A Vast Conspiracy (69 page)

“No,” the witness corrected gently. “I had resigned.”

“You had resigned, but you had been previously.”

“I had been previously,” Pam Parsons agreed.

“Am I correct that the subject of your perjury was consensual sex?”

“No,” she said. Wrong again.

“What was the subject of the perjury, then?” the ill-prepared McCollum went on. “Please clarify that.”

“Well, it is really kind of funny,” the languid and somewhat spacey Parsons answered. “There is a gay bar called Puss in Boots in Salt Lake City, Utah. It wasn’t easy to say. I have been there. That occurrence was two years after, then, the things that I was suing
Sports Illustrated
for. It wasn’t a
pretty picture for me. I thought I had many reasons for why I could say no, but it was an out-and-out lie. I had been there.”

At this moment, there was scarcely a person in the packed hearing room who had any idea what Parsons was talking about. Puss in Boots?
Sports Illustrated
? Who was this woman, and what did she have to do with the impeachment of the president?

To McCollum, apparently, she was both an expert witness and an exhibit on the wages of perjury. “You were in a position at one time of leadership.”

“Absolutely,” Parsons said. “I was also an athletic director.”

“There you go,” McCollum encouraged. “The president of the United States is the top leader in this country. What kind of message do you think it sends if we conclude that he committed perjury and do not impeach him and he gets away scot-free …?”

“Please let me give this answer. I am ready,” Parsons said dreamily, “Mixed message. We cannot raise our young people with mixed messages. There are no secrets, but the discretion of when to tell them things is what maturity is about. But secrecy doesn’t cut it when we are raising young children.”

Bewildered as everyone else by this answer, McCollum turned to the next witness, an older, demurely attired woman with a more earthbound manner. “Dr. Battalino, what is your thought about the double standard we might be creating if we conclude the president committed perjury and we don’t impeach him, with respect to people such as yourself are convicted and sent to jail or put in house arrest for perjury regarding consensual sex? Is this fair?”

Barbara Battalino understood her role better than Parsons, and she gave the answer McCollum wanted. “I believe that we as a people, as a country, must not give the impression … that we are indeed a country that does not take seriously the rule of law and liberty and justice for all.”

Few could quarrel with this admirable sentiment, but neither McCollum nor anyone else explained who these women were or why they were testifying. From 1977 to 1982, Pam Parsons had been a successful women’s basketball coach at the University of the South Carolina, but then
Sports Illustrated
ran a story that described her as a predatory lesbian who had “sex in mind” when she recruited players. Parsons sued the magazine for libel. During that civil case, she lied about many different subjects, including her familiarity with the establishment known as Puss in Boots. After her civil
case was thrown out, the judge demanded that she be criminally investigated for her false statements. In the end, she pleaded guilty to perjury and was sentenced to four months in prison and five years of probation, which she completed in 1990.

Battalino’s tale was even more peculiar. A patient had sued Battalino for malpractice based on her work as a psychiatrist at a Veterans Administration hospital in Idaho. The suit was dismissed, but then Battalino, who was a lawyer as well as a doctor, went to court to force the government to pay her legal fees. In the course of that proceeding, she was asked in a deposition whether she had ever had sex with the patient in question. She said no—a lie. (She had performed oral sex on him at the hospital.) She pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and was sentenced to six months of home detention. She also lost her medical and law licenses.

As was apparent to almost any reasonable viewer, these women’s sad stories bore little relevance to whether Bill Clinton should be impeached. For one thing, both women initiated the legal proceedings in which they lied—Parsons with her libel suit and Battalino with her fee application. The legal system looks especially askance at those who drag others into court on false pretenses. Moreover, Battalino’s act of sex with a patient was misconduct in and of itself. Most important, though, the legal decision to bring a criminal charge differed fundamentally from the political choice to impeach an elected president. Regardless of Congress’s decision on impeachment, Clinton could still have been prosecuted. The crude parallelism of McCollum’s argument—these women didn’t get away with it so neither should Clinton—was simply wrong. For the perjury ladies, the question was never whether they had committed high crimes and misdemeanors; for Bill Clinton, that was all it was.

This daylong perjury debacle was just one symptom of the disarray in Hyde’s investigation. As the chairman knew better than most, the public had no interest in an impeachment based on the Lewinsky allegations. Thanks to Starr’s testimony, Travelgate and Filegate had flamed out as possible grounds for impeachment. So, prodded by Schippers, Hyde announced plans to open an investigation on yet another front—the alleged campaign finance scandal. In the midst of the perjury hearing, Hyde confirmed that the committee would subpoena records from the Justice Department about its inquiry into the matter. “We are trying to find some things and we have good reason to believe they may be there,” he said,
adding that the committee was “duty-bound to explore” the campaign finance issues.

This exploration took less than forty-eight hours. Hyde quickly recognized that in the less than a month remaining before his stated finish line for the investigation, he couldn’t accomplish more than his Republican congressional colleagues had in months of hearings about campaign finance. Schippers continued to mosey around other corners of the investigation—interviewing Kathleen Willey, trying to question Juanita Broaddrick—but Hyde, at least, confronted the fact that Lewinsky was all he had. In the end, Hyde resorted to a crude desperation to invest that sorry little tale with a significance it did not possess.

“Have you been to Auschwitz?” the chairman suddenly asked during the session with the perjury ladies. “Do you see what happens when the rule of law doesn’t prevail?”

After midnight on the day of Starr’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Abbe Lowell, the Democrats’ counsel, had gone for a late supper in Georgetown with three of the younger Republicans on the panel, Steve Buyer, Mary Bono, and Lindsey Graham. Over their beers, Lowell and Graham discussed the outline of a possible deal to avoid impeachment.

With his down-home demeanor and easygoing style, Graham came to enjoy a reputation as a sort of moderate on the committee. This wasn’t really deserved. As a first-term representative from South Carolina, Graham had helped lead the first, abortive coup against Gingrich—the one based on the speaker’s alleged undue moderation. In 1997, Graham had joined about a dozen extremists like Bob Barr in calling for impeachment hearings against Clinton even before the Lewinsky allegations arose. Still, Graham liked being the center of attention as much as he cared about ideological purity, so he told Lowell about an idea he had.

“If the president would only admit this,” Graham told Lowell, “we could do this deal.”

Thus was born, in theory at least, the last hope for Clinton to avoid impeachment. In the days leading to the committee vote, Graham and a handful of others floated the idea that if Clinton would only come clean, they would agree to some lesser punishment than impeachment—a censure, perhaps. Graham said he wanted Clinton to admit to “lying” and “perjury,” which the president would never do, for good reason. For one
thing, it was far from clear that his conduct did fit the technical meaning of perjury; for another, with Starr able to indict Clinton at any moment, it was madness to expect the president to admit to a crime. In fact, the whole Graham proposal resembled a sucker’s game for Clinton—a floating standard of contrition that invariably found his remorse inadequate.

Certainly, as a constitutional matter, Graham’s idea was laughable. The president’s behavior either amounted to high crimes and misdemeanors or it didn’t, and his subsequent statements should not have made any difference. But in the week leading up to the committee vote, Clinton’s backers were willing to try anything, and the idea did succeed in getting Graham attention from White House aides—and even more interest from CNN and MSNBC.

For his part, Clinton had largely surrendered to bitterness and self-pity. On December 8, after a charity dinner in Washington, he met in the hotel basement with Peter King, the conservative Republican congressman from New York who had committed himself to fighting impeachment. King told the president that the combination of DeLay and Clinton’s answers to the eighty-one questions had made it hard for Republicans to vote no. Clinton defended his answers, saying they were “true and misleading, but not true and complete.”

“With all respect, Mr. President,” the gruff King said, “I know you believe this, but most members of Congress think it’s bullshit.”

Clinton grew emotional. “Don’t people in Congress realize what I have gone through the last three months?” he said. “Do they think it’s been a walk in the park? I’m not just trying to save my ass. Just because I come to work every day doesn’t mean this isn’t tearing me apart. I have to act this way because I am the president.”

Then Clinton allowed himself to speculate about his own trial in the Senate. “Bob Byrd has been waiting for this all his life,” the president said bitterly, referring to the long-tenured senator from West Virginia. “He can give long speeches about the Constitution and impeachment. I can just see him walking around the Senate. He’ll love it.”

The negotiations over Clinton’s statement actually stretched right up to the time the committee voted. The debate in the committee’s Rayburn building chamber had begun on December 10, but it wasn’t until four o’clock on the following afternoon, just minutes before the actual vote, that a grim-faced
Clinton left the Oval Office and walked the few steps to the White House Rose Garden to read his text.

Many on the committee took a break to listen to Clinton. It was a tense moment in the Republican staff office, as several representatives gathered around the television. As they listened to the five-minute presidential statement, Graham was seated directly in front of the screen—waiting to pass judgment. At one point, earlier, Graham and Bob Barr had almost come to blows when Barr denounced Graham for trying to write Clinton’s words for him. Barr didn’t want Graham giving Clinton any help in avoiding impeachment.

In the speech, Clinton acknowledged that he must be held accountable. “Should [Congress and the American people] determine that my errors of word and deed require their rebuke and censure, I am ready to accept that,” he said. Clinton said he was “profoundly sorry” for misleading “the country, the Congress, my friends, and my family. Quite simply, I gave in to my shame.”

Graham just laughed. “Not even close,” he said, and then he and his colleagues returned to the committee room to vote.