The temperature in Washington reached an improbable seventy-four degrees on February 12, 1999, and the balmy air invested the proceedings with an even greater sense of relief and liberation. The Senate had spent the last two days in closed-door debate about the articles of impeachment, so there was little suspense about the final result. Still, at four minutes past noon, when the chief justice announced that voting would begin, the magnitude of the moment settled heavily in the Senate chamber. No living American had ever seen the Senate vote on whether to remove the president of the United States from office. For the only time in the trial, Rehnquist had a nervous catch in his voice as he read the script before him.
“The Chair reminds the Senate that each senator, when his or her name is called, will stand in his or her place and vote ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ as required by Rule XXIII of the Senate rules on impeachment,” he said. “The Chair also refers to Article I, Section 3, Clause 6, of the Constitution regarding the vote required for conviction on impeachment. Quote: ‘[N]o Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present.’
“The question is on the first article of impeachment. Senators, how say you? Is the respondent, William Jefferson Clinton, guilty or not guilty?”
On count one, which charged perjury in the grand jury, the vote was forty-five guilty, fifty-five not guilty. All of the Democrats and ten Republicans voted against the article.
The managers had devoted most of their energy to proving count two, which accused Clinton of obstruction of justice. When they knew any hope of removal was gone, they had placed their hope on winning a simple majority. But five moderate Republicans, all from the Northeast—Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, and Arlen Specter—joined the Democrats in voting not guilty. A vote of fifty to fifty, which somehow fit the sour sense of irresolution hanging over the entire affair, left Clinton to serve out his term.
With the senators seated solemnly before him, the chief justice announced, “It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said William Jefferson Clinton be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges.…”
As the Senate engaged in a perfunctory debate over a censure of Clinton—the idea promptly died because Phil Gramm and others had vowed to filibuster it to death—the president’s lawyers returned to the White House to report to their boss. Once the House voted in December, Clinton had largely withdrawn from day-to-day involvement in the case. The quasi-judicial setting made it improper for him to lobby the senators, and in any event, Clinton’s best strategy had always been to concentrate on the nation’s business. His spokesmen reveled in telling a disbelieving press corps that the president had not watched this or that important moment in the impeachment debate. But for the most part, those claims were true.
In the Oval Office with Ruff, Kendall, and the other lawyers, Clinton expressed his gratitude and set about analyzing the votes. Several of those present were hoping that the president might reflect a little on the meaning of it all, but Clinton only wanted to talk politics. They talked of the splits among the Republicans, the difficulties that Lott had in keeping his party together. To Clinton, this was just like any other tough vote on the Hill.
By the end of the short gathering, the chatter of strategy and tactics had revived the president’s spirits, and he was downright chipper.
“We got five Republican votes,” he said. “That’s not bad!”
EPILOGUE
Private and Public
Judge Wright’s dismissal of the Paula Jones case, on April 1, 1998, turned out to be a less definitive conclusion than might otherwise have been expected. The Dallas lawyers appealed, and the case was assigned to the same panel of judges who had already ruled against Clinton on the issue of whether a president could be sued while in office. By summer, it was clear that Starr was going to file a report and Congress would debate impeachment. This meant that Donovan Campbell and the Rutherford Institute had largely achieved their political objectives. Pursuing the lawsuit, even if they won their appeal, would only cost the plaintiff’s lawyers more money. From Clinton’s perspective, a loss on appeal meant the nightmare of a trial. By early fall, it was apparent that a settlement could benefit everyone.
In the first days after the Starr report came out, in September 1998, Don Campbell called Bob Bennett and said that his client would no longer demand an apology. All she wanted was $1 million. The amount was too high for Bennett, but the withdrawal of the apology demand showed that Campbell was serious. On September 30, Bennett called back with a counteroffer of $700,000. Campbell expressed some interest and promised to be back in touch, but then the phones went silent.
At this point, Bennett thought the case had run out of surprises, but then Campbell’s partner, Jim Fisher, telephoned on October 6. He said that Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata—the lawyers who had taken the Jones case to the Supreme Court—were making life very difficult about their fee. Fisher wondered how Bennett felt about a solution they were considering.
“Would you object,” Fisher asked, “if, as part of the settlement, Abe Hirschfeld paid Gil and Joe’s fee?”
The name vaguely rang a bell for Bennett, but then he didn’t live in New York. As it happened, the Polish-born seventy-nine-year-old Hirschfeld had just lost a libel suit against the New York Daily News for calling him a “wacky indicted wanna-be politician,” which was actually pretty apt. Hirschfeld made millions in the fifties and sixties as the developer of indoor parking garages and then became a kind of local legend with his half-baked runs for political office and doomed investments in Broadway shows and, once, the New York Post. Nothing, however, surpassed the plan he presented to Paula Jones’s attorneys. “I will give Paula Jones a million dollars myself,” he said at the time. “Then, after the release of her case is signed, I recommend that the president resign, and Mr. Gore becomes president, and he immediately names Bill Clinton the honorary president of the United States. And it is agreed that Roger [sic] Starr will get the first available seat on the Supreme Court. It’s as easy as apple pie.” Incredibly, the Dallas lawyers took Hirschfeld seriously, especially after he put the $1 million on deposit in a bank. Campbell’s team spent weeks trying to structure a deal with Hirschfeld and his lawyer.
At this point, the whole Paula Jones community was in the process of imploding. Steve Jones had been fired from his job at Northwest, under disputed circumstances, and his acting career was going nowhere. He and Paula were still stuck in the same one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach and getting along poorly. Steve took to badgering Campbell and the other lawyers so much that they stopped accepting his calls. Susan Carpenter-McMillan prevailed upon her husband, Bill McMillan, a personal injury lawyer, to speak to the Dallas team on Paula and Steve’s behalf—but Susan and Bill’s marriage was in the process of breaking up, too. The one thing all these people had in common was their hatred for Davis and Cammarata, who were still insisting on being paid for their years of work on the case.
After Bennett did a little checking—and learned that, among other things, Hirschfeld was under indictment for state tax evasion—he told the Dallas team that the president could not be party to any settlement that involved the colorful New Yorker. On November 5, Campbell called Bennett and lowered his demand to $950,000, but he added a new condition: “each party has to pay all costs.” As Campbell told Bennett, “Barbra Streisand can’t write a check.” Bennett told Campbell it was none of his business how Clinton funded the settlement. In the meantime, Hirschfeld announced, for characteristically obscure reasons, that he was taking his money off the table. (He was also later indicted in a separate, murder-for-hire plot against a former business partner; both criminal cases against him ended in hung juries.)
On November 11, the deal finally came together at $850,000. In one sense, this was an astonishing amount of money for Clinton to pay. Jones’s lawsuit had asked for only $700,000 in damages, and it had already been thrown out of court. Yet it
will remain one of history’s great understatements that the president should have settled the case earlier. Of course, no one could have predicted the precise nature of the calamity that this lawsuit would visit upon Clinton and his family. But the case did bear warning signs that the president should have heeded. For this failure, Clinton will pay in the most valuable currency that any president possesses—in the first paragraph of his obituaries, when reference is made to his impeachment. (Clinton came up with the money to pay Jones from his insurance policy with Chubb and a trust fund established by Hillary Clinton’s father.)
The settlement hardly qualified as much of a victory for Paula and Steve Jones. Their final share of the proceeds came to about $200,000—less than half of what they would have received if they had agreed to the $700,000 settlement that Davis and Cammarata had negotiated in August 1997. Donovan Campbell’s firm received $283,000, Davis and Cammarata $260,000, and the Rutherford Institute $100,000. In a distant echo of the original contract that Cliff Jackson drafted, the final settlement also stipulated that Davis and Cammarata were to receive up to $90,000 from any book or movie deals that Jones may make in the future. (Danny Traylor, the Little Rock lawyer who took the phone call that began the case, asked for and received nothing.)
In March 1999, Paula and her two boys moved back to Arkansas. She found a house not far from her hometown of Lonoke, and she signed on as a client of Jack Gordon, the former husband of LaToya Jackson and a self-described “celebrity promoter.” Gordon brokered a deal for the former plaintiff to open the Paula Jones Celebrity Psychic Network, a telephone hot line where she and a staff of other psychics predicted the future for callers at $3.99 per minute. Gordon also arranged a paid interview with OK! magazine, a British publication. Jones told the magazine that she expects to become even more fearful for her safety after Clinton leaves office, because “he may think, ‘well, since I’m not the president, now I can do whatever I want to—I can get rid of her and her family.’ ”
The Starr investigation ended in ignominy. In the last three trials conducted by the Office of Independent Counsel—against the Arkansas bankers Herby Branscum, Jr., and Robert M. Hill, against Susan McDougal, and against Julie Hiatt Steele—the prosecutors failed to win a conviction on a single count. (Jurors acquitted on some charges and hung on others.) Starr’s prosecutors filed a second and then a third indictment against Webster Hubbell, the Clintons’ close friend and former associate attorney general. In one of these cases, a tax prosecution, Starr also charged Hubbell’s wife, his lawyer, and his accountant with felonies. The trial judge threw out one of these cases, and though that ruling was subsequently reversed, the appellate court decision made it impossible for the prosecutors to proceed to trial. Consequently, both cases were resolved in a joint plea bargain that essentially imposed no new punishment on Hubbell. Starr dropped the cases against Suzanna Hubbell, the lawyer, and the accountant.
The decisions to bring the McDougal and Steele cases demonstrated the distinctive forms of bad judgment that were the hallmarks of the Starr prosecutorial style. Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons’ former business partners in the Whitewater project, served eighteen months in prison for her still-inexplicable refusal to testify before Starr’s grand jury. Even though McDougal made clear she would never cooperate with Starr, his Little Rock office used her failure to testify as the basis for filing another case against her, this one charging criminal contempt and obstruction of justice. This did not technically qualify as double jeopardy, but Hickman Ewing, Starr’s deputy in Little Rock, was clearly trying to punish her a second time for precisely the same behavior. The Arkansas jury rejected this vindictive and unnecessary case.
If the McDougal case displayed the vengefulness of Starr’s prosecutors, the prosecution of Steele, a minor figure in the whole imbroglio, displayed their unhealthy obsession with getting the president. Steele had been a close friend of Kathleen Willey’s in 1993, at the time when Willey said Clinton had groped her. Four years later, in July 1997, when Michael Isikoff began investigating the story, Willey cited Steele to the reporter as a corroborating witness. In her first interview with Isikoff, Steele backed up Willey’s story, saying that her friend had complained at the time about the president’s crude pass at her.
When Isikoff decided to go ahead with his story, later in the summer of 1997, Steele told him that she had lied in their earlier conversation. In truth, Steele said, she had never heard Willey complain about Clinton in 1993. She had told the original falsehoods as a favor to Willey. In the months that followed, Steele stuck to the second version of her story—that Willey had asked her to lie in her behalf. On one level, the whole Willey vs. Steele controversy could be seen as much ado about relatively little. Two witnesses told conflicting stories, which is something that often happens in criminal investigations.
But the Steele prosecution grew out of the central obsession of Starr’s investigation. Jackie Bennett, Starr’s chief strategist, had questioned Clinton closely about Willey’s charges in his grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998. The president categorically denied Willey’s account of a groping. Bennett wanted to build another perjury case against Clinton—this one based on the word of Kathleen Willey. Steele’s account made Willey out as a conniving liar herself, so the OIC set out to build up Willey and destroy Steele. Thus this prosecution.
As so often happened with the OIC, things did not go as the prosecutors hoped. Willey had to answer hard questions about the financial misdeeds that led her husband to commit suicide; she had provided, at best, dodgy and evasive testimony during her deposition in the Jones case. She had also made the customary inquiries about selling her story of Clinton’s alleged sexual come-on. In light of all this, Willey’s attorney wisely insisted on a grant of immunity before she agreed to cooperate with Starr’s office.
Then, after Willey received immunity, she told the Starr office a series of flat-out lies about her relationship with a man named Shaun Docking. After her husband’s death, she had become sexually involved with this younger man, and the affair had ended badly, in 1995. As part of their breakup theatrics, she told him a false story about having gotten pregnant. In Steele’s trial, Willey was asked, “Why did you not tell the United States” the truth about Docking?
“I was embarrassed, and I was ashamed of that,” she said.
Willey’s lies put Starr’s prosecutors in a dilemma. Her immunity agreement stated clearly that if she didn’t tell the truth, her immunity could be withdrawn and she could be prosecuted for all her crimes—including the lies that broke the agreement. But she was also their last, best hope to make another case against Clinton. Starr had to choose: hold fast to his oft-repeated insistence on the truth and void Willey’s immunity deal, or ditch the principle and save a witness who might finally bring down Bill Clinton.
The prosecutors gave Willey a second immunity agreement, which served to excuse her latest round of lies. After all, Willey had only lied about sex.
In a broad sense, Starr’s team made the right call about Willey’s immunity. On this most private subject in her life, she had lied out of shame and regret. There was no need to make a federal case out of it. But this reasoning should have been applied to Bill Clinton as well. The actions that led to his impeachment were rooted in his embarrassment about how he had conducted his sex life. Of course, prosecutors and the nation at large should hold the president to higher standards. But even by the stern measure a nation should apply to its leaders, Clinton’s enemies staged a banquet of excess—in the tactics they used, in the judgments they made, and in the remedy they sought.
One person saw the case for what it was, and when the heat of the impeachment fever had passed, Judge Susan Webber Wright offered a cool final assessment. On April 12, 1999, the judge found Clinton in contempt of court for violating her orders in Jones v. Clinton—that is, by lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. After a brief, sober review of the facts, Wright concluded that “there simply is no escaping the fact th
at the President deliberately … undermined the integrity of the judicial system. Sanctions must be imposed, not only to redress the President’s misconduct, but to deter others who might themselves consider emulating the President of the United States.…” In an especially bitter pill for Clinton, Wright ordered him to pay the Jones lawyers’ expenses in connection with Clinton’s deposition in the case. (After a final bit of rancorous litigation, Wright set that amount at $90,000.) The judge imposed a punishment that was no more, and no less, than Clinton deserved. The legal system may have taken over the political system elsewhere, but in one Little Rock courtroom, the basic rules of fairness still applied.
One more party also had the case right from the start—the American people. The Lewinsky saga abounded in fatuous judgments about the alleged sentiments of this great inert beast. But even employing due caution, one can only marvel at the quiet wisdom of the vast majority of Americans, especially in the face of nonstop hysteria from the political and media classes. These opinion leaders announced that long-established distinctions—between public and private, between personal and political—no longer mattered in American life. And the people replied, evenly, that they certainly did. This battle, of course, did not conclude with the verdict in the Senate. The self-appointed arbiters of moral fitness moved on to new targets—candidates instead of presidents—and new subjects—drug use instead of adultery—and insisted on passing judgment. Again, apparently, the public disdained these assessments from on high. But with the legal system showing no sign of relinquishing its hold over the nation’s politics, the language of accusation and investigation will continue to dominate the nation’s discourse.
A Vast Conspiracy Page 51
