Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (86 page)

Two potential choices for attorney general were shot down in what was called Nanny-gate, the use of illegal aliens as childcare workers and nonpayment of taxes on those workers. Another Justice Department nominee, a widely respected black woman from the academic world named Lani Guinier, was attacked as a “quota queen.” Clinton withdrew her name as head of the civil rights division rather than stand up to a Republican firestorm. The accuracy of the charges against Guinier was never challenged, but a new style of “scorched earth” attacks in the guise of congressional advice and consent had been unleashed. The rough-and-tumble horse trading and attacks on presidential appointees had long been a cloakroom matter in Washington, mostly out of public view. Appointments had traditionally been treated as a president’s prerogative and, while there have been notable rejections of presidential appointees, most presidents get to make the appointments they want. But under the new rules, aided and abetted by twenty-four-hour news networks eager for blood in the water, the process had turned vicious. The personal tone of the assaults had been ratcheted up in the wake of the Bork and Thomas nominations. Republicans were looking for payback.

Each of these early setbacks to the Clinton agenda overshadowed a slowly recovering economy and, more surprisingly, the shrinking deficit. Risking that Americans wanted to be done with the excessive deficits, Clinton had gambled on a tax package that included tough deficit reduction restrictions in 1993. Passage of a free trade pact with Mexico and Canada (known as NAFTA) and a major anticrime package that included new handgun controls—known as the Brady Bill in honor of James Brady, the White House press secretary who had been severely wounded and permanently injured in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan—were also victories.

But Clinton’s gaffes were eclipsing his successes. Some miscues were trivial, such as the criticism over a $200 haircut. Others cut deeper. A standoff with a religious cult led by David Koresh in Waco, Texas, turned disastrous when an FBI assault on the compound led to a deadly fire (see p. 578). Bedeviled by continuing reports of his womanizing, dismissed during the primary campaigns as “bimbo eruptions,” Clinton was also being dogged by one woman’s alleged sexual harassment suit based on events that took place when Clinton was governor of Arkansas. The suit attracted only passing attention when it first surfaced—dismissed as another “bimbo eruption.” But these stories would eventually become connected to an ongoing investigation of the Clintons’ Arkansas investments and real estate deals, known as Whitewater. When White House aide Vincent Foster, a longtime Clinton friend from Arkansas, committed suicide, his death was tied into Whitewater as well, and official Washington went into a full-blown scandal investigation mode.

The policy stumbles, personal embarrassments, and major missteps culminated in the 1993 defeat of Clinton’s legislative keystone, the overhaul of the health-care system. Establishing a commission to examine American health-care policies, Clinton’s first mistake may have been his choice of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head the commission. A controversial figure in her own right, the first lady stepped on congressional toes on the way to proposing a far-reaching plan that would cover all Americans. But the Clintons saw their prize project wither, bucked by Congress and an intense lobbying effort by the health-insurance industry. This sharp rebuttal of Bill Clinton’s policy centerpiece was an omen of 1994’s midterm elections.

In a political earthquake, Republicans swept control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. They were led by Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, who trumpeted a conservative list of promises called the Contract with America. This “contract” promised a laundry list of favorite Republican right-wing positions, including a balanced budget amendment, increased defense spending, term limits for congressional seats, an amendment to end legal abortion, and a reform of the welfare system. They were joined by a Republican majority in the Senate, setting the stage for a struggle between the White House and Congress as America moved toward the final presidential election of the twentieth century.

A brilliant politician with finely tuned skills in the new world of “talk show” politics, Clinton was able to co-opt some of the Contract with America as he deftly moved to the political center, guided more often by his influential consultant, pollster Dick Morris, than by his political advisers. In November 1995, Clinton regained the upper hand when he battled Gingrich and the Republican Congress over the budget, a stalemate that actually led to a shutdown of the United States government. For a few days, nonessential federal workers were sent home because there was no funding to pay them. Most Americans barely noticed that the government was out of business. Clinton also co-opted one of the centerpieces of the Contract with America by championing a major overhaul of the welfare system despite opposition from traditional Democratic Party allies.

It was also during that budget confrontation with Newt Gingrich and the Republican House in mid-November 1995 that President Clinton took notice of a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Must Read:
All Too Human: A Political Education
by George Stephanopoulos.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
on the
Today
show (January 27, 1998):

This started out as an investigation of a failed land deal. I told everybody in 1992, “We lost money.” . . . Well it was true. It’s taken years but it was true. We get a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband. . . . I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. . . . [T]his vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

What is “is”?

In the media-driven world that American politics has become, when the “photo op” has become the chief means of communicating policy, presidents and their staffs have become increasingly sensitive to the “image.” And for the public, it is those images—not always those of the president’s choosing—that become fixed in history. Today, whenever we see an image of Richard Nixon, he is either toasting the Chinese leadership in the historic visit that marked the high point of his presidency, or flashing a V sign as he boarded the helicopter that took him from the White House in disgrace. Ronald Reagan is almost always smiling broadly as he rides a horse on his California ranch, or honoring the war dead at a D-Day memorial in Normandy. Jimmy Carter is immortalized in a cardigan sweater telling Americans to turn their thermostats down during an energy crisis.

Then there is the indelible image of Bill Clinton, wagging his finger as he indignantly told America on January 26, 1998, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false.”

In fact, they were not false. At least not all of them. And on December 19, 1998, Bill Clinton became the second White House occupant in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives. (The first was Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson; see p. 249.) Four articles of impeachment were sent to the House by the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee, but only two of them were adopted by the full House.

The long, tawdry history of the Clinton impeachment case dates to scandals during Clinton’s years as attorney general and governor in Arkansas, and later as president. But they were also tied into the culture and history of Washington. The veneer of gentility in American politics had been erased, mostly since the 1970s Watergate era. The backroom political wrangling that had been kept behind closed doors changed into the no-holds-barred, pit-bull style of the eighties and nineties—with the full compliance of a new twenty-four-hour-a-day news media. In the new age of continuous cable and Internet news, the press no longer operated by the “old school” rules of the Washington press corps—rules under which FDR’s wheelchair was never shown in photographs and reporters looked the other way when it came to JFK’s numerous dalliances. The viciousness of the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings was all part of a new power game in which winning was the only thing.

Aided and abetted by his wife, Hillary, who sat by his side during a famous
60 Minutes
television interview in which the couple confessed that they had marital problems, Clinton had been able to dodge stories of his womanizing during the 1992 campaign. But in 1994, a new story came along. An Arkansas woman named Paula Corbin Jones sued Clinton for sexually harassing her while he was governor in 1991. This story broke as the Clintons were being actively investigated by a special prosecutor, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who was examining a tangle of Arkansas real estate deals known as Whitewater, as well as two separate cases involving misuse of FBI files by the White House and missing billing records from Hillary Clinton’s Little Rock law firm. Starr’s investigations were essentially going nowhere and Clinton’s law team was successfully delaying the Jones suit until after the 1996 election—in which Clinton rather easily defeated veteran Republican senator Robert Dole, with Reform Party candidate Ross Perot playing a substantially diminished role.

In spite of these high-profile investigations, and in the midst of his reelection campaign, Clinton had become involved with Monica S. Lewinsky. She was, in 1995, a twenty-one-year-old White House intern. Between their first encounter and March 1997, when her internship ended, Lewinsky frequently and repeatedly engaged in what most people would call “sex” with Clinton in the Oval Office. As it turned out, Bill Clinton defined the word differently.

The Starr investigation and the Jones suit were proceeding when Jones’s lawyers were informed of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair by Linda Tripp, a former White House staffer who worked in the Pentagon, where Lewinsky had been transferred. Tripp had surreptitiously taped the young woman discussing her involvement with the president. Clinton was then questioned about this relationship by the Jones law team under oath and denied the relationship. Starr received word of this denial and began an investigation into possible perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges against Clinton. In the course of videotaped testimony to prosecutors, Clinton was once asked, “Is that correct?” Already notorious for his ability to wiggle around words, Clinton responded, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

In September 1998, just prior to the midterm congressional elections, Independent Counsel Starr released a report on his investigation to Congress. (He chose not to announce that the Clintons had been exonerated in the investigations of the FBI files and the law firm billing files.) Disgusted by the revelations in the Starr report of oral sex taking place during official calls to congressmen and media reports of Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress, the American public seemed to be split three ways: those who hated Clinton, those who defended him, and a large middle ground that seemed to want the whole question to go away and the government to get on with its business. Pressing Clinton at every turn, the Republicans smelled blood in the water. But they apparently misread the American mood.

In a stunning reversal of American election tradition, the Democrats gained five seats in the House. (The party controlling the White House historically loses seats in the sixth year of a presidency.) Postelection analysis pointed to voters who were tired of the Republican obsession with the scandal. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the leader of the conservative Republican “revolution,” had gambled $10 million on last-minute advertising that attacked Clinton, and was largely blamed for the party’s dismal showing. Within a week of the election, Gingrich announced his resignation from the House.

The essence of the case for impeachment of the president presented by Starr boiled down to a seamy affair about which the president had clearly lied while under oath and had possibly asked others to lie for him. These were the charges that the House took up on December 19, 1998, when they impeached the president for perjury and obstruction of justice.

In an almost farcical incident that captures the tenor of the times, Clinton’s impeachment vote was nearly overshadowed when, on the same day, Louisiana congressman Robert Livingston, the speaker of the House designate, who was to have replaced Newt Gingrich, announced his retirement from the House. In dramatic fashion, he resigned after
Hustler
magazine publisher Larry Flynt had uncovered reports that Livingston had had at least four extramarital affairs. The revolution was eating its own.

Apart from the case of Richard Nixon, who certainly would have been impeached had he not resigned, Congress had dealt with fifteen impeachment proceedings since the first case in 1799. Twelve involved judges, one was a cabinet member, one a senator, and only one a president, Andrew Johnson. Of these fifteen impeachments, seven men had been removed from office (all of them federal judges); two cases were dismissed; and six ended in acquittal. Although these earlier impeachment cases provided a limited set of historical precedents, most of the questions regarding impeachment are fairly clear. During the Watergate hearings, a history of impeachment had been prepared for the House Judiciary Committee. One of the young lawyers who worked on it was a recent Yale Law graduate named Hillary Rodham.

During the framing of the Constitution in 1787, the rules regarding impeachment were vigorously debated by men who recognized the enormity of removing an official from office, especially an elective office. The working draft of the document called for removing the president only for bribery and for treason. After heated discussion over the question of how easy such a removal should be, Virginia’s George Mason offered a compromise phrase that dated from old English law: “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And it is that phrase that has caused the most controversy. To most people, the modern sense of the word “misdemeanor” means a petty crime. But many historians hold that when the Constitution was composed, “high misdemeanors” referred specifically to offenses against the state or community as opposed to a crime against people or property.