Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (32 page)

Fortunately, any concerns about a falling-out came to an abrupt end in the second half of 1998. This was when it became clear that Newt Gingrich and his accomplices Dick Armey and Tom DeLay seriously intended to impeach the president.

8

DEFENDING CLINTON

Ever since 1993, I’d been defending both Clintons from Republican attacks on their integrity. Serving on the Financial Services Committee, I observed the investigation into the Clintons’ Whitewater investments firsthand. At first, the Democratic majority easily defused the assault. When Clinton’s aide George Stephanopoulos testified before our committee in 1994, I noted how nervous he seemed. As Stephanopoulos recalls in his memoir, I sent him a note from the rostrum saying, “Relax George. We’re kicking the shit out of them.” And we were.

Consequently, when the Republicans took over the House the next year, they were determined to turn the tables. They convened two full weeks of hearings, to be followed by a report that they were certain would expose the Clintons’ bad behavior.

They fell embarrassingly short. Their first obstacle was that there was nothing there. Their second was the Republican chair of the Financial Services Committee. If Diogenes had come to Washington searching for his honest man, I would have sent him Jim Leach.

No one who tries to be effective in Congress can be entirely free of partisan considerations, not even those few who assert their independence. As a liberal Republican in the House—a category that is no longer an endangered species but an extinct one—Leach may have welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate his party loyalty by reopening the investigation. And he did appear to be genuinely put off by what he saw as the first couple’s unseemly willingness to use political influence in the pursuit of private gain—a feeling not mitigated by the fact that they had done so ineptly and had actually lost money on the deal. But as the hearing proceeded, and it became clear that there was much less to the accusations than met the eye, his integrity overpowered his partisan instincts. The two-week hearing ended after one week. More significantly, the committee never issued a report on the matter. This reflected common political sense: If you don’t have anything bad to say about your opponents, shut up.

The Republicans were not ready to give up, but to the Clintons’ good fortune, the next congressional investigator was one of the House’s least credible members, Dan Burton of Indiana, who chaired the Committee on Government Reform. I had experienced his penchant for silliness before. When I’d announced that I was gay, he’d announced that he would no longer use the House gym, lest I’d infected the place with AIDS. He got over it after a while.

This was not the only time my sanitary habits came up in a discussion with an Indiana Republican. During the gays in the military debate, Senator Dan Coats, who had volunteered to lead his party’s effort to maintain the ban, said in one of our joint TV appearances that it was entirely legitimate for straight members of the armed forces to object to being nude in our presence. Borrowing a line from Alfred Hitchcock, I told Coats that I regularly worked out in the House gym and had not been having myself dry-cleaned. As far as I could tell, none of my straight colleagues had been traumatized by sharing the shower room with me.

Burton found Whitewater too tame—and unpromising—a subject for his inquisition, and so he tried to make political capital out of the terrible tragedy of the suicide of the White House aide Vince Foster. To make the case that Foster could not have killed himself given the disposition of his body, Burton shot a watermelon in his backyard. The “murder” of Vince Foster, allegedly at the behest of the Clintons, became a popular theme on the Clinton-hating right-wing fringe. Less bizarrely, but with equal futility, Burton and his allies sought to prove that the Clintons had rummaged through FBI files for partisan gains and had unfairly fired employees of the White House Travel Office, possibly to cover up abuse. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr continued his investigations, but absent convincing evidence, the anti-Clinton case seemed to be withering away—until reports of a former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky appeared in January 1998.

When I first heard of Lewinsky’s supposed affair with the president, my concern that it might be true was tempered by my assumptions that it could be neither proved nor disproved and that it would be politically irrelevant. The accusation was more plausible than the others against Clinton, given his personal history (which I reference nonjudgmentally, given my own record). But it was also far less serious, alleging neither criminal activity nor abuse of government power. For a Bill Clinton running for reelection, it would have been a problem. For a president who would never again be a candidate, it was a family issue, not an official or a political one.

When asked to comment on
l’affaire
Lewinsky, I minimized it on precisely these grounds. Then we heard about Lewinsky’s blue dress, and I realized that this business could get very serious. The vehemence of Clinton’s apparently categorical denial of “sexual relations” had clearly raised the stakes. In delivering a public statement from the White House, he elevated a possible sexual indiscretion—obviously not the first by a sitting president (or one in any other position)—into a head of state’s possible breach of trust with his country.

That summer, impeachment transformed from the far-fetched wish of the far-fetched right into a real possibility. Democrats began to talk about it among ourselves—involuntarily, in my case. I received a call from a close friend who was also close to Al Gore, soliciting my position and predicting that Clinton would be forced to vacate his office.

I had no difficulty deciding where I stood. Ousting Clinton would be a grave error on several counts. It would vindicate the right-wing’s tactics; it would endorse the notion that divergence from conventional sexual mores was, in electoral terms, a capital offense; and most seriously, it would undermine not just the Democratic Party but also the core principle of democracy.

The Republican Party’s right-wing ideologues refused to accept Clinton’s legitimacy as president. They believed he had been elected in 1992 only because Ross Perot had split the antigovernment vote, and their crusade to overturn the election results began almost immediately. When Whitewater proved inadequate, their leadership shifted toward shutting down the government, and when that didn’t work, they tried to exploit same-sex marriage and abortion. When Clinton was reelected and the Democrats gained congressional seats, the Republicans temporarily shelved the delegitimization campaign, a decision made easier by the president’s postelection willingness to work with them to diminish “big government.” But the right-wing dream of ousting a man they considered a pretender to the throne had not disappeared.

Taken together, the work of Starr, DeLay, and the network of Clinton haters called Pirandello to mind: They were a lot of characters in search of an impeachment.

I soon became a leader in the fight against what Hillary Clinton accurately described as a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Once again I benefited from the process of elimination. Impeachments are referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, where I was the second ranking Democrat behind John Conyers—the only committee member who had sat on the panel during the Nixon impeachment. My relative seniority was not the only reason for my prominence in defending Clinton. There were very few other applicants for the position.

Today, it’s hard to believe that something as trivial as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair could have driven a popular president from office. But in the late summer of 1998, that result seemed highly likely. Most Democratic members of Congress, especially those facing an election in November, were convinced that vocally supporting Clinton was politically risky—until he admitted to the grand jury that Lewinsky had been telling the truth. Then they decided it was toxic.

As the summer progressed, the ranks of Clinton supporters dwindled, a phenomenon he and I discussed in the several phone conversations we had on the subject at his initiation. (I can report that even at fifty-eight, after twenty-six years in elected office, being paged in a public place and told to call the White House operator to be connected to the president was a very big deal, even if it was to discuss that unpleasant subject.) I hadn’t fully realized how little company I had until August 17, the day Clinton admitted his relationship with Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury and taped a short statement apologizing for it, though not as profusely as he should have from a political standpoint.

When the White House declined to elaborate on Clinton’s recording and refused to supply an administration spokesperson to appear on the air, the networks followed protocol and asked for a list of surrogates. I do not know how many names were on the administration’s list of favored supporters. I do know that I was apparently the only one who agreed to the part. My basis for this is that even though the networks usually try to avoid duplicating each other, I promptly received requests to appear live that night from NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC, plus two local Boston stations.

I was happy to reaffirm my defense of Clinton, but accommodating the TV requests did pose a logistical problem. Herb Moses and I had ended our relationship earlier that summer—an event chronicled to my discomfort in a front-page
Boston Globe
story ominously headlined “Frank Breakup Ends an Era in Gay Politics.” (Fortunately, the implication that our breakup would discourage other gay men from romantic attachments was unfounded.) Newly single, I had gone to Provincetown for the congressional recess, and on the night of Clinton’s testimony, I was looking forward to a dinner at the home of some friends. In any other circumstance I would have had to choose between going to a TV studio and attending the dinner. But in this case, I realized I had considerable logistical leverage. For once, they would have to come to me. Harry Harkins, my host for the dinner party, turned his house into a temporary studio.

The TV interviews went mostly as I had anticipated. I argued that Clinton’s behavior was irresponsible, and his dishonesty regrettable, but that none of this justified undoing the results of a presidential election. Dan Rather did surprise me with one question. He asked if I agreed with White House spokesperson Ann Lewis that the interaction in question could not be described as “sexual relations.” Not wanting to give my own opinion on the subject, and knowing that Rather would not have time for a follow-up, I did what I usually warn people against in tense situations—I got cute. “If you think you’re going to get me into a debate with my big sister about sex on national TV,” I told him, “you’re mistaken.”

Making the case against impeachment to a large national audience exhilarated me. When asked if I had entered risky political territory, I responded that I did not think defending oral sex in Provincetown was particularly controversial. After I returned from the Cape, I received more praise than criticism in my district. In some quarters, I was a hero. When I had lunch with Charlie Halpern, my college roommate, in Manhattan, he said he now knew what it was like to hang out with a rock star.

If Manhattan accurately reflected the national mood, I might have been president myself, rather than trying to save Clinton. When I got back to Washington after Labor Day, I came down from my ego trip. I’d seen myself as Horatius at the bridge, defending democracy against the hordes. Then I remembered how Horatius ended up.

On September 9, 1998, Kenneth Starr sent Congress a damning 445-page report, formally stating, “There is substantial and credible information supporting the following eleven possible grounds for impeachment.” The question before the House now was whether the report should be released immediately or withheld until the administration had a chance to respond.

This was a critical vote. Substantively, releasing the report would give the pro-impeachment forces a big head start in framing the national debate. Politically, the vote would show the relative strength of the two sides, which was in turn a good indicator of how the members read public opinion on the subject.

From my standpoint, the results could not have been worse. The motion to release the report without delay passed by an overwhelming margin, 363 to 63. Ominously for Clinton, Democrats opposed his position by a vote of 138 to 63. Nearly half of Clinton’s supporters on this vote were African American. Seven of Massachusetts’s ten representatives voted with him, as did six of the San Francisco Bay Area’s ten. He won majority support nowhere else. Even Jewish members, the most liberal white group, were against him, albeit by a relatively narrow margin of 12 to 8.

It was clear that my colleagues saw very strong public support for impeachment. I do not contend that electoral considerations were the only reason for the large Democratic vote. Some of the members in both parties were genuinely offended by Clinton’s behavior. (Clearly not all—among those voting to release the report were several who were later embroiled in their own sex-related difficulties: Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Gary Condit of California, Mark Foley of Florida, and most notably Speaker Gingrich, who was then, during his second marriage, carrying on an affair with his soon-to-be third wife.) But this was a high-profile issue, and the political element was unavoidable. Insisting that elected officials ignore deep public feelings on such a subject may have theoretical justification but has no predictive value. Of all the rules I have drawn from my experience in elected office, one is unchallengeable: If you want an issue to be decided on wholly nonpolitical grounds, you should not ask 435 politicians to decide it.

After the vote, I spent a good deal of time thinking about my predicament. What would it mean to be a leading figure on the Judiciary Committee trying to derail a highly popular impeachment? Politicians hoping to benefit from innocence by association often cite well-known and well-liked role models. In my career, I also have tried to keep negative role models in mind—people who screwed up badly dealing with tough problems, especially when they did so in part because of personality traits I share. Charles Sandman was a Republican from a solidly Republican New Jersey district who undertook an aggressive, even belligerent, defense of Richard Nixon as a Judiciary Committee member in 1974. He debated Nixon’s prosecutors vigorously, often sarcastically. He did not simply try to refute the charges against Nixon. He belittled the charges and derided those who pressed them.