Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (63 page)

Foes of the president further complained that he was so absorbed in protecting his hide that he was endangering national security. On August 7, Al Qaeda terrorists blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On August 20, three days after his televised address, Clinton authorized retaliatory missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, leading critics to charge that he was cynically using military firepower in order to divert attention from his personal excesses. Whether this was so was impossible to prove—Clinton said he acted to thwart terrorism—but there was no doubting that his personal problems were consuming much of his time and that partisan battling over sex was hijacking the attention of Washington and the country.
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Starr wasted no time before moving ahead for impeachment. In a sexually graphic, 445-page report (along with more than 3,000 pages of documents) that he sent to the House on September 9—and that the House released to the public on September 11—Starr had nothing critical to say about the Clintons’ involvement in Whitewater or about their role in other matters that he had explored during his four-year investigation. But he had plenty to divulge about Clinton’s sexual proclivities. His report, which spared no details, charged that the president had committed perjury, a felony, by denying under oath that he had ever had “sexual relations” with Lewinsky, and that he had obstructed justice, also a felony—in many ways. Among these ways were the following: encouraging her to submit a false affidavit denying that she had engaged in sex with him; concealing that he had exchanged gifts with her; helping her to get a job in New York so that she might avoid giving testimony concerning him in the Jones case; and lying to friends so that they would give untruthful stories to the grand jury.
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Though the report was voyeuristic, many editorialists found its conclusions to be damning. Jokes circulated that America had a “priapic president” who had an “Achilles tendon in his groin.” The
New York Times
called Starr’s report “devastating” and predicted that Clinton would be remembered for the “tawdriness of his tastes and conduct and for the disrespect with which he treated a dwelling that is a revered symbol of Presidential dignity.” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the
New Republic,
penned an essay, “Lies That Matter,” in which he said, “Clinton is a cancer on the culture, a cancer of cynicism, narcissism, and deceit. At some point, not even the most stellar of economic and social records is worth the price of such a cancer metastasizing even further. He should go.”
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Unfortunately for anti-Clinton editorialists such as these, most Americans seemed to be far less censorious. To be sure, polls at the time showed that roughly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of his personal conduct, but his job approval ratings dipped only slightly in late August 1998. Throughout the highly partisan warfare that dominated the headlines until early 1999, polls consistently gave Clinton job performance ratings of more than 60 percent. At times in early 1999, they exceeded 70 percent, an amazingly positive standing for a president. Similarly high job ratings persisted for the rest of his presidency.
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Given Clinton’s personal behavior, his high job approval ratings seemed puzzling, but there were good reasons why these held up. One—relatively inconsequential—dated to the dismissal in April 1998 of the civil suit in which Jones had charged Clinton with sexual harassment. In dismissing her case, the judge made it clear that the evidence produced by her attorneys was too slight to merit trial.
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Public awareness of this dismissal may have helped, at least a little, to make people think that he had been the target of excessive partisan zeal. A second and much more important reason for Clinton’s high ratings was the economy, which along with the stock market was booming in 1998 as never before. It is a truism of American politics—of all politics—that a thriving economy is one of the best things that can happen to a chief executive, even if he or she is not mainly responsible for it.

A third reason focused on Starr. Even before he produced his report, he had struck many Americans as prudish, sanctimonious, and vindictive. Critics thought that he had allowed personal animus against Clinton—and prissy concerns about sex—to cloud his judgment, thereby turning a sex scandal into a constitutional crisis. Many Americans—urged on by unflattering portrayals of Starr in the media, which reveled in personalizing political struggles—seemed inclined to blame the prosecutor for the president’s predicament. Polls in late August indicated that only 19 percent of Americans viewed the increasingly embattled prosecutor favorably, while 43 percent did not.
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As the
Washington Post
’s Haynes Johnson later observed, Starr was likely to go down in American history as the “relentless, self-righteous Inspector Javert [of
Les Misérables
] whose dogged pursuit of Bill Clinton year after year results in the second impeachment of a president of the United States. . . . Ken Starr emerges in this public picture as a humorless moralist, a Puritan in Babylon, out of touch with contemporary attitudes. A zealous ideologue.”
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The tendency of people to distinguish between Clinton’s personal behavior and performance on the job suggested that Americans, especially younger Americans, were by no means so puritanical about sex as some contemporary commentators thought they were, or as many cosmopolitan Europeans had long and superciliously maintained. In 1998, even a majority of women, especially those who were liberal in their politics, appeared to rally behind the president. Though they disapproved of his relationship with Lewinsky, they did not believe that he should be judged on his moral character alone. After all, his wife had stuck with him.

Their attitudes, like those of a great many men, indicated that by the late 1990s Americans had become considerably more willing than in the past to take a live-and-let-live view of the sexual behavior of people, including public officials. Their readiness to do so was yet another sign of the long-range liberalization of American cultural attitudes that had advanced, especially since the 1960s.
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Clinton, a freewheeling symbol of the more permissive boomer generation, was a person they could relate to and understand.
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C
ONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS, HOWEVER
, were far less tolerant of Clinton’s behavior than were the majority of the American people. Many of them hoped to advance partisan interests and raise campaign funds from their conservative base. On October 8, a month after they had received Starr’s report, House Republicans voted to proceed with an impeachment inquiry. In speeches on and off the floor they excoriated the president. With the off-year elections less than a month away, they hoped for a GOP triumph and then for impeachment, which, as prescribed by the Constitution, would enable the Senate to put the president on trial. A vote of two-thirds of the senators would remove the president from office.

These Republicans were following the action from way out in right field, unable to see how out of touch they were with the major players—or with public opinion. This became especially clear in the election results that November. In some gubernatorial races, notably in Texas, where George W. Bush scored a resounding victory, the GOP had cause for celebration. But the voting produced no changes in the partisan lineup of the Senate, which remained in the control of the GOP, 55 to 45. In the House, Democrats gained five seats, slightly reducing the Republican majority to 222 to 212.

This was the first off-year election since 1934 in which the party holding the White House had actually enlarged its numbers in the House of Representatives. Gingrich, who had led the charge against Clinton, felt humiliated. Three days later he resigned as Speaker and announced that he would leave the House at the end of his term in January 1999. It also became known that he had been having an affair with a congressional aide young enough to be his daughter. When his designated replacement as Speaker, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, was revealed as an adulterer in December, he, too, announced that he would leave Congress in January. He proclaimed, “I must set the example that I hope President Clinton will follow.” Not all the impeachers, it seemed, were of unimpeachable moral character.

Undeterred by setbacks such as these, the Republican majority in the House pressed ahead to impeach the president. On December 19, a day on which Clinton had authorized massive American air strikes on Iraq, they achieved their aims. On largely party-line votes, Republicans prevailed on two of four counts recommended by the House Judiciary Committee. One charge, which stated that the president had committed perjury before a federal grand jury, passed, 228 to 206. The other, which asserted that he had obstructed justice in the Jones case, was approved by a vote of 221 to 212. Clinton was the first duly elected president in United States history to be impeached.
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Because conviction in the Senate required a two-thirds vote of sixty-seven, the outcome of the trial in the upper chamber, where Republicans had only fifty-five seats, was never in doubt. The proceedings nevertheless lasted for thirty-seven days. House Republicans presenting their case to the Senate asserted that Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice met the constitutional definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and justified his removal. Clinton’s lawyers retorted that while he had acted badly, his misbehavior hardly justified the extreme step of ejecting him from office. On February 12, 1999, the Senate rejected the perjury charge, 55 to 45, with ten Republicans joining all forty-five Democrats in the majority. The vote on the obstruction of justice charge was closer, 50 to 50, with five Republicans joining forty-five Democrats in opposition. Clinton had won.

Though the biggest battles were over, several legal issues explored by Starr remained to be settled. By June 30, 1999 (at which point authorization for independent prosecutors was allowed to lapse), his investigations into Whitewater and other matters had succeeded in generating twenty indictments, fourteen of which resulted in pleas of guilty or convictions. Among those jailed were Webster Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary Clinton and a deputy attorney general under Clinton, and Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker. Hubbell was guilty of fraud and tax evasion, Tucker of fraud. A month later Judge Susan Webber Wright, who had dismissed the Jones case in 1998, ruled that Clinton had given under oath “false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Holding him in contempt, she ordered him to pay Jones’s lawyers $90,000.

On Clinton’s last day in office, he admitted giving false testimony regarding his relations with Lewinsky and was fined $25,000, to be paid to the Arkansas Bar Association. His law license was suspended for five years. In return he received immunity as a private citizen from prosecution for perjury or obstruction of justice. Finally, in March 2002, prosecutor Robert Ray, who had succeeded Starr in late 1999, delivered the concluding report of the investigation. It occupied five volumes and ran for 2,090 pages. It concluded that there was insufficient evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton had been guilty of any crimes relating to Whitewater. It was estimated at that time that the investigation had cost American taxpayers a total of $60 million.
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Then and later, pundits sought to assess the legacy of this extended, nasty, and frequently sleazy struggle. Many of these assessments reflected political positions; these died hard, if at all, in an atmosphere of unrelenting partisan vituperation. House Republicans remained highly confrontational in subsequent years. Democrats complained bitterly that Republicans, having seized on sexual misbehavior to impeach a president, had tortured the constitutional meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and had set a dangerous precedent that partisan members of Congress in the future might invoke in order to unseat someone whom they did not like.

The prolonged partisan wrangling prompted some contemporary observers to point to the cumbersomeness of America’s political institutions. Had a prime minister been accused of scandalous behavior, they said, his or her party might well have been able to settle the matter quickly, either by affirming support for its leader or by picking a new one. In extreme cases, the governing party might feel pressure to call for a new election, which would be held in short order. Quick solutions were not available in the United States, whose eighteenth-century Constitution had shown admirable durability but also prescribed a system of separation of powers that encouraged adversarial relations between the executive and legislative branches of government. A host of checks and balances, notably the provision for a Congress of two equally powerful houses, further complicated American procedures. The Constitution, moreover, set four-year terms for elected presidents: Unless Clinton resigned, or was impeached and convicted, he could expect to remain in office until January 2001. When he refused to quit, Republicans determined to remove him. The complex process of investigation, impeachment, and trial that ensued not only lasted for more than a year; it also provoked a constitutional crisis. When the fighting finally ended, many people worried that it had sorely damaged the institution of the presidency.

Other observers disagreed with these dour reflections. They retorted that politicians in the future, acutely aware of the failure of partisan warriors to remove Clinton, would think twice before wielding the blunt weapon of impeachment. Some editorialists nonetheless agreed that the president had been reckless. His perjury and obstruction of justice, they said, met the constitutional definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” As A. M. Rosenthal, a well-known
New York Times
columnist, had exclaimed in December: “Mr. Clinton did not lie simply to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He lied and lied, under oath and directly to the people, and lied to aides who became a chain letter of lies, to build a wall around the White House.”
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