A Vast Conspiracy (73 page)

On Saturday, January 16, Hyde concluded the managers’ opening statements with an oration of his own. “One hundred and thirty-six years ago,” Hyde began, “at a small military cemetery in Pennsylvania, one of Illinois’s most illustrious sons asked a haunting question: whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure.”

What followed was a kind of quasi-military survey of American history. “We must never tolerate one law for the ruler and another for the ruled,” he said. “If we do, we break faith with our ancestors from Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, to Flanders Field, Normandy, Hiroshima, Panmunjom, Saigon, and Desert Storm.” Moments later, he said, “If across the river in Arlington Cemetery there are American heroes who died in defense of the rule of law, can we give less than the full measure of our devotion to that great cause?” Finally, he said, “On June the sixth, 1994, it was the fiftieth anniversary of the American landing at Normandy, and I went ashore at Normandy and walked up to the cemetery.… How do we keep the faith with that comrade at arms? Well, go to the Vietnam Memorial and the National Mall and press your hands against a few of the 58,000 names carved into that wall and ask yourself how we can redeem the debt we owe to those who purchased our freedom with their lives.”

This was Hyde’s solution—a kind of rhetorical excess that led him to invoke twelve battles in less than fifteen minutes. The effect was the opposite of what he intended. He was talking about war in a case about sex, which made the contrast all the more striking. In one way, though, Hyde seemed to recognize the intellectual and moral gulf that separated him from his fellow citizens on this issue, and he made at least a token effort to address it. The catalyst was, of all things, the Iran-contra affair.

Throughout the impeachment battle, Clinton supporters pointed out how Hyde had served as a principal defender of President Reagan and his
administration during the Iran-contra affair. (For example, Hyde was the only member of Congress to attend the verdict in Oliver North’s criminal trial. When North was convicted of making false statements and obstruction of justice, Hyde rushed to embrace him.) In an elliptical passage in the same battle-strewn speech, Hyde alluded to what some viewed as this contradiction in his views. “Morally serious men and women can imagine the circumstances at the far edge of the morally permissible when, with the gravest matters of national interest at stake, a president could shade the truth in order to serve the common good,” Hyde said. “But under oath for private pleasure?”

In the end, the question was, what kind of lies were excusable? In preparing for his August 17 speech, Clinton and his advisers discussed the Reagan precedent—and reached precisely the opposite conclusion to Hyde’s. To the Clinton team, the fact that Reagan’s lies concerned matters of national importance made them more, not less, significant than Clinton’s false statements about a personal matter. The Reagan and Clinton precedents thus neatly posed the issue of public vs. private morality, and Hyde, better than anyone, recognized that the country was not going his way. By this point, even the haughty moralists in the Washington press corps saw that no amount of puffing from them (or Hyde) could persuade most people to change their minds about the magnitude of the charges.

Near the end of the opening statements, Chief Justice Rehnquist gave the senators a signal that the Constitution permitted them to consider the views of their constituents. After perhaps the third or fourth reference by the managers to the senators as “jurors,” Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa rose to object. (It would be the only objection from the floor during the entire trial.) “Mr. Chief Justice,” Harkin said to the hushed audience, “I object to the use and continued use of the word ‘jurors’ when referring to the Senate sitting as triers in the trial of the impeachment of the president of the United States.”

Harkin briefly pointed out some of the differences between the senators and ordinary jurors. Unlike courtroom jurors, the senators were all familiar with the defendant; they knew each other, too; and the senators had the right to establish the procedures in the trial and even to overrule the chief justice in his rulings. As Harkin acknowledged, it was to a certain extent a semantic point, but still an important one. “What we do here does not just decide the fate of one man,” he said.

As Harkin suggested, impeachment was indeed more a political than a
legal process, and senators had the duty, not just the right, to consider the views of the country. Under the Constitution, it mattered that Hyde, for all his effort, could never recruit more than a small group of already devoted Clinton-haters to his cause.

In his phlegmatic way, the chief justice indicated that he saw Harkin’s point. “The Chair is of the view that the objection of the senator from Iowa is well taken,” he said. “Therefore, counsel should refrain from referring to the senators as jurors.”

Harkin was delighted. Moments after the ruling, he whispered to Pat Moynihan, “I just won my first Supreme Court case!”

The atmosphere was brittle and tense as the White House prepared to begin its defense after the long Martin Luther King Day weekend, on Tuesday, January 19. The managers had not said anything that appeared to jeopardize Clinton’s survival in office, but there remained, as ever, a sense that something unpredictable could still happen. What Clinton needed was a messenger of reassurance that the managers’ cries were nothing more than hyperbole.

Fortunately for the president, he had the right advocate in waiting. Chuck Ruff wore his ferocity lightly. Unlike, say, David Kendall, the White House counsel projected statesmanship rather than partisanship, and though no one around him liked to admit it, Ruff’s wheelchair helped. He had lost the use of his legs three decades earlier, after he contracted a mysterious illness on a charitable mission to Africa. The disability somehow added to Ruff’s air of rectitude, but it also camouflaged his intensity. At the age of fifty-nine, Ruff had enjoyed one of the most distinguished legal careers of his generation, even before he came to the White House. He had served as the final Watergate special prosecutor, as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and as a high-priced private litigator at the Washington powerhouse of Covington & Burling. As much as anyone at either counsel table, Ruff liked to win—and to that end he had hidden a secret weapon within his opening remarks.

Ruff began with a recital of the facts leading up to the impeachment. In his caution and deference, Ruff’s very person marked a contrast to the zealots who spoke for the House. Ruff repeatedly made mention of someone whose name had scarcely passed the managers’ lips over the past three days—Linda Tripp. Ruff’s intensity built gradually as he showed how this
impeachment was built on an incomplete record, a faulty understanding of the law, and a distorted view of the evidence. “I want you to have in mind throughout our presentation, and indeed throughout the rest of the proceedings, this one principle. Beware of it,” he said gravely. “Beware of the prosecutor who feels it necessary to deceive the court.”

Ruff had the facts to back up this bold charge. The crucial moment in Ruff’s presentation concerned what he called “the magic date of December 11,” 1997. On that day, two events of importance occurred. Judge Wright ruled that the Jones lawyers could ask witnesses about their sexual contacts with Clinton. Also, Vernon Jordan met with Lewinsky and made several calls to help her find a job. Ruff quoted from the opening statement to the Senate by Asa Hutchinson, the manager from Arkansas: “The judge’s order came in, that triggered the president into action, and the president triggered Vernon Jordan into action.” Extending the torture, Ruff even brought out a chart that Hutchinson had used in front of the senators, to show how the managers described a cause-and-effect relationship between the judge’s order and the intensified job search.

Then Ruff lowered the boom.

“Let me show you the official report of the judge’s discussion with the lawyers in the Jones case on that date,” he said. The conference call began at 5:33
P
.
M
. central standard time, or 6:33
P
.
M
. in Washington. Where was Vernon Jordan at that time? According to his testimony (borne out by documentary evidence), “I left on United flight 946 at 5:55 from Dulles airport and landed in Amsterdam the next morning.” (The president, it turns out, was out of town at that moment as well.) In other words, Jordan had left the country by the time Judge Wright issued her order. It was physically impossible for the order to have “triggered” the phone calls. Jordan had stepped up the job search without knowing how Lewinsky could be questioned in her deposition.

“Oh, I see,” Ruff said, disposing of the accusation with grim satisfaction. “Well, never mind.”

It was the kind of Perry Mason moment that few lawyers ever have the opportunity to savor, much less in such an important setting. Of course, that one fact did not refute all of the charges against the president, but it served as a useful example of the excessiveness of Clinton’s pursuers. Ruff’s charge that Hutchinson and company “deceived” the Senate was unfair; the truth was more banal. The managers never learned the facts as well as Clinton’s defenders did, and guided by the ineffectual Schippers (who had
made the same mistake about December 11 in his own testimony), they spun everything against Clinton whether or not the facts justified it.

After Ruff’s statement, Lott called for an early conclusion to the trial day because the senators would soon have to march to the House chamber for another important ceremony, the president’s State of the Union address. This was a milestone under any circumstances, but the evening’s festivities would mark Clinton’s second such speech in the age of Lewinsky. A year earlier, on the day that his wife denounced the “vast right-wing conspiracy” on the
Today
show, Clinton had spoken as a man whose presidency stood in desperate peril. So it was, in a way, again on this day. No president had ever addressed the Congress and nation while on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors.

In truth, though, the president and his party came to this day in a state of near euphoria. They had triumphed in the election beyond their greatest hopes. The Republicans’ endless pursuit of Clinton was ending in political calamity for the hunters rather than their prey. Most important, Clinton was able to say in his speech, “My fellow Americans, I stand before you to report that the state of our union is strong.” His address served as a triumphant accounting of an extraordinarily prosperous moment in American life. Democrats whooped; Republicans like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey sat, arms crossed, in grumpy silence. By the end of the address, at least thirty Republican House members had fled the chamber; to avoid a public backlash for this disrespectful gesture, they had their congressional pages fill the empty seats.

The strange best-of-times, worst-of-times atmosphere continued even after the president’s speech. In a receiving line at the Capitol, the president and first lady greeted Strom Thurmond with smiles and handshakes. As they later described the scene to a friend, they heard Thurmond say, “You’re two turds.”

“Pardon?” said the president.

“You’re two turds,” the senator repeated.

As Thurmond moved through the line, the Clintons exchanged perplexed looks with each other, baffled by the hostility they engendered, and continued shaking hands. It wasn’t until late in the evening that they realized that they had failed to understand the ancient senator through his soupy South Carolina accent.

They’ll never get two thirds
, Thurmond had said.
They’ll never get two thirds
.

“I have seen the look of disappointment on many faces,” Dale Bumpers said to the men and women he had counted as colleagues just three weeks earlier, “because I know a lot of people really thought they would be rid of me once and for all.”

From the beginning, the White House defense strategy had been to play on the senators’ exalted sense of themselves. Who better, then, to make Clinton’s case than one of their own? At first, the president’s team had tried to recruit George Mitchell, the former majority leader, who had recently played an important role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. But Mitchell backed out at the last minute, leaving the defense team scrambling for another ex-senator. In desperation, they turned to Bumpers, Clinton’s fellow Arkansan, who had just retired after twenty-four years in the Senate.