And Senator Kerrey said that before the president started telling his lies under oath in a sworn deposition in front of a federal judge. The evidence that the president perjured himself, and perjured himself repeatedly, during his deposition in the Paula Jones case is overwhelming. So overwhelming, in fact, that Clinton acted like a trapped animal when he was later asked to say simply that it is wrong for presidents of the United States—in the abstract—to commit perjury and obstruct justice.
At a press conference on April 30, 1998, ABC reporter Sam Donaldson posed this question to President Clinton:Now you deny wrongdoing, I understand, but as a standard for presidents what do you think: Does it matter what you do in private moments, as alleged? And particularly does it matter if you have committed perjury or in another sense broken the law?
Clinton responded:Well, since I have answered the underlying questions, I really believe it’s important for me not to say any more about this. I think that I’m, in some ways, the last person who needs to be having a national conversation about this.44
It is astonishing that the president of the United States has so obviously and blatantly broken the law that he feels he should not go on record saying that presidents, as a general matter, should not break the law. Clinton openly announces that he is “the last person who needs to be having a national conversation about” whether it should “matter” if the president is a felon.
U.S. BLUES
Though there are standards and precedents to abide by, impeaching a president is not just a matter of legal technicalities. It is a matter of our duty as citizens. Impeachment may seem like an extreme course, especially when our mutual funds are doing well, but it is a course specifically provided for in the Constitution. The Constitution was drafted by men who had already resorted to more extreme measures than impeachment to remove their colonial governors. They had staged a revolution and drafted a document proclaiming to the world that revolution was their right and duty, when, “in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”
Americans have become so delirious on the rhetoric of choice that the question of whether to impeach a president, even one who has manifestly committed impeachable offenses, seems like a matter of personal preference, rather than our obligation as citizens of a republic. That isn’t how our Founding Fathers put it in the Declaration of Independence. And they were about to alter a government “long established” in a more jarring fashion than a simple little impeachment.
They acknowledged that “[g]overnments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes” and recognized “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves….” But the whole point of the Declaration is that finally there comes a limit to what citizens can tolerate from their government. And then the Declaration does not say merely that citizens have the right to make a change, but that they have a duty: When citizens witness “a long train of abuses and usurpations… it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government….”45
This is what it means to be a citizen in a republic—of the self-governing kind and not the banana variety. You can vote for a knave and a clown, but then you have to take some responsibility to correct your mistakes. And those who didn’t vote for the clown have a responsibility to rescue the rest of the country from its foolishness. Moreover, there ought to be some responsibility attached to holding office in a government founded on the blood of patriots. (So, why exactly is the Republican Congress doing nothing while waiting for Ken Starr to save the country?)
This is our fundamental political tradition. The governed may be expected to abide a certain amount of evil for the sake of continuity and stability, but there’s a limit. When it is easy to imagine Larry Flynt watching television coverage of the president and wondering what the country has come to, the president has got to go.
It has been the president’s game to identify his critics as religious right fanatics to play on people’s fear of excessive morality in politics. This is odd since the Christian Coalition hasn’t made a peep about the president’s manifest perversions and apparent crimes, except to endorse the position of Clinton’s flacks: like Lanny Davis, it is just waiting “to see the facts.”46 Be that as it may, surely it does not yet require fidelity to a particular religious creed to say the president of the United States should not be having affairs with an intern, lying to the American people, obstructing justice, or perjuring himself in a constitutional case.
Impeachment is not something even a partisan jumps into impulsively. But it’s absurd to pretend that only nonpartisan adherents of good government—whoever they are—can call for impeachment. No one ever expected the impeachment of a president to be nonpartisan. It’s supposed to be partisan. Alexander Hamilton wrote that impeachments would “enlist all [the citizenry’s] animosities, partialities, influence, and interest.”47 This was in a tract recommending adoption of the Constitution—along with its impeachment clauses.
In fact, the whole government is supposed to be partisan precisely so that, as James Madison put it, “each may be a check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.”48 If the president’s enemies aren’t going to be sentinels over him, who is?
The indignant complaint that the people attacking the president are out to “get” him is so illogical it stops you in your tracks. Okay, but then the people defending the president are out to save him, so where does that get us? There are always two sides. The question isn’t whether there are two sides—down to the last criminal defense lawyer defending Clinton—but whether there are grounds and reason to impeach the president.
The Declaration of Independence gave only one side of the story, too. It repeatedly blamed the whole thing on King George: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good…. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.” He did this. It didn’t matter that they were out to get King George and that the Tories had a different opinion.
If this country didn’t have the stomach to stand up for its principles, we’d be Canada now. And, anyway, this isn’t revolution, so calm down. It is a remedial measure: “Impeachment is the first step in a remedial process—removal from office and possible disqualification from holding future office.”49 (That phrase comes from the report drafted in part by Hillary Rodham.)
In Federalist No. 51, in which Madison commended the Constitution’s reliance on partisan interests, he said: “It may be a reflection on human nature that such precautions should be necessary. But what is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” What kind of reflection on our nature might it be if the country were willing to suffer Clinton to continue as president now that we have learned what kind of man he is?
The consequences of this can hardly be overstated. Democracy runs on trust, without which phrases like the “consent of the governed” are meaningless. It is essentially impossible to have democracy if elected leaders do not tell the truth, everyone knows they do not tell the truth, and no one cares. Presidents who by their deceit spread such cynicism actually do commit “offenses that subvert the system of government.” As the Declaration of Independence put it, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consequently, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
Elliot Richardson, the attorney general fired in Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” explained the danger of failing to remove a corrupt president:[T]here is a serious risk when you investigate corruption. You may do more harm than good if all you do is poke a stick in a muddy pool and stir up the mud without clarifying the water…. [P]oliticians govern their conduct in the light of past experience.50
HIGH TIME
If President Clinton can do what he has done and not face impeachment, we will have set an all-new, heretofore unimagined—unimaginable—low-water mark for elected officials. Not just that, but if Congress doesn’t have the will to throw him out, Clinton will have established a new standard for the entire country. The new standard will be a total absence of standards. Lying doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s about sex, because sex doesn’t really matter, even if it’s gross, exploitive, adulterous, and risky. Go ahead: seize this loophole, to the ruin of your family.
And since manipulating the IRS or FBI from the top is all in the course of business, it must be okay to mislead them and divert them from the other end, too. If you get caught and don’t have a good enough legal team to escape, you might have to pay a fine or go to prison. But there’s no shame in it. The country doesn’t really condemn this. We adore a lovable rogue. And we are very, very tolerant. The only thing we won’t tolerate is a loser. Nothing matters except winning, and it is fine to lie and cheat and manipulate because honor is just a word, just hot air, and the country doesn’t really believe in it.
If Clinton stays, we may as well change our national motto from “In God We Trust” to the old Nike slogan: “Just Do It!”
The last line of the Declaration of Independence is: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Impeachment isn’t a revolution, and no one’s lives or fortunes are at risk. It’s not even our sacred honor this time. It’s just a question of whether the country can patch together a little self-respect.
The Founding Fathers said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. This book isn’t even asking for vigilance. It’s just asking people to give a damn. If Americans don’t care about this, then they are expecting liberty without paying any price at all.
PART ONE
“Kiss It”
Chapter Two
You Can’t Prove I Lied
On July 23, 1973, a sitting United States president was subpoenaed for the first time in 166 years. Citing executive privilege, President Nixon refused to comply with the subpoenas, instigating a battle over the tapes in the Watergate scandal that would end in Nixon’s resignation one year later.
That same day, three thousand miles away in San Francisco, Monica Lewinsky was born.1 (Family friend William Ginsburg would kiss “that girl’s inner thighs when she was six days old,” as he later told Time magazine.2)
Almost twenty-five years later, Lewinsky would be on tape saying things about the sitting president that would prompt the president’s former top aide, George Stephanopoulos, to remark, “[T]hese are probably the most serious allegations yet leveled against the president…. If they’re true, they’re not only politically damaging, but it could lead to impeachment proceedings.”3 The night the story about the Lewinsky tapes broke, Jay Leno said on the Tonight Show, “Let me be the first to welcome President Gore.”
Stephanopoulos wasn’t the only former Clinton apologist briefly stunned into honesty. The next day, former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said, “If he’s not telling the truth, I think the consequences are just astronomical,”4 and the Washington Post editorialized: “This time it’s different: The allegations against President Clinton are allegations of extremely serious crimes. If they are true, they cannot be... expected to dissolve in an ‘everybody does it’ cloud of ambiguity.”5
Even long somnolent Attorney General Janet Reno woke up and formally requested that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s jurisdiction be expanded to investigate whether the president perjured himself, suborned the perjury of others, and obstructed justice. Officials at the Department of Justice “were floored” by the allegations and evidence, according to a source quoted in the Washington Post.6
For only the second time in the history of the country, the sitting United States president was under criminal investigation. Oh, yes, and Monica lived at the Watergate.
The morning the story broke, January 21, 1998, there was total shock. The independent counsel had tapes with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky unwittingly describing her repeated performance of (as Paula Jones had put it) a “certain type of sex” on the president in the Oval Office. And she was also captured on tape describing the red carpet treatment she had gotten from the president and the president’s men to induce her to lie about it under oath—as the president had done already.
But soon a predictable pattern began to take shape. While the country was still in shock, Clinton issued a series of fuzzy, disingenuous denials. He threw in his trademark escape hatches, holding in reserve the possibility of his later saying, you can’t prove I lied. Clinton has always been so disingenuous.
Then quickly, before the media could finish parsing his nondenial denials, the motives and tactics of the president’s opponents became the issue. And then it was yesterday’s news—I’ve already answered that. Soon half the American people were telling pollsters that they were totally copacetic with the idea of the White House as Animal House.
From nine hundred FBI files in the White House to a pattern of IRS audits of Clinton’s enemies to selling the Lincoln bedroom, Clinton had already done things Nixon only dreamed about. Now Clinton had leapt over a boundary of propriety Nixon hadn’t even experienced as a constraint. Behavior that wouldn’t have been tolerated in a presidential aide twenty-five years ago was now acceptable behavior for a president. It is difficult to imagine how Clinton could disgrace the presidency any further.
Clinton flacks have frequently made the preposterous claim that this whole degrading mess was the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing the Paula Jones suit to proceed. Implicit in the claim is that American presidents have always engaged in salacious, reprehensible conduct in the White House and White House interns have always talked about earning their “presidential kneepads.” It is as if somehow the Supreme Court had been holding back all this sewage from flooding onto the presidency, and by mere historical accident it all caught up with Clinton. In fact, of course, private civil lawsuits against presidents have always been allowed. They certainly have never been disallowed. Other presidents weren’t vulnerable because other presidents weren’t such pigs.
Clinton’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) demands that companies fire employees who are overheard calling women “broads.”7 And now he was supposed to have gotten a “certain type of sex” from a twenty-one-year-old unpaid White House intern right there on the presidential seal. In the Clinton view, the president is not to be an exemplar but an exception: the rules that apply to all other Americans just don’t apply to President Clinton.
Two weeks after the scandal broke, Wolf Blitzer of CNN said to President Clinton at a press conference, “Mr. President, Monica Lewinsky’s life has been changed forever—her family’s life has been changed forever. I wonder how you feel about that and what, if anything, you’d like to say to Monica Lewinsky at this minute?” The president smiled as he mulled the question over and then said, “That’s good.” He chuckled with the rest of the crowd and continued, “That’s good, but at this minute, I’m going to stick with my position in not commenting.”8 His whole presidency has been a complete mockery of the American people. Even now, it was all just a game.
THE UNDERLYING CASE: JONES V. CLINTON
On May 6, 1994, President William Jefferson Clinton was sued for sexual harassment by one Paula Corbin Jones for an incident that occurred when Clinton was the governor of Arkansas.
Reporters had been crawling all over Little Rock the first year of Clinton’s presidency looking for arcana on the new president. (They were all over Atlanta after Jimmy Carter became president, too, but the Georgia State troopers didn’t have such colorful stories to tell.) In December 1993 the former governor’s sexual exploits were exposed in an article in The American Spectator. Jones was outed as an attempted Clinton conquest. But according to a
n Arkansas state trooper quoted in the article, it wasn’t just an attempt—Clinton had scored with Paula. She denied the allegation and requested a public apology from President Clinton. When Clinton denied her allegations with the same sincerity he had denied Gennifer Flowers’s allegations, she sued.
Jones alleged that on May 8, 1991, when she was working at a conference for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission being held at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, a state trooper, Danny Ferguson, approached her, handed her a slip of paper with a hotel room number on it, and said “the governor would like to meet with you.”
He reassured Jones and her coworker and friend, Pamela Blackard, by saying, “It’s okay, we do this all the time for the governor.” 9 Ferguson then escorted her to a hotel room where the governor was alone. After some small talk in which Clinton informed Jones that her boss was Clinton’s “good friend,” Clinton began praising Jones’s “curves,” kissed her, slid his hand up her cullottes, and “lowered his trousers and underwear exposing his erect penis and asked Jones to ‘kiss it.’”10 Jones leapt up to leave the room. Before she could make her exit, Clinton reminded her of his friendship with her boss.
Jones brought suit under a statute that prohibits gender discrimination by government officials11—which the courts have interpreted to include sexual harassment.