A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (163 page)

The Clinton-Lewinsky case, therefore, became as significant for the change it heralded in journalism as it had done for the actual facts of the case. Already Rush Limbaugh had exposed the details of the Clinton health-care plan on AM radio. Now an unknown Internet reporter had broken a case that the major partisan press refused to uncover. Talk radio and the Internet joined a couple of conservative papers and the Fox News Network to provide, for the first time in fifty years, a genuine opposition press in America. The dominant liberal media would no longer control the spin of public events.

Meanwhile, a wave of indignation spread about the president’s involvement with a young intern. Clinton concluded that he could not tell the public the truth because it would destroy him politically. In a televised appearance he blatantly lied to the nation, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky!” It harked back to Nixon’s famous statement to the American people that their president was “not a crook.”

Clinton’s team revived the successful “nuts and sluts” strategy that had worked well in the early 1990s with Gennifer Flowers: painting Lewinsky, Jones, and Perdue as crazy or promiscuous. Yet no sooner had the first blast of public scorn receded when another woman, a supporter of the president’s named Kathleen Willey, appeared on a national television news show to claim that Clinton had harassed her too, pinning her against a wall while he groped her in the White House.

Starr’s investigation now had to shift gears. Independent counsels are charged with the task of investigating
all
episodes of obstruction of justice, including any new charges that arise during the original investigation. That, after all, was exactly what had sunk Nixon: investigations of subsequent infractions, not the burglary. The new allegations required Starr to investigate the Jones claims as well, and he was ordered to do so by the three-judge panel that had handed him the Foster and Travelgate cases. Starr’s investigation was no more about sex than Al Capone’s arrest had been about income tax evasion. Rather, it was about Clinton’s lying to a grand jury—lying under oath. In fact, had Starr chosen, he could have packaged the Lewinsky/Travelgate/Whitewater/Foster/and John Huang finance abuses into a giant RICO case (racketeering charges that did not require a single criminal behavior but which covered a wide pattern of abuse).

Public opinion polls still reflected high job approval for Clinton, but his personal approval ratings started to sink. The public seemed willing to ignore the president’s behavior as long as no obvious evidence of lying to investigators surfaced. However, Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, containing Clinton’s DNA, surfaced, ensuring the public that neither Congress nor Clinton could get off without making difficult choices. Lewinsky, in one of her encounters with the president, had saved the dress she wore that night. Once again, the major media knew about the evidence and buried the story, and once again Matt Drudge pried it out of the pressrooms.

Drudge’s revelations showed that the president was on record as having lied in front of a federal grand jury—a felony, and certainly grounds for removal. On August 17, 1998, he made a public apology to the nation. Having just weeks earlier flatly lied, he now admitted that “while my answers [to the grand jury] were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”
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Even the apology, though, which included numerous explanations and rationalizations, was itself a political deflection to take the edge off the evidence that Starr was about to deliver.

In order to make abundantly clear the nature of Clinton’s lies, Starr’s report had to provide highly specific sexual details. The same critics who complained about lack of specificity in previous allegations suddenly wailed about Starr’s evidence being
too
specific and personal.

Clinton counted on the House members, including many Republicans, to refuse to examine the Starr Report when it was finally submitted in September 1998. To his surprise, almost all Republicans and many Democrats examined the evidence. What they found was shocking. Not included in the public Starr Report that had hit newsstands shortly after it was delivered to Congress was confidential material relating to the rape allegations by Juanita Broaddrick. When combined with Kathleen Willey’s testimony about Clinton’s thuggish behavior toward her, it painted a portrait of a multiple offender and, possibly, a rapist. One House member said that what he had read nauseated him. There was bipartisan support to begin impeachment proceedings, with the House voting 258 to 176 for the inquiry. Even after the November elections shaved a handful of votes from the Republican ranks, the actual floor vote to impeach saw five Democrats join the House Republicans to vote for two articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice and lying to a federal grand jury. (It could easily have been three counts: later, Judge Susan Webber Wright would state that Clinton had submitted a false affidavit in her hearing as well, but she did not make this fact known until after the impeachment process. Wright was a Clinton appointee, and a former student of his when he had taught at the University of Arkansas.)

At that point, the media failed in its job of presenting facts and educating the public. Constitutionally, the purpose of the House investigation is to determine whether laws have been broken that pose a threat to the integrity of the legal system or whether the offense rises to the constitutional level called high crimes and misdemeanors. Simply engaging in behavior detrimental to the office of the presidency can be interpreted by the House as a “high crime”—different from a statutory crime. Whether or not an act is an impeachable offense is
strictly
within the jurisdiction of the House, according to the Constitution. Once the House has turned out articles of impeachment, the trial takes place in the Senate, whose
sole
constitutional duty is to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused—not to render judgment on the seriousness of the crimes. Clinton and the Senate Democrats counted on flawed public understanding of the Constitution, combined with the willing alliance of the media, to cloud the procedures. When the Senate trial began in early 1999, the House sent thirteen “managers” to present the case, pleading with the senators to examine the confidential material. The House managers, led by Henry Hyde of Illinois and counsel David Schippers, a Democrat, were convinced that an objective person reading the Broaddrick and Willey accounts would conclude that Clinton had lied and had done so repeatedly and deliberately, and that he posed an ongoing threat to other women in the White House. But Schippers was stunned to hear one senator state flatly that most of them had no intention of even looking at the evidence, and that even if there was a dead body in the Oval Office, “You wouldn’t get 67 votes to convict.”
⁶⁸

Republican senators, cowed by the polls, made it clear before the proceedings started that they would not call witnesses, introduce new evidence into the record, or in any way ask any questions that might embarrass the president. The trial was over before it had begun, and Clinton was acquitted by a vote of 56 to 44. Although four Republicans voted for acquittal, not a single Democrat voted for conviction.

Clinton and the Democrats crowed about the November elections in which the Republicans lost seats in the House (but still maintained a majority) as evidence that impeachment was misguided. Clinton tried to claim vindication by the vote. In fact, however, a cynical disgust had set in. Just as the Republicans had overestimated the strength of their 1994 victory, Clinton misread both the verdict of impeachment and the results of the two national elections in which he had failed to receive 50 percent of the vote in either. By 1999, surveys increasingly showed that people would not go into business with the president, or even allow him to babysit for their kids. The public tolerated him, but certainly did not trust him. Late-night comedians made Clinton a regular part of their routines, and
Saturday Night Live
mercilessly ridiculed him. By the time impeachment was over, Hubbell and the McDougals had been jailed; Vince Foster was dead; Elders and Espy had resigned in disgrace; and Dick Morris, Clinton’s adviser, had quit in the midst of his own scandal with a prostitute. Later, on the basis of his fraudulent statement to Judge Wright, Clinton was disbarred in Arkansas.

Once cleared of the charges, Clinton embarked on a quest for legacy building, attempting to erase the state of the Lewinsky saga from his presidency. Much of his effort involved intervention abroad, although some of those initiatives had started long before any articles of impeachment were drawn up. Unfortunately, some of them were shaped and directed while Clinton’s mind was on his impeachment battle, among other things.

Missions Undefined

Having avoided the military draft during the Vietnam era, President Clinton committed more troops to combat situations than any peacetime president in American history. Supporting a humanitarian food-delivery mission in Somalia in 1992, George Bush had dispatched 25,000 troops with the understanding that the United Nations would take over the job of food distribution. But in June 1993, after Pakistani peacekeepers were killed by local warlords, Clinton expanded the mission to hunt down the leading troublemaker, General Mohammed Adid.

Using seize-and-arrest missions, carried out by the Rangers and Delta Force, mostly in Mogadishu, American troops sought Adid without success, although they captured many of his lieutenants. The raids usually went off without a hitch, but one attempt to grab Adid turned into a disaster. When the plan went awry, American helicopters were shot down and 18 Rangers, pilots, and special forces troops were killed. One Ranger’s dead body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
⁶⁹
Clinton pulled the American forces out, leading anti-American terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to coin a “Mogadishu strategy”: killing enough American soldiers that a president would lose popular support for the mission.

Unlike Somalia, which the world soon forgot or ignored, a more troublesome sore spot was the Balkans, in which Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Yugoslavia had been kept together in the communist era by Marshall Tito’s delicate use of brute force and political balance. Once communism fell, each ethnic group again sought its own national status. Notions that these groups lived peacefully side by side under communism seriously underestimated the skill and oppressive force that Tito had used to keep the fractured nation together.

When Croatia withdrew from Yugoslavia, the major substate, Serbia, under President Slobodan Milosevic, sent troops to aid the local Serb sympathizers in putting down the Croatian rebellion. Croatia managed to stave off the Serbs, but Bosnia, which had declared independence in 1992, had mixed ethnic groups and multiple nationalities, presenting a more difficult task in resisting the Serbs. A new Balkan war started to erupt as the Serbs engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” a process of outright killing of non-Serbs or, at the very least, driving them out of areas controlled by Milosevic’s forces. Serb policies starkly resembled Hitler’s campaign to eradicate the Jews, and Milosevic was personally so unappealing that he was easily demonized in the press. Although Clinton promised support to NATO, most Americans viewed the Balkans as a European problem. Moreover, with Russia’s continued support of its old ally, Serbia, the old NATO-versus-Warsaw Pact antagonisms threatened to reignite.

NATO air power supported Croatian and Bosnian forces in driving back the Serbs. In 1995 the warring parties agreed to a meeting in Dayton, Ohio, where they signed the Dayton Accords, creating a unified but partitioned Bosnia with Muslims and Croats in one area and Bosnian Serbs in another. This agreement required the presence of 60,000 NATO peacekeepers, including 20,000 U.S. troops, which testified to the weakness of the settlement. United Nations investigators found mass graves containing 3,000 Muslims, leading to the indictments of several Serb leaders as war criminals.

Milosevic refused to go away, instead focusing on a new target, the region of Kosovo, controlled by a Serbian minority and populated by numerous Muslim Albanians. The Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim-armed terrorist organization, began a series of attacks on Serb targets in 1998, whereupon Milosevic dispatched more Serb troops. Western press reports of widespread atrocities—most of which were later shown to be unverifiable—once again prompted Clinton to commit American forces through NATO. Desperate to draw attention away from his White House scandals, yet aware that he did not dare repeat the Vietnam ground scenario in the Balkans, Clinton ordered the Pentagon to carefully conduct the campaign from 15,000 feet to avoid U.S. casualties. According to the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Clinton made a “major blunder” in ruling out the use of ground troops from the beginning.
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Despite steady bombardment, the Serbs suffered only minor military damage: the worst destruction involved a mistaken American attack on the Chinese embassy. The Serbs had fooled NATO, skillfully employing clever decoys in large numbers. Like the Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign featured a coalition of NATO aircraft, but unlike Desert Storm, it lacked any clear mission except to make Kosovo safe for the Kosovars. Once Milosevic had forced all the Kosovars out—which had been his objective—he agreed to negotiations. Less than a decade later, NATO commanders would admit they could not “keep peace” there any longer.

Another ongoing source of foreign policy trouble was the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since the administration of Jimmy Carter, American policy makers have expended countless hours and vast treasure on obtaining a peace in the region, specifically a lasting agreement between Israel and her Muslim neighbors.