A Vast Conspiracy (66 page)

By the end of the first day of secret deliberations in the committee, the Judiciary panel had taken twelve roll-call votes, and virtually all of them were decided along party lines. More than anyone, Hyde understood how the Democrats were trying to win by losing, but he lacked the will to fight back. To be sure, there was a cynical core to Gephardt’s strategy of provoking fights and then crying partisanship; it was the rough legislative equivalent of the man who murders his parents and seeks sympathy as an orphan. But the Democratic strategy illustrated a truth about the impeachment fight, too—that Clinton’s opponents were indeed obsessed with his humiliation, with his ouster, and with his sex life.

The tableau of the full Judiciary Committee in session resembled a caricature of the contemporary Republican and Democratic parties. The twenty-one
Republicans included twenty white Christian males, plus Mary Bono, Sonny’s newly elected widow. The sixteen Democrats included five African-Americans, six Jews, three women, and one openly gay man. This was no coincidence. Judiciary attracted the hard core of both parties, the kind of representatives who cared more about taking stands than bringing home pork. To a great degree, the members of the committee had safe seats—thirty of the thirty-seven members had been last elected with at least 60 percent of the vote—so they had little reason to fear retaliation at the polls for taking controversial stands.

It was ironic, then, that the single member of the committee who had the most important, if least publicized, role in the impeachment debate fit none of the stereotypes about the Judiciary Committee. With his starched white shirts, thick glasses, thinning hair, and formal manner, Rick Boucher was the one Democrat on the committee who looked like a Republican. He represented the poor and rural southwestern corner of Virginia, and his legislative concerns focused on economic issues dear to his constituents in Appalachia. In light of his legislative priorities, Boucher was not looking for this fight. Instead, in the best American tradition, this soft-spoken congressman came from, and largely returned to, obscurity—but not before emerging as one of the few admirable characters in the whole sordid drama.

Opposing impeachment did Boucher no particular good in his district, but he brought fervor to the cause. A Wall Street lawyer before he returned home to the small city of Abingdon, Boucher was offended by the lynchmob atmosphere he sensed among the Republicans. Moreover, as a congressman since 1982, Boucher had watched the House descend into more or less permanent partisan rancor. Boucher determined to do whatever he could to stop the process, which was fortunate, because Gephardt had plans for him as well. From the beginning, the minority leader fixed on Boucher as the one Democrat on Judiciary who could reach out to his more moderate colleagues in the full House.

But before Boucher could do anything, the president had one more important hurdle to pass. On September 21, thanks to the vote of the Judiciary Committee in executive session, the videotape of Clinton’s grand jury testimony was released. As with each major development in the case, this one was preceded by predictions from pundits that it was finally—finally!—going to change public opinion about the president. And like all the others, the release of the tape prompted no meaningful change in the
polls. No matter what question was asked, the polls stuck at where they had been since January—about 60 percent support for Clinton, 30 percent opposition, and 10 percent undecided. Though many questioned Kendall’s agreement to the taping procedure, the release of the tape did prove he was right about one thing. Kendall had insisted that the camera remain fixed on Clinton, with no provision for pictures of the questioners or their reactions. This pitiless shot, unchanged over four hours, generated sympathy for Clinton, as viewers identified more with his discomfort at answering these questions than with his interrogators’ struggle to get him to tell the truth.

The videotape of the president’s grand jury testimony, much more than the transcript, demonstrated something else that seemed strangely unexpected after all this time. In a peculiar way, one could see that Clinton cared for Monica Lewinsky. He generally gave an embarrassed smile when he spoke of her, but there was, if not gallantry, a kind of affection as well. At one point during his testimony, he said that he recognized that Lewinsky would tell others about their affair. “Not because Monica Lewinsky is a bad person,” he went on. “She’s basically a good girl. She’s a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind. I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her, her upbringing. But she’s basically a good person.” These were the words of a man who had listened to Monica complain about her parents, and Clinton’s demeanor as he discussed his former girlfriend illustrated a seldom-noticed key to the president’s enduring popularity, especially among women. It has often been observed that some philandering men love women, and some hate them. Perhaps Clinton behaved as he did out of loneliness, lust, or simple neediness, but he was not a misogynist. Many women sensed the peculiar form of Clinton’s neuroses and they recognized, in other circumstances, his clear respect and admiration for women; thus many, as a consequence, tolerated his wayward ways.

With the release of the president’s grand jury testimony safely in the past, Boucher turned to the next big date on the impeachment calendar. On October 8, the House would vote on whether to authorize the Judiciary Committee to begin a full impeachment investigation. Could the Republicans maintain the bipartisan spirit that characterized the first, full House vote on impeachment? Or could Gephardt win by losing, and thus demonstrate that impeachment was a Republican plot to get the president?

Gephardt put Boucher in charge of crafting the Democratic position. Boucher realized that the country was tiring of the whole Lewinsky story, so he came up with the idea of placing a time limit on the impeachment inquiry. In the same spirit, Boucher sought to limit the scope of the investigation to Starr’s referral to Congress—that is, to the Lewinsky allegations only. This restriction would keep the Republicans from turning the impeachment hearing into the meandering search for wrongdoing that Clinton’s opponents in Congress had been conducting for years. On September 29, Boucher put his proposal to Gephardt, who approved it and then directed the Virginian to unify the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee around the proposal.

This wasn’t easy. These Democrats were a fractious, opinionated bunch, and all of them wanted their fingerprints on a piece of American history. The hard-core liberals on the panel—including Zoe Lofgren and Maxine Waters of California, Bobby Scott of Virginia, Mel Watt of North Carolina, and Jerrold Nadler of New York—didn’t like Boucher’s idea at first. They wanted the committee to set down the standards for an impeachable offense, and only then to establish limits on the time and scope of hearings. Gradually, though, Boucher wore down his colleagues and convinced them of the political appeal of his proposal. On October 1, in a meeting in Gephardt’s office, Boucher reported that the committee Democrats were united on the issues of time and scope.

But Boucher’s work was only half done. Having persuaded the liberal Democrats that he wasn’t being too tough on the president, he then had to convince the conservative Democrats that he wasn’t being too easy on him. There wasn’t much time, either, because Gephardt wanted the Democratic position announced at a press conference on Friday morning, October 2, at 10:30
A.M
. So Boucher asked the “Blue Dogs”—the collection of the two dozen or so most conservative Democrats in the House—to meet with him at 8:30
A.M
. that Friday. At half past ten, Boucher would meet the rest of his Judiciary colleagues and let them know if there was a unified Democratic position or not.

The Blue Dogs gathered in the office of their leader, Gary Condit, of California. At a meeting like this one, a Maxine Waters or Jerry Nadler would have been out of place, but Boucher spoke the moderates’ language. Condit said he could live with a time limit on the impeachment hearings, but it had to be long enough for a reasonable examination of the evidence. “If it’s only forty-five days, that sounds like a cover-up,” Condit said.
Boucher said around ninety days, or until the end of the year, would be fine. All of the congressmen present wanted to talk, and the time of the press conference was drawing near, but Boucher didn’t want to break away.

At the “swamp,” the triangle of grass on the Senate side of the Capitol where congressional press conferences took place all day long, the other Judiciary Democrats waited impatiently for Boucher. At last, Conyers started without him. At about ten forty-five, Boucher jogged up to the gaggle of his colleagues and gave them a satisfied nod. By the time it was Boucher’s turn to speak, most of the reporters had lost interest, but he knew, as did just a handful of others, what he had accomplished.

Every day at 7:30
A.M.
, Henry Hyde would meet his chief of staff, Thomas E. Mooney, at the Hyatt near Capitol Hill, eat breakfast, and mope. From the day the Starr report arrived, Hyde had hated everything about the process—not least what had happened to him. On September 16, the online magazine
Salon
had reported a story about an extramarital affair Hyde had had during the 1960s. He had made peace about the issue with his wife, who had died in 1992, but none of his children or grandchildren had known about it. Hyde recognized that the source of the story was probably the woman’s cuckolded husband, but he blamed the White House for its scorched-earth method of dealing with adversaries. He was right to worry. Sidney Blumenthal had shifted the target of his “oppo” campaign from the Starr prosecutors to Clinton’s pursuers in Congress. One day around this time, Blumenthal, who is from Chicago, told me his mother had recently been reminiscing about how Hyde used to bring his girlfriend to the Sherman Hotel.

Such an environment put Hyde in no mood to compromise. Hyde was in a political vise. As the reaction to the release of Clinton’s grand jury videotape illustrated, there was little public support for impeachment. But Hyde’s Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee desperately wanted to press forward. And overriding all other motivations was the belief that had sustained Clinton’s enemies for years: Hyde believed that there were more shoes to drop. Starr had tantalized the Republicans on the committee with his pregnant warnings that his investigation was continuing. Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate remained within his jurisdiction, as did the separate inquiry about whether Clinton had lied about his encounter with Kathleen Willey. The supposed campaign finance scandal,
with its vague intimations of a connection to Communist China, beckoned Hyde as well. In light of all this, what really worried the chairman about Boucher’s proposal was the limitation on the scope of the hearings to Lewinsky alone.

But Boucher had put Hyde on the defensive, as became apparent when the chairman appeared on
Meet the Press
on Sunday, October 4. Hyde rejected the Boucher plan’s limitations on time and scope of the hearings, but the chairman wanted to show that he was being reasonable, too. So Hyde volunteered, “I have a New Year’s resolution and that is we finish by New Year’s. Now, you know how New Year’s resolutions sometimes get broken, but it’s my hope and prayer that we could finish by New Year’s.” Democrats rejoiced. By limiting his schedule to the end of the year, with the November election intervening, Hyde had essentially admitted that he would not have time to call any witnesses about Clinton’s behavior. (If Hyde started calling fact witnesses like Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan, Democrats would have had the right to call their own witnesses, and that would have taken the hearings well into 1999.) Hyde’s New Year’s resolution meant that he would be relying exclusively on the evidence collected by Starr. Whether Hyde liked it or not, he was now the unpopular Starr’s permanent teammate.