger some of the moderate Republicans from tough districts.
But an impeachment trial would have to happen in the Senate, and it would take two-thirds of senators voting to convict on “high crimes and misdemeanors.” That’s a tall order. You’d need every Republican—including liberal Republicans from Maine, Vermont and Pennsylvania—plus twelve Democrats to remove the president from office. That math was improbable at best. I remembered something Harry Reid used to joke about when he was the Democratic whip: “They don’t elect me to talk, they elect me to count.” Anyone who could count votes knew there was never going to be enough votes in the Senate to remove the president from office.
I came up with a path forward that might bring the issue to an end while satisfying everyone. It was an expedited, rip-off-the-Band-Aid strategy. The weekend after the Starr report was released, I went on a few of the Sunday news shows and proposed that the president should testify before the House Judiciary Committee, answer any questions and explain his decision to mislead the nation. In return, Congress would commit to an expedited vote to censure the president. I believe it could have passed the Senate 100–0, a strong rebuke, the first time since 1834 that a president would have been censured. A punishment doled out only once every 150 years seemed an adequate statement. Dianne Feinstein and others were supportive. It would be swift justice in weeks, not a yearlong political circus.
The White House didn’t shoot down the trial balloon, but the GOP did. They were in no hurry. They thought it was a winning issue.
A month later, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, printed a challenge: cash for trash—he’d pay for stories of Republicans who backed impeachment but were cheating on their spouses. Washington was really in the gutter.
In the midterm elections, the big Republican wave Newt Gingrich had promised would be the result of the Clinton scandal didn’t materialize: balance remained the same in the Senate and a talented outsider named John Edwards scored an upset in North Carolina; in the House, we actually picked up five seats. Newt Gingrich was toast. His party made it clear it would no longer tolerate him as Speaker.
Still, the House Republicans seemed determined to plunge forward with Gingrich’s impeachment plan.
In mid-December, President Clinton ordered air strikes to compel Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to allow arms inspectors back in the country. Many of us in Congress had been urging the president to increase the pressure on Hussein. The air strikes should have been applauded in Congress loud enough to be heard in Baghdad. But instead it was another moment of division: the usually courtly majority leader Trent Lott called the timing “suspect.”
Just three days later, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The trial would begin in the Senate the following month. What a sour Christmas break it would be.
When we returned, for five weeks the Senate met as a courtroom, with all one hundred senators serving as jurors.
I can’t tell you how strange it was to see the chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, descend the marble steps of the highest court in the land, cross First Street NE and trudge two hundred yards up to the Capitol to preside over the makeshift court that was the Senate floor. Rehnquist was eccentric in the way that only those with a lifetime appointment can be: a couple of years before, he had added four gold stripes to the sleeves of his otherwise nondescript
black robes in an unspoken tribute to his favorite character—Lord Chancellor—in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
It was surreal, sitting at my desk and listening to a debate not about legislation, but about the removal of the president of the United States.
Like any jury, we would deliberate in private.
I remember thinking how helpful it would have been at the time for Americans to have a window into the closed-door deliberations. It was a stark contrast from the rancorous back-and-forth that had filled the airwaves for months.
Senators took those deliberations seriously. I stayed up late the night before in my office sketching out my rationale, what I would say when my turn arrived in the old Senate chamber. My memory flashed back to my early Catholic education, and I pulled out my dictionary to double-check the difference between the words “venal” and “venial”; the difference between a sin that is mortal and one that doesn’t rise to that level given its circumstances. It seemed an apt comparison.
No matter what side of the issue a senator was on, the tone of the conversation in the chamber after the cameras departed was respectful and constructive. Perhaps we recognized partisan politics had gone too far. Perhaps we were simply exhausted. But I think it was something else. The president wasn’t the only one on trial: the Senate was too, and most senators knew that was the case.
In the end, there were only forty-five votes to convict the president of perjury, just fifty on obstruction of justice. The president hadn’t come anywhere near being removed from office, but a year had been wasted nonetheless.
