Clinton’s aides were thrilled with this further evidence of the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed ruling class of the town. They brought him a copy of the article. He proudly kept it on his desk.
On election night, Bill and his aides ate pizza in John Podesta’s office while getting the returns and exit polls by phone and on the Internet. Hillary, deputy counsel Cheryl Mills, and Maggie Williams waited for the returns in the White House theater and watched the film version of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, about a black woman brutalized by men.
On election day, the Democrats picked up five seats in the House, shrinking the Republican majority from 223 to 211. In the Senate, the 55 to 45 Republican majority held. The results were bizarre, both for a lame duck presidency and the extraordinary circumstances of the election itself. Most of the journalistic experts had agreed with Republican predictions of large gains in the House and an increase in the GOP majority in the Senate. The last time the president’s party had picked up seats in a second term was 1822. Hillary believed the Democrats could have done even better had they been unified and adamant against impeachment.
Barbara Boxer, whose seat had been considered endangered, won. In New York, Schumer defeated D’Amato, to Hillary’s great satisfaction. Almost as satisfying, in North Carolina, Senator Lauch Faircloth was defeated. Faircloth, of course, was believed by Hillary to be complicit in the hiring of Ken Starr.
That Friday, New York’s other senator, Pat Moynihan, taped an interview in Manhattan with longtime TV newsman Gabe Pressman. It was scheduled for Sunday broadcast. Moynihan said he would not run for a fifth term, two years hence. Later Friday night, the news already all over town, Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman and one of the president’s most ardent supporters, phoned Hillary to tell her and to ask her to consider running for Moynihan’s seat. He thought she could win. Ten months earlier, Judith Hope, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, had told Hillary she didn’t believe Moynihan would run in 2000 and had already urged her to consider it.
Hillary said later that she told Rangel she didn’t want to pursue it, that, obviously, there were other matters for her to resolve in her personal and political life. Rangel’s recollection is that she had been less unequivocal, and had left the door open ever so slightly. Over the next two weeks, Time magazine conducted a poll that showed Hillary’s approval ratings at the highest they had ever been—70 percent, double the percentage at the time of the defeat of the health care initiative.
NEWT GINGRICH was now both terrified and furious that his extramarital affair with a congressional aide might be revealed in the upcoming impeachment fight. Many in his party blamed him for the election disaster. Three days later, Representative Robert Livingston of Louisiana declared he would challenge Gingrich for the speakership. In a conference call to the entire Republican membership after realizing his support was evaporating, Gingrich announced he was resigning as speaker and from the House. It was a remarkable end for the “Contract with America,” his revolutionary and controversial brainchild for governmental change and reduction, and a nasty departure for its author. He headed home to Georgia, where not long after, he joined his girlfriend and left his wife. The undercurrent of unease and discontent among Republicans was the big story but a complicated one. Behind the scenes, Henry Hyde had told Kendall and Charles Ruff that, without a bipartisan majority, he didn’t believe impeachment should move forward, and that perhaps an alternative—censure, most likely, and/or an admission by Clinton that he had lied—could succeed.
Bill and his White House political and legal staff had reason to think that the election returns might stave off the appetite of House Republicans for impeachment. Partly to eliminate any further troubles, the president settled the Paula Jones case on November 13 for $850,000 ($475,000 was covered by insurance). There could now be no appeal from the dismissal of the suit or other action arising from it. Hillary said she knew, with the wisdom of hindsight, that not settling with Jones early on had been a terrible error.
Despite the dismal Republican showing in the midterm election, few of its incumbents in the House seemed to lose their hunger for impeachment and whatever other punishment they could mete out, even though they doubted the Senate would vote to convict. And the White House, as late as the third week of November, was still talking about censure. But Gingrich’s deputy, Tom DeLay, was now the real Republican power in the House. Known as “the Hammer,” he controlled perks, campaign funds, and an ideological agenda that, in terms of disdain for the Clintons, was even more extreme than Gingrich’s. He had no intention of giving an inch.
On November 19 Starr testified before the Judiciary Committee—the main witness in its four-week impeachment “inquiry.” (Hillary had spent eight months working on the impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon before hearings had even begun.) In enumerating the charges against Clinton, Starr said that his investigation had found no grounds for articles of impeachment in the Travel Office affair, or an investigation into the improper use of FBI files by White House employees that had once achieved “Filegate” status. Congressman Barney Frank asked when Starr had arrived at those conclusions.
“Several months ago.”
The congressman asked why the exoneration had been withheld until after the election, “when you were sending a referral with a lot of negative stuff about the president and only now…give us this exoneration.”
Starr’s answer was full of legal hems and haws, finally amounting to an acknowledgment that his office was responsible only for supplying derogatory—not exculpatory—information to Congress, in his view.
AMONG DEMOCRATS, there was a growing sense that Hillary was “mechanically defending Bill but not engaged,” as one of the capital’s Democratic elders put it.
Whatever her role earlier, Hillary was now less a day-to-day player in the White House strategy sessions. Several people tried to engage her in the process, but to no avail. “I would make a point of trying to reach out to her and tell her what’s going on because I knew she cared,” said Greg Craig, her old friend from law school days, and a special counsel at the White House for impeachment matters. “And then she would call back with thoughts. But by and large she was pretty much detached from the entire enterprise…. She appeared at one residence meeting very earlyon. In my tenure there I never saw her again. And those residence meetings were every week except when the president was traveling…. It wasn’t that she was disinterested, though. She was interested, but she was detached…. If you raised something about the process with her, she would respond appropriately and intelligently, and she would have a view. Did she deal herself in? No. Not in the way I’ve seen her do when she’s traveling nationally.”
The midterm campaigning had enabled her to get out of Washington and the White House, to be with her own staff and the people she felt close to. She did not relish plunging back into strategy sessions with her husband’s aides, and all the painful reminders of what had occurred during the first seven months of the year, when she had led the fight to save him. Many of her aides noted the change. This was still a delicate period in the Clintons’ relationship. To some she seemed emotionally overwhelmed—understandably. Though many still speculated as to whether Hillary would divorce Bill, those closest to them thought the possibility remote. “This is how it is,” Tony Rodham told his wife, Nicole, “and they will always be together. You have two people that love each other. There is no doubt.”
“I think you have to go through a personal process and a public process, and I don’t pretend to know what all they tried to do to begin to patch things up and work at it,” Melanne Verveer said around this time. “But there’s been distance. And clearly it’s not been without effort on both of their parts to try to heal the rupture. But I think they also both recognize that nobody can understand anybody’s marriage, that these people have had a hell of a lot in common for a long, long time, and I’m not sure that either of them can imagine their lives separate from each other.” Fitfull
y, they began to get to know each other again.
There seemed to be an expectation in the White House that logic would prevail too in terms of resolving the impeachment question, that the new Republican leadership would desist, especially if they read the polls. This ignored an important fact of Washington life: perpetual incumbency. Fewer than 50 House seats out of 435 were usually competitive each election, and those that were in 1998 were already decided; the gerrymandered congressional redistricting meant most members’ seats were almost for life if they wanted them, assuming they didn’t go to jail or get caught at something that particularly offended their constituents. And it was even more true for Republicans than Democrats. Democratic gains or Bill Clinton’s high poll numbers didn’t affect the feelings of certain Republican members toward Hillary and Bill. They still despised them. They had nothing to lose, in their view, by voting for impeachment. And the Republican base, the shock troops that turned out the votes and raised the money, especially the evangelical right, fed off Clinton-bashing. Why stop now when they had a chance to succeed in all they had dreamed of? Moreover, if impeachment succeeded, there was still a possibility that a few important Democrats might bolt, and bring enough votes with them to convict.
Such realizations, inexplicably, were slow in coming in the West Wing. “We in the White House were living in denial,” as Blumenthal said. He told Hillary it was almost certain they would be able to make enough votes to stop impeachment. “That never occurred to me,” she said. By Thanksgiving, the reality had penetrated the staff, and last-ditch efforts to find a means of compromise with the Republicans fell through. Greg Craig had publicly stated that the White House was open to some kind of censure or rebuke short of impeachment. Bill’s staff counseled that, if he would publicly admit he had lied, he might be able to get a vote of censure. But Kendall continued to counsel him to never admit to a crime, and the lawyer’s calculation that Starr or some successor might pursue him after he left office was not unfounded.
Now the clock was running out on the president. On December 11, the Judiciary Committee approved four articles of impeachment for referral to the full House of Representatives. Each vote was along party lines, 21 to 16 and 20 to 16. The first article was for “providing perjurous, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury.”
Hillary and Bill flew to the Middle East the next day for a four-day trip. The strain between them was evident. By now, Hillary had begun expressing her concern to a few close friends that the Clinton presidency—her legacy and Bill’s—was going to be judged on the impeachment of her husband and what led to it, and the investigations that from the start had spun beyond control.
On December 16, the day after their return to Washington, the president’s military and intelligence team advised that there was only a small “window” to attack sites in Iraq where U.N. inspectors suspected Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction or was working on their production, as well as other military assets. The Islamic holy month of Ramadan was approaching.
The beginning of the bombing campaign forced the Republican leadership to delay the House debate on impeachment. Republican congressman Joel Hefley said that the bombing “is a blatant and disgraceful use of military force for his own personal gain.” It was one of many similar statements. The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said the “timing and the policy” were both “subject to question.” Missiles and bombs were still striking Iraq when the impeachment debate began on December 18.
Finally Hillary broke what was being regarded as a week of public silence about the efforts to remove Bill from office. She delivered a statement on the South Portico. The reporters’ stories the next day noted that she looked tired and uncomfortable and almost severe. “I think the vast majority of Americans share my approval and pride in the job the president’s been doing,” she said. “We in our country ought to practice reconciliation and we ought to bring our country together.” It was an enigmatic moment.
The next day, Saturday, December 19, before the votes on the articles of impeachment were to begin, Hillary met with the Democratic caucus at Dick Gephardt’s request. Her statement the previous day had seemed less than a rousing endorsement for her husband. Though it was a foregone conclusion that the Republicans had the votes to impeach Bill Clinton for high crimes and misdemeanors, it was important to keep defections to a minimum, to lessen the chance that Democratic senators might vote to convict the president, leading to his removal from office.
Now she was “as defiant as the day she blamed the Monica Lewinsky scandal on a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’” the New York Times reported. She told the closed meeting that she was there in part as “a wife who loves and supports her husband.” Republicans were intent on “hounding him out of office” because they opposed his agenda. “You all may be mad at Bill,” she told them. “Certainly I’m not happy with what my husband did. But impeachment is not the answer.” Nor would her husband resign.
The Republicans that morning were producing unexpected drama. Six weeks had passed since Newt Gingrich had announced his abdication and prepared to leave town. While Hillary was meeting with the Democrats, Gingrich’s successor as speaker, Robert Livingston, fifty-five, a member of Congress for twenty-two years, met with his party’s caucus and announced that he had been unfaithful to his wife. “I have on occasion strayed from my marriage,” he told them. “I sought marriage and spiritual counseling.” Livingston had come to this juncture by virtue of the pornographer Larry Flynt, owner of Hustler magazine. In the midst of the Lewinsky-impeachment madness, Flynt had decided to challenge what he recognized as the hypocrisy of political Washington, especially (but not limited to) those pursuing Bill Clinton. Flynt had taken out a full-page ad on October 4 in the Washington Post offering up to $1 million to any woman who could prove that she had had a sexual relationship with a married member of Congress or high-level government official. The ad produced results. During Flynt’s “investigation” of a respondent’s claim, Livingston’s wife, Bonnie, had called the pornographer and begged him not to print the details of her husband’s affair in the magazine.
When the House opened its proceedings on the floor that morning, Livingston was the first to speak on the upcoming vote for impeachment. He addressed the president: “Sir, you have done great damage to this nation…. I say that you have the power to terminate that damage and heal the wounds you have created. You, sir, may resign your post.” To that, Democrats, aware of Livingston’s statements to the party caucus, shouted that Livingston should resign. “I can only challenge you in a fashion that I am willing to heed my own words,” he resumed. “But I cannot do that job or be the kind of leader that I would like to be under the current circumstances. So I must set the example that I hope President Clinton will follow. I will not stand for Speaker of the House on January sixth.” Those in the chamber were shocked. He had already groveled before his colleagues and admitted he had “strayed” from his marriage. Wasn’t that enough? Livingston’s colleagues were quick to differentiate between an affair and perjury.
The White House sensed great potential danger in what was happening. Gephardt had disappeared from the floor to confer with the president’s aides, and soon a statement was issued in Clinton’s name urging Livingston to reconsider. He didn’t, and soon after, like Gingrich, resigned from the House. Finally, after two hours off the floor, Gephardt reappeared and spoke in the well of the House. He called Livingston “a worthy and good and honorable man,” which brought a standing ovation on both sides of the aisle. Such were the ways of Washington in this longest season.
The House rejected Gephardt’s parliamentary maneuver to force a vote on censure, 230 to 204. Acting on their prearranged plans, the Democrats then marched out of the chamber as voting began on Article I, gathering on the steps of the Capitol to stage a brief protest rally, then turning around and parading back in before the fifteen-minute voting period expired.
On nearly a party-line vote, the House of Representatives p
assed two articles of impeachment, one for obstruction of justice and the other for lying under oath. Rather than hang his head in defeat, Bill joined Hillary and a slew of Democrats in the Rose Garden, as Al Gore praised the president. The House had done “a great disservice to a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents,” he said. This was a carefully orchestrated show of combativeness, to counter Livingston’s suggestion that the president resign. The idea was to turn defeat into victory, and in a sense it worked. But there was the larger picture: the wreckage of what had seemed such a promising and idealistic presidency six winters before, and the young president and his brilliant wife who would change the face of governance in the capital. On their way outside, Hillary and Bill Clinton had barely spoken, and the tension between them was visible for all to see.
THE OUTCOME of the president’s trial was, given the drama that had preceded it, relatively uneventful. The ceremonial proceedings, the chief justice in his Gilbert and Sullivan robes, the attempts at majestic oratory with their undercurrent of sex, were insipid. It was a low moment in the history of the American presidency, and even lower in terms of a United States Congress already on its way to becoming an institution that ignored its constitutional responsibility as a co-equal branch of government. Nor had the judicial system performed its assigned role without favor. The verdict was as expected, and Bill was acquitted after a five-week trial. The vote on the first article of impeachment was 55 to 45, with no Democrats joining Republicans favoring conviction for perjury; and 50 to 50 on the second article of impeachment on obstruction of justice (seventeen votes shy of conviction), with no members of the president’s party voting to convict. The chief justice mercifully gaveled the proceedings to a close at 12:39 P.M. on February 12, 1999.