True Compass (51 page)

Then I worked the telephones one more time: Al Gore. Mac MacLarty again. Attorney General Janet Reno, whom I could not reach. I phoned up certain key allies and emphasized the need for them to keep up the pressure.

On the following day, January 29, just as the White House seemed on the verge of granting our wish, I learned, confidentially, that hand grenades had turned up in San Diego. Each one had a note affixed, demanding a visa for Adams.

The news would inevitably go public. The White House, aware of it, was preparing three new demands for Adams: denounce the grenades in San Diego, condemn attacks on innocent civilians, and also condemn a recent bombing on Oxford Street in London. I let the White House know that Adams was a serious man and a key to Northern Ireland peace, and it would embarrass and insult him if we went back to him yet again. The White House agreed, and Adams himself consented to condemn the violent incidents if asked by the press.

His visa was granted the next day. The easy work was over. Now we waited seven months until the IRA declared a full cease-fire, and the long negotiations toward peace finally began. On Good Friday, April 10, 1998, representatives from the British and Irish governments and the political leaders of Northern Ireland met in Belfast to sign what became known as the Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement, which was soon approved in a referendum by the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

President Clinton, meanwhile, was finding himself progressively mired in a series of rumors, charges, and investigations that went on and on before yielding nothing.

Vicki and I were watching television on the morning in January 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Vicki turned to me at that moment and said, "If this is true, they are going to try to impeach him." I don't think either of us really believed that would happen, but the mood was so poisonous, anything was possible. On August 15, Clinton testified to a grand jury called by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr. On that same evening, he went on television and admitted that he'd had "an inappropriate relationship" with Lewinsky. He called the affair "a personal failure on my part, for which I'm solely responsible." I telephoned the president immediately after his appearance to tell him he could count on my support; that I was standing by to help him through whatever may come. I wanted to support the president--and perhaps, even more, the presidency, which had been under assault almost from the moment he took office. I felt that this kind of attempt to delegitimize a president was dangerous for our democracy.

I should pause here a moment and make clear my feelings about the right to scrutinize public officials.

Do I think such inquiry is fair? Absolutely. But do I think it tells the whole story of character? No, I truly do not. Human beings are much more complex than that. Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don't define the whole picture of who we are.

At any rate, the larger reason for my decision to support the president was this: impeachment talk was indeed in the air. And I could not accept that Clinton's involvement with Lewinsky, or even his doomed attempt at "cover-up," was sufficient reason for impeachment. I'd had lunch around that time with Samuel Beer, who'd been a teacher of mine at Harvard. Sam was an expert on the Constitution and on impeachment law, and how it had developed from the British system. He went all the way back into the twelfth century at that lunch, establishing the parameters of the law that the Founding Fathers had used as their model. Clearly, he declared to me, nothing in this tradition covered personal conduct. It dealt entirely with the abuse of public power in the presidential office. Sam reinforced my belief that this was not an impeachable offense--nor even one meriting censure.

On August 24, Clinton came up to Worcester for a political appearance, and Vicki and I met him there. I showed him a Lou Harris poll indicating that the public's attitude toward the Lewinsky matter had not changed since it first surfaced six months earlier. Fifty-five percent of those interviewed believed there had been an affair; 77 percent believed that Congress should stay focused on the country rather than the president's private life; but 35 percent said that if Clinton had lied about it, he should resign.

Vicki and I were impressed with Clinton's demeanor at Worcester. He was functioning on all cylinders, focused on policy, talking about getting things done. He discussed his recent meetings with Boris Yeltsin and analyzed various races coming up around the country. He had a great deal of support in Worcester, and he was feeding off the energy of the crowds, enjoying his rapport with the people, who obviously felt a deep connection to him. In fact, I remember thinking that the president may have been a bit in denial, not quite ready to deal yet with the depth of his problem and the direction in which things were moving. But his magnetism was still powerful, and its effect extended beyond ordinary voters. John Kerry joined us and several others for lunch, during which the president--after downing his submarine sandwich and fries--sort of polled us informally: "What do you guys want me to do? What do you think?" When he got to Kerry, John seemed that he might have something more to say. But he finally said something like, "Focus on a message and a limited number of issues."

When I asked the president at dinner what I could do to help him, he asked me to talk to Robert Byrd. It was a smart request. The president had indeed learned an important lesson or two while listening to Byrd's peculiar homily about Tiberius being a sex slave. He appreciated the extent of Byrd's influence and understood his strict, old-fashioned code of morality.

There was in fact a great deal of speculation about where Byrd stood on the question of impeaching Bill Clinton. The West Virginia senator was nearly eighty-one then, but still a powerful figure. In fact, some of his greatest days still lay ahead, with his eloquent and passionate stand against George W. Bush's authorization of the Iraq war on the grounds that Bush ignored the constitutional role of the Senate in the matter. Byrd was recognized as the guardian of the Senate as an institution. If it turned out that he believed Clinton should resign or be impeached on constitutional grounds, that would make a huge difference in Clinton's fortunes. And Clinton knew it.

I went to see Byrd at his office in Washington and spoke with him at length about the role of the Senate in this constitutional challenge. I suggested that we needed to proceed in a way that would enhance the American people's view of the Senate, and that this might be done by our remaining above the battle; to concentrate more on establishing the framework for any possible action than on being out front with an opinion. I believe that Senator Byrd welcomed this discussion. He held his fire for the time being, which served everyone's interest.

Nevertheless, after the House Judiciary Committee made public the details of Ken Starr's report, the House voted 258 to 176, with thirty-one Democrats in favor, to authorize the Judiciary Committee to conduct an impeachment investigation.

The midterm elections on November 4 gave a boost to the president's prospects. Against expectations, Democrats gained five seats in the House, and Republican senators Al D'Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina were defeated. The opinion polls showed that the Republicans' losses were tied to a growing disapproval among the public for impeachment. Two days later Newt Gingrich announced his retirement as Speaker of the House. He'd been among the most aggressive advocates for Clinton's removal.

On the same day of Newt's announcement, nearly nine hundred legal scholars and historians issued a statement declaring that the charges against Clinton did not rise to the level of impeachable offenses--a statement that powerfully buttressed my own efforts to head off this action. Even the influential Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter went on record saying the impeachment effort should stop, and that Clinton should answer instead to the criminal justice system at the end of his term. House Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde, reading the prevailing mood, quickly moved to scale back his hearings to one witness, Starr, as a concession to the public's wish for a quick resolution. At the end of November, President Clinton reluctantly let it be known that he would be receptive to the idea of censure and a large fine.

On December 4, Byrd rejected the idea of censure--but only to declare that if the House voted impeachment, the Senate must hold a trial, on pain of "shirking its duty" under the Constitution. Censure, Byrd said, should be considered only when impeachment had run its course.

Clinton's mood seemed privately to plummet during this period. But even as he finally accepted that his presidency was imperiled, he still didn't seem able to confront the ultimate cause. In telephone conversations with him, I sensed that this was not yet a place he could go: the awareness that his affair with Monica Lewinsky had deeply disturbed and disheartened people. And that perhaps they were even more disturbed that he had lied about it to his wife and the members of his cabinet and allowed them to be humiliated by publicly defending a falsehood. In his mind, it continued to be all about the Republicans, what they were doing to him, not what he had done.

I continued to be supportive. I met with him nearly every day as 1998 wound down. I was there for him in mid-December, when the Judiciary Committee rejected censure and voted for impeachment along party lines. I was there for him when the House Republican leaders called on him to resign and spare the country an ordeal. I spoke with him several times on the phone--he usually called late at night--as we pursued a plan developed by John Breaux of Louisiana to find thirty-five senators, one more than was necessary to acquit in a trial, to sign a letter saying they agreed with those legal scholars and historians who found the charges unimpeachable. Clinton brightened at this idea, saying that it would put him "back in the driver's seat" while a lesser punishment was worked out. In any event, I could find only fifteen or sixteen senators willing to sign, and learned from Tom Daschle that not even thirty-five would be enough to ward off a trial; at least fifty-one would be needed.

When Byrd learned about this proposed letter, he got angry. He went to the Senate floor and admonished, "Mr. President, do not tamper with this jury!"

Clinton did not seem to hear this. He remained fixated on getting the Democratic senators to sign a letter. "If we let Bob Byrd have his way on this procedure, they'll stay after it until my numbers go down," he told me. "Once that letter is out, from that time on, I can be president. I can't be president without that being out there." He talked about a lynch mob. He said, "I feel strongly about this. If they force me to resign, this is the end of the Democrats. Of course I'm not going to resign."

Then Bill Clinton asked me to say that the president must not resign. He had to deal with Iraq, he pointed out. "Every important decision I make will be second-guessed. They want to hound me out of office, drive my numbers down, and then go after the Democrats." He repeated, "This is a lynch mob, and it's out of control."

Less than a week before Christmas, President Clinton's private anguish was affecting his political optimism. Meeting with him at the White House to go over his legislative program for the coming Congress, I learned of a new fear: that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who would preside over the trial, would not give him "a fair shake," as he put it. At the same time, he was fitfully imagining scenarios of regaining his full power and prestige: "If we can get this over by the State of the Union, then I'll make a great State of the Union speech." This, the president believed, would change the mix, halt the drift of his presidency. But these hopeful ideas were interlaced with grim defiance: "We can drag this thing out with process and procedure. They're not going to get rid of me. I'll stay here. I'll never resign. They're never going to get rid of me."

On January 5, 1999, with the trial scheduled to begin in two days, the Senate found itself in the grip of partisanship and the fear of chaos. The future of President Clinton, momentous enough in itself, was now rivaled by an issue of perhaps even greater magnitude: the future of the United States Senate as an institution of unquestioned integrity and authority.

Specifically, the House impeachment managers wanted to call witnesses--as many as twelve of them, by implication including Monica Lewinsky. President Clinton's lawyers insisted on standard pretrial procedures for each witness to ensure preservation of their constitutional rights. This posed the danger of a drawn-out trial that could have paralyzed the government for months. Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Slade Gorton of Washington floated a compromise idea that would reduce the trial's duration to about a week, limited to presentations by the House managers and the president's lawyers, followed by a test vote to determine whether the sixty-seven votes needed for impeachment existed. Witnesses would be called only if the Senate decided to proceed with the trial. Majority Leader Trent Lott said he personally did not think witnesses necessary, but if the House managers considered them vital, the Senate would have to honor their opinion.

The day before the trial, Democratic senators caucused in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room in the northeast corner of the Capitol, part of the extension that was built from 1851 to 1859. In that august space, Robert Byrd spoke of the historic nature of what lay immediately before the Senate and the need for all to adhere to the constitutional process so essential to the legitimacy of American tradition. Senator Daschle reported that although Trent Lott supported the Lieberman-Gorton plan, some twentytwo Republicans insisted on the longer proceeding.

After rising to speak, I argued that the entire process had been politicized, and that it was essential to try to restore bipartisanship. Tom Daschle was trying to do this, I pointed out; but if it became clear that the impeachment process was going to be a sham, then the Senate should move toward a test vote as quickly as possible so as not to dignify a partisan process. Then we should move on with the Senate's crowded legislative agenda. The caucus broke up without reaching a decision.