Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?

  The right had spent years stoking the culture war and placing questions of morality at the white-hot center of American politics—religion, abortion, gay rights, “family values,” evolution, and so many other issues had been crucial to their success and to Gingrich’s rise in particular. An infidelity committed by a man they already regarded as a 1960s moral reprobate was something they were bound to pursue to the bitter end. Even if Gingrich and other congressional leaders of the effort, such as Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority whip, were just being cynical and opportunistic themselves, the constituents whom they’d spent a decade whipping into moral frenzies demanded that they attempt Clinton’s removal.

  But now, in the fall of 1998—the release of the prurient Starr report, the impeachment push, the news stories that began to dribble out about the elves and the Jones legal team, suggesting that Hillary may have had a point about that conspiracy—brought together the other side in the culture war. That side had been divided over Clinton, at times bitterly so. But Starr and Gingrich united it, and they even accomplished the trick of putting Team Left in a position it didn’t typically find itself: on the side of the majority.

  * * *

  Republicans in the House had been unhappy with Newt Gingrich’s leadership for some time. His mishandling of the federal government shutdown was a big reason, as were Gingrich’s own ethics issues—his misuse of a political action committee had resulted in the House voting overwhelmingly in January 1997 to reprimand him, the first time the House had ever done that to a sitting Speaker. That summer, some Republicans attempted a coup against him, but they couldn’t marshal enough votes to oust him. And now came this electoral disaster. Three days after it, Gingrich shocked Washington by announcing his resignation.

  The new Speaker, it soon emerged, would be Bob Livingston, a conservative Republican from Louisiana. Some observers wondered whether the switch would lead to the party letting up on the impeachment gas pedal, but Livingston had always been pro-impeachment, and in any event it was really DeLay whose foot was on the accelerator. A new Speaker is typically not elected until the January following an election year, when the new House is first called to order. But Livingston had the votes and was in essence the Speaker-elect by the week after Election Day.

  But something was going on in Beverly Hills that would give this story yet one more incredible twist. Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, the pornography magazine, had a history of running often tasteless editorial content attacking society’s sexual moralists. Flynt was so outraged by what he saw as Republican sexual hypocrisy that he took out newspaper ads offering $1 million to anyone who could bring him credible information about any Republican members of Congress having extramarital relations. There had long been rumors about Gingrich himself, and indeed it later emerged that during the entire time that Gingrich was pressing for impeachment and thundering away about Clinton’s morals, he was married to his second wife but was having an affair with the woman who eventually became wife number three. So surely there was material aplenty out there.

  On December 11 and 12, 1998, the House Judiciary Committee voted out four articles of impeachment. They read, in order:

  • That the president “provided perjurious, false, and misleading testimony to the grand jury regarding the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”

  • That he “provided perjurious, false, and misleading testimony in the Jones case in his answers to written questions and in his deposition.”

  • That he “obstructed justice in an effort to delay, impede, cover up, and conceal the existence of evidence related to the Jones case.”

  • That he “misused and abused his office by making perjurious, false, and misleading statements to Congress.”

  All were passed strictly along party lines, 21 to 16, except the second one, on which Clinton actually got one Republican vote, from Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said that the confusing definition of sexual relations in the Jones case inclined him to give the president the benefit of the doubt on this one. Now the articles would move to the full House, where everyone anticipated passage largely along party lines.

  The world turned. On December 14, Clinton was in Gaza to watch in person as the Palestinians voted to end their formal call for the destruction of Israel, after landing at the new airport he’d helped create. On December 15, Iraq repeated its insistence that it would not allow reentry for the international weapons inspectors it had expelled from the country two months prior. The ominous headline on the front page of the New York Times read “Iraq Is Accused of New Rebuffs to UN Team; U.S. Repeats Warnings of Striking Baghdad.” On a normal news day, that surely would have been the lead story, but on this day, it sat on the far-left column, straining for attention against the four-column, all-caps “WHITE HOUSE GRASPS AT OPTIONS AS WAVERERS MOVE TO IMPEACH.” No one was thinking about Iraq.

  And that very night the United States bombed Iraq.

  Iraq’s Baathist regime, which seized power in 1968, had not been something Americans needed to worry much about. In the 1970s, Baghdad tilted toward the Soviet Union; but after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the United States slowly started buddying up to Iraq and its new leader, Saddam Hussein. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the United States provided military and financial assistance to Iraq. But then everything changed after Iraq stormed into Kuwait in 1990, and President George H. W. Bush coordinated the Persian Gulf War to expel the invader. Neoconservatives inside and outside the administration wanted Bush to send the troops on to Baghdad and remove Hussein, but Bush resisted. Ousting Hussein remained very much on neocons’ minds, but the project was delayed (only until 2003, as we would learn) when the country elected a Democrat in 1992.

  Clinton had taken a reasonably hard line against Iraq. The official policy was “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran, but Hussein’s string of small provocations drew some aggressive American responses—occasional quick bombing strikes and economic sanctions that many international observers considered so severe as to be inhumane. All this time, under the terms of Iraq’s surrender in the Gulf War, and because Hussein had used poison gas on his own subjects (the Kurds in the north), the regime was subject to regular weapons inspections. In August, Hussein curtailed the inspectors’ activities, before cutting them off altogether in October. Then, on December 15, 1998, the United Nations released a report detailing the many ways in which Iraq had blocked inspectors from doing their work; hence, the bombing.

  Was it another Wag the Dog scenario? Many Republicans and talking heads thought so. Clinton insisted it was not. “If we had delayed for even a matter of days from [the UN] report, we would have given Saddam more time to disperse his forces and protect his weapons,” Clinton told the nation from the Oval Office. He noted also that Ramadan started that weekend, and that bombing during the holy month “would be profoundly offensive to the Muslim world and, therefore, would damage our relations with Arab countries and the progress we have made in the Middle East.” The raids continued for four days. (In fact, the bombing of Iraq never really stopped during Clinton’s presidency, to enforce a Western-imposed no-fly zone.)

  The House readied for its votes, which were set for Saturday, December 19. But before that, one more bolt of lightning would strike. On Thursday, rumors began circulating about
the Speaker-elect. By that night, Livingston had made a shocking admission, seemingly out of nowhere: yes, he admitted, he had had adulterous affairs. The next day, Friday, the nation saw why he’d made his preemptive admission. Larry Flynt announced that he had the goods: proof, he said, that Livingston had had extramarital affairs with four women.

  Livingston took to the floor of the House on Saturday. He called on Clinton to resign. Democrats shouted: “No! You resign!” And very soon in that same speech Livingston did. The hunting of the president had not taken Clinton down, but it did ensnare two Republican Speakers, the second of whom never even officially held the job. Only two of the four articles of impeachment passed—the first, about misleading testimony to the Paula Jones grand jury, and the third, which charged obstruction of justice. But two were enough. It was on to the Senate for trial, for only the second time in American history. Clinton appeared on the South Lawn of the White House—arm in arm with Hillary, who now saw their job as defending the Constitution—and said he planned to stay on the job “until the last hour” and “to go on from here to rise above the rancor, to overcome the pain and division, to be a repairer of the breach.”

  10

  Ducking Lightning Bolts Till the End

  At 10:05 a.m. on Thursday, January 7, 1999, the House managers—the thirteen Republican members of the House who would present the evidence against Clinton in his impeachment trial, acting in essence as the prosecution team—filed into the chamber of the United States Senate. They were escorted to the well, whereupon the Senate’s sergeant at arms, James Ziglar, announced: “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons are commanded to keep silent, on pain of imprisonment, while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate of the United States articles of impeachment against William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States.”

  There was much custom and pomp. Everyone spoke solemnly. Chief justice William H. Rehnquist, assigned by the Constitution to act as presiding judge, sat up above the litigants in a robe embroidered with four gold stripes on each arm, an adornment that he said was inspired by a costume he’d seen in a local production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Senators and the House managers debated whether witnesses would be called, and how many, and whether they would testify in person or on videotape. Monica Lewinsky, mobbed by the media on her return to Washington, was deposed on videotape. The media treated it all portentously.

  But the truth was that there was no drama to the proceedings at all. Moment to moment, they were mostly, in fact, boring. In real life, trials are long and technical and don’t make for good television. But the main thing was this: under the Constitution, two-thirds of senators must vote to convict for a president to be removed from office. Though the Republicans controlled the new Senate 55 to 45, there was no way that twelve Democrats were going to desert Clinton, and everyone knew it. Yet the House Republicans pressed on with their “onerous, miserable, rotten” duty.

  There was one moment of drama that month, and it happened not in the Senate chamber but in the House: Clinton’s State of the Union address, delivered that year on January 19, in the midst of the trial. Tensions were high in the chamber as the president spoke; top Republicans Tom DeLay and Dick Armey sat next to each other in prominent seats, pointedly never applauding once, not even when Clinton was introduced. Clinton, as he had done the previous year, strolled through it all as if nothing in the world were out of the ordinary. Finally, on February 12, 1999, the senators voted. The first count, for perjury, was defeated 45 in favor, 55 against. The second count, for obstruction, ended in a 50–50 tie. Clinton strolled into the Rose Garden after the vote and delivered a contrite, four-sentence statement, and nearly thirteen months after the world first heard the name Monica Lewinsky it was over.

  Something arguably much more interesting happened inside the White House on February 12. At around the same time the Senate was casting its votes, Hillary Clinton called in Harold Ickes to ask him questions about New York. Three days after Chuck Schumer beat Alfonse D’Amato with Hillary’s help in that 1998 Senate race, New York’s respected senior senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate. New York was at that point bereft of any first-tier Democrats who seemed an obvious choice to succeed the man who to many epitomized what a senator ought to be. The Republicans, meanwhile, had Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, both formidable politicians. It began to dawn on New York Democrats that they should recruit Hillary to run for Moynihan’s seat. She summoned Ickes, who had come of age in the cauldron of New York politics, to pepper him with questions. He had one for her: “Why in God’s name would you want to do this?” But as she kept pressing, it became clear to him that “she was going to have to be talked out of it.”

  * * *

  On Monday, March 29, 1999, a milestone was hit as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time ever. On the day Clinton took office, the Dow had stood at 3,241. It was yet another marker, along with the 22 million jobs that were ultimately created and the staggering 11 percent growth in median household income—greater than under any other president since those data were first gathered in 1967—of how the economy had roared under Clinton. Clearly, not all of it was his doing; some of it was the Federal Reserve’s doing, as is always the case, and, of course, the spread of the Internet and the huge tech boom helped. It also helped, in terms of how Clinton came to be remembered, that he got out just in time—the so-called dot-com bubble started to pop in the spring of 2000, but the country didn’t face recession until Clinton left office.

  His job-approval numbers had slipped a hair from the previous summer’s highs north of 70 percent, but he was still in the low 60s; he’d survived impeachment; the political class was beginning to turn its attention to the next presidential election; he was in a position to coast to the end. What would he do with the remaining seven hundred or so days in office? He would turn mostly to foreign policy, to two matters that had consumed him from his earliest days. He was determined not to leave office without brokering a Middle East peace deal. But before he could get to that in earnest, he would need to confront Slobodan Milosevic one final time.

  In the months since Richard Holbrooke had read the riot act to Milosevic in July 1998, fighting in Kosovo had continued. Holbrooke helped arrange a cease-fire in October. Sporadic battles flared up again in December, and then in January 1999 came the Račak Massacre, in which Serbian forces killed forty-five Kosovar Albanians in retaliation for a KLA attack on four Serb policemen. Milosevic expelled the American ambassador. Talks on Kosovar autonomy were held in Rambouillet, France, in a grand château where NATO and Russian negotiators couldn’t even put the Serbs and the Kosovars in the same room, such was the level of antagonism. The talks stalled and were extended and moved to Paris; on March 19, they broke down, as the Serbs refused to agree to any form of autonomy and walked away. Some critics charged that NATO had drafted an agreement the Serbs couldn’t possibly sign by demanding free movement for NATO forces throughout not just Kosovo but Serbia itself; but British foreign secretary Robin Cook told the BBC a year later that “if that particular technical annex was something that bothered them, we would have been very happy to have considered constructive amendments from them. They never even raised it.”

  Four days later, the bombs—NATO bombs, officially, not American ones—began falling on Serbia. This campaign would last not just a day, as the bin Laden strike had, or a few days, as was the case with the bombing of Iraq. It carried on for eleven weeks. This time, there was no Wag the Dog catcalling. Milosevic had bedeviled Clinton since nearly the day he took office, and Europe had certainly had enough of the man who had arguably wreaked more havoc on the continent than anyone since Hitler.

  It didn’t all go without a hitch, though. On May 7, 1999, bombs struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese citizens. The bombs had not gone astray: they’d hit their intended target, but, incredibly, the maps NATO was using (pro
vided by the CIA) had identified the building as a Serbian government building that was used for military purposes. The Chinese were enraged and accused the Americans of an intentional attack. For a full week, Jiang Zemin wouldn’t even take the calls of the president of the United States. When they did finally speak, Clinton recalled,

  I apologized again and told him I was sure he didn’t believe I would knowingly attack his embassy. Jiang replied that he knew I wouldn’t do that, but said he did believe that there were people in the Pentagon or the CIA who didn’t favor my outreach to China and could have rigged the maps intentionally to cause a rift between us.

  In time, the matter was smoothed out. The bombing was halted on June 10. Around five hundred Serbian and Kosovar civilians were killed; the United States lost just two soldiers. It took a while to bring Milosevic down, but the next fall he was defeated in an election and shortly hauled off to The Hague to face a war crimes tribunal.

  * * *

  The closing months of a presidential administration are a time when issues that hadn’t received much prominence before can be elevated. Such was the case with Bill Clinton and the environment. He had not been much of an environmentalist as governor of Arkansas, operating in a poor and rural state where public sentiment would always support jobs and growth over environmental concerns. He came into office promising to reduce carbon emissions and take other measures to fight the effects of climate change, which science had recognized since the late 1980s as a threat partially caused by human activity.