A Vast Conspiracy (74 page)

Kendall and Greg Craig of the president’s defense team exchanged nervous looks as Bumpers began, because until the last minute, the former senator had been making indecipherable scrawls on a yellow legal pad. “Don’t worry, boys,” he told them, “I got it under control.”

Bumpers’s speech marked the high point of the trial—at once folksy and eloquent, funny and wise, heartbroken and heartfelt—in all, a great moment in the history of Senate oratory. He made no effort to disguise his affection for the man with whom he had dominated the politics of their state for a generation. Bumpers thus had a special credibility to make a point that had largely escaped notice as Clinton had moved toward his acquittal. “You pick your own adjective to describe the president’s conduct. Here are some that I would use: indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless. I promise you the president would not contest any of those or any others. But there is a human element here that has not even been mentioned. That is, the president and Hillary and Chelsea are human beings,” Bumpers said. “The relationship between husband and wife, father and child, has been incredibly strained, if not destroyed. There has been nothing but sleepless nights, mental agony for this family”—and so there was.

But the heart of Bumpers’s remarks concerned the charges against Clinton. “We are here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse of marital infidelity—not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society,” he said. “It is a sex scandal. H. L. Mencken one time said, ‘When you hear somebody say, This is not about money—it’s about
money.’ ” The audience laughed. “And when you hear people say, This is not about sex—it’s about sex.”

In this regard, Bumpers called on his long-ago experience trying hundreds of cases as the only divorce lawyer in tiny Franklin County, Arkansas. “In all those divorce cases, I would guess that in eighty percent of contested cases, perjury was committed,” he said. “Do you know what it was about? Sex. Extramarital affairs. But there is a very big difference between perjury about whether there was marital infidelity in a divorce case, and perjury about whether I bought the murder weapon.… And to charge somebody with the first and punish them as though it were the second stands our sense of justice on its head.

“There is a total lack of proportionality, a total lack of balance, in the thing. The charge and the punishment are totally out of sync.” No one ever put the case against Clinton into clearer perspective—and no one ever used a more apt word than “proportionality” to sum up the excessive nature of the attack on the president. With this word, Bumpers recognized Clinton’s misdeeds but placed them in a wise man’s sense of context and perspective.

As Bumpers turned to close, he began wandering the aisles he knew so well and delivered an elegant rebuke to Hyde’s invocation of the nation’s military history. Bumpers, too, spoke of the rule of law and how men had sacrificed for it. “If you want to know what men fought for in World War II,” he said, “ask Senator Inouye,” who was seated in the middle of the chamber. “He left an arm in Italy.… Certified war hero. I think his relatives were in an internment camp. So ask him, what was he fighting for? Or ask Bob Kerrey”—seated to Bumpers’s right—“certified Medal of Honor winner. What was he fighting for? Probably get a quite different answer.” Bumpers then turned to the Republican side. “Or Senator Chafee, one of the finest men ever to grace this body and certified Marine hero of Guadalcanal, ask him.”

It was, in the end, a plea for tolerance, for reason—for a sense of proportionality. “The people have a right, and they are calling on you to rise above politics, rise above partisanship. They are calling on you to do your solemn duty, and I pray you will.” For a moment, the senators broke the etiquette of the trial, and rose as one in applause. Not Daniel Inouye, though. He remained seated, and with tears running down his cheeks, used the one arm he brought home from his service to his country to pound his chair in appreciation.

On the following morning, Friday, January 22, Trent Lott held a brief press conference in a Capitol hallway. He was asked if anything might change the momentum toward the president’s acquittal.

“That depends on what NBC broadcasts on Sunday,” the majority leader said.

In the shared code of Washington insiderdom, everyone caught the reference. For the past three weeks, many of the reporters covering the story had spent as much time gazing at web browsers as at the Senate floor. In a way, it was fitting that Clinton’s trial would end with a backstage drama orchestrated by Matt Drudge—two of them, actually. It was appropriate, too, that the stories dated back to even before Bill Clinton was president. The tales about him recirculated endlessly, with each failure of proof serving merely to goad later pursuers. So, with the trial winding down in Clinton’s favor, his enemies turned to their last hopes for the elusive lightning bolt that would finally strike him down.

The first story had its origins in a rumor that dated back to Clinton’s days as governor of Arkansas—that he had fathered a child with a black prostitute. On February 18, 1992, the
Globe
tabloid had run a story with the headline
GOV
.
CLINTON HAD ORGIES WITH
3
BLACK HOOKERS—IN HIS MOTHER
’
S HOUSE
! A few weeks later, with the supermarket tabloid spread out in front of him, the Chicago financier Peter Smith had offered to pay David Brock to investigate this allegation, but Brock refused. Later, the writer did accept Smith’s money to underwrite the article in
The American Spectator
that mentioned “Paula.”

As the Senate trial was beginning, Drudge brought the black prostitute story back to life. In a series of reports beginning with his familiar tag “**World Exclusive**,” Drudge announced,
WHITE HOUSE HIT WITH NEW DNA TERROR
;
TEEN TESTED FOR CLINTON PATERNITY
. In connection with the DNA tests that tied Clinton to Lewinsky’s dress, the Starr report had disclosed the genetic makeup of the president’s blood. As Drudge recounted, the rival tabloid the
Star
was planning to test the blood of one Danny Williams, son of the prostitute named in the
Globe
story, to see if there was a genetic match to his putative father, the president. “He looks just like him!” Drudge quoted the mother’s sister as saying. Alas, a few days later, Drudge had to report that the
Star
’s tests had ruled out Bill Clinton as the father of the young man.

Still, by this time, Drudge was on to a bigger story, one that had already damaged Clinton—the tale of Juanita Broaddrick, who was known as Jane Doe Number Five in the Jones case. This story dated to Clinton’s last gubernatorial campaign, in 1990, when his opponent, Sheffield Nelson, had tried to put the rape accusation into public circulation. During the House impeachment inquiry, Schippers’s team had tried hard to prove the charge, and the investigators assembled a secret store of evidence about it in the Ford building. Forty-five House members examined the evidence in the days before the impeachment vote. In January, shortly after his DNA “scoops,” Drudge disclosed that NBC’s Lisa Myers had interviewed Broaddrick for the network’s
Dateline
broadcast.
NBC SAID TO BE HOLDING INTERVIEW WITH
“
JANE DOE
,” according to Drudge’s headline. As usual with Drudge, his reports consisted of meta-journalism—journalism about other journalists’ stories.

Understandably, the network was taking its time to verify, as best it could, a twenty-year-old allegation of this kind. However, Drudge’s increasingly frantic reports suggested that NBC was giving in to White House pressure not to broadcast the story during the trial. (
BROADDRICK EXPLOSION
:
CALLS FOR NBC NEWS PRESIDENT TO RESIGN
, went one typical headline.) The Broaddrick interview thus became the last great crusade of Clinton’s enemies. With his comment at the press conference, Lott was, in effect, daring NBC to run Lisa Myers’s interview on Sunday, while the trial would still be continuing. As Drudge chronicled the debates within NBC about when to broadcast the interview, a new collectible appeared on the Washington scene: lapel buttons bearing the words
FREE LISA MYERS
(Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wore one on the Senate floor.) By the end of the trial, the Broaddrick interview became perhaps the most famous nonpublic work of journalism in American history, its propriety and fairness debated ad nauseam by a world of people who had not seen it.

In any case, despite the pressure from Lott, Drudge, and others, NBC did not broadcast the interview until after the trial. In the broadcast, Broaddrick came across as poised and articulate, and NBC did manage to determine that she and Clinton had apparently been in Little Rock on the date in question. In public, Clinton refused to address the allegation, leaving it to David Kendall to deny that he had raped anyone. In private, though, Clinton suggested to one friend that he had slept with Broaddrick, but that it had been a “consensual deal.” An allegation like this one served mostly as a reminder of the reason behind statutes of limitations. Two
decades later, it was simply impossible to determine what, if anything, had occurred between these two people.

As it turned out, Lott’s challenge came on a day when even the most remote chance for Clinton’s conviction disappeared altogether. At 3:45
P.M.
, on the afternoon of January 22, Senator Robert Byrd handed Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, a copy of a press release he was issuing. Byrd said that he would “offer a motion to dismiss the charges and end this impeachment trial.” It was clear to him, he said, that there would never be two-thirds support for Clinton’s removal, so there was no point in continuing. From the beginning, both sides had recognized that Byrd was the most likely leader of a Democratic stampede against the president. His support of acquittal sealed the result. Byrd didn’t want to hear from witnesses, either. All he wanted to do was “end this sad and sorry time for our country.”

A curious transformation overcame many of the managers as their task became more conspicuously hopeless. The more unpopular they became—in the Senate chamber and in the country at large—the more certain they became of their rectitude. Indeed, in a curious way, some of the managers seemed to take repudiation as proof of their righteousness. This trial isn’t helping us politically, they said, so we must be pursuing it because we are right.

Hyde certainly expressed that view, with a characteristic dollop of self-pity as well. When the time came to debate Byrd’s motion to dismiss, the chairman had taken full-time to playing the victim of the Senate’s disdain. The motion to dismiss, he said on January 25, was worse than unwise; it was an insult to the dignity of the House of Representatives. “I sort of feel that we have fallen short in the respect side because of the fact that we represent the House, the other body, kind of blue-collar people, and we are trying to survive with our impeachment articles.”

Hearing Hyde portray himself as “blue-collar” was too much for two veteran Senate Democrats, and Joe Biden and Paul Sarbanes stormed out of the chamber.

Hyde ignored them and continued with mock humility. “However you vote,” he said, “we will collect our papers, bow from the waist, thank you for your courtesy, and leave and go gently into the night. But let us finish our job.”

Despite all this, Hyde’s ambivalence persisted. At around this time, the chairman called his old friend Howard Berman, the California Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and asked him to make an overture to Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut. Berman was to tell Lieberman that Hyde would be amenable to a motion to end the trial with some sort of censure of the president. This conclusion would offer the managers something other than the embarrassment of a full acquittal. Berman passed the message to Lieberman, who in turn came back with an obvious question. When I propose this idea, can I say that Hyde authorized it—indeed that he came up with it? Hyde said no; he wouldn’t stand behind the idea in public. So, predictably, without Hyde’s promise of support for his own idea, the proposal fizzled.