Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (33 page)

As the case against Nixon grew stronger, Sandman’s position became weaker. Indeed, he barely outlasted the departing president in public office. After winning his seat by a 30 percent margin of victory in 1972, he lost it by 16 percent two years later. In certain ways, my debating style was uncomfortably close to Sandman’s. And while I had never seen him in person, my recollection was that we had roughly similar body types, making for a combination of temperament and appearance that could seem overbearing on television. Backing away from my anti-impeachment role was unthinkable, morally and politically. But I did begin to think about how to approach it more carefully. I would show verbal restraint and take pains not to denigrate those who found Clinton’s behavior deeply offensive. That last point was of special relevance. Others could argue that mutually consenting sexual activity was no big deal. For me to make this case would be to invite a politically effective response—“It takes one to defend one.” Standing out as one of the country’s most aggressive advocates of ignoring marital infidelity could result in a very big hit to my credibility.

It was in that apprehensive state of mind that I awaited the broadcast of Clinton’s grand jury confession on September 21. I was at home in D.C. because it was Rosh Hashanah. I had long since stopped observing the High Holy Days at temple, but I abstained from doing anything in public lest anyone use my example to criticize other Jews who missed work because of their observance.

I do not remember a time when I was either intellectually persuaded or emotionally gripped by religious feelings. By my sophomore year in college, I’d stopped attending services when I realized they were more of a cultural than a spiritual practice for me. I did continue to feel very Jewish, reflecting the fact that being Jewish in America—and undoubtedly in other places as well—is a mix of religious, ethnic, cultural, and social elements. But even when I no longer professed religious views, I was determined never to do or say anything that would in any way suggest that I was trying to separate myself from other Jews. To the contrary, I often made reference to my Jewishness in various ways. Given the history of persecution, and the anti-Semitic influences that persisted in America, I believed and still do that giving any other impression would be contemptible.

For that reason, I never felt an inclination to publicly profess agnosticism. The issue of religion arose for me only in public policy debates. I consistently took the position that people’s rights to their own religious beliefs and practices should be respected, but that they should not be in any way allowed to impose those practices on people who believe differently, or who do not, in the theological sense, believe at all.

Of course, being Jewish was inevitably an element in my career. When I ran for Congress, the Jewish voters in Newton, Brookline, and later in Sharon and elsewhere made up a significant part of my strongest bases of support. (I was struck, however, by a poll taken back at the start of my career in national politics, in 1980. It noted that while my standing among Jewish voters was high, my standing was higher still among those who either declined to answer the religious question, or said they had no religion at all.) As the state’s first Jewish member of Congress in nearly one hundred years, and this in a state that had up until then elected only one Jewish statewide official—a Republican, George Fingold—I felt an obligation to other Jews to show some solidarity. Flagrantly not attending High Holy Day services would have detracted from that.

Still, as time went on, I believed I had done enough to demonstrate my Jewish solidarity. I concluded that participating in ceremonies that had no meaning for me was no longer necessary. Without making any announcement of the fact, I simply stopped going. In fact, over the past twenty years, my attendance at religious services has taken two forms: weddings and bar mitzvahs for other Jews, and funeral masses for people in the district I represented. (I made a particular point of trying to attend every funeral service I possibly could for anyone who was killed in war.) I did remember my bar mitzvah teachings, and at the various bar and bat mitzvahs of my nieces, nephews, and great-nephews, I very competently said the appropriate prayers. My Hebrew pronunciation is not perfect, but on the other hand it is probably as good as my English.

Subsequently, after leaving office, I half jokingly objected when Bill Maher, one of my favorite TV hosts, asked if I felt uncomfortable sitting next to a pot-smoking atheist on the set of his show. I replied that there were two of us on that stage who fit those categories. The media reached the conclusion that I had come out as an atheist. In fact, I am not an atheist. I don’t know enough to have any firm view on the subject, and it has never seemed important to me. I have had a life-long aversion to wrestling with questions that I know I can never answer. My tolerance for intellectual uncertainty is very low.

As a member of the House, when I was administered the oath of office, I consistently said that I “affirmed” rather than “swore,” and never added the words “so help me God.” But because we were inducted en masse, no one ever noticed. In 2013, when I sought an appointment to the U.S. Senate, I decided that if I were selected, I would break with custom: I would not take the oath by placing my hand on a Bible. Instead, I would warn Vice President Biden that I intended to join the Senate by having my husband, Jim, hold a copy of the Constitution, on which I would place my hand as I affirmed that I would do my duty. As it turned out, the idea was moot.

*

To return to Clinton’s impeachment, as the footage of the president’s grand jury testimony rolled on Rosh Hashanah, I was sporadically monitoring it rather than taking in every word. I am too impatient and easily agitated to watch or listen to anything that will affect me politically or officially. Meanwhile, I checked in regularly with my offices in D.C. and Massachusetts. To my surprise and relief, they did not receive a deluge of calls opposing my stand. The volume of calls was limited, and a large percentage of the callers opposed throwing out the president based on his admission.

Public reaction in the following days was similarly reassuring. After watching the prosecutors grill Clinton for four hours, viewers learned just how weak the special counsel’s case was. They understood that Starr had presented Congress not with eleven separate instances of wrongdoing but with eleven variations on the theme of oral sex.

On October 8, the House took up the subject again. This time the issue was more sharply drawn: The motion directed “the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate whether sufficient grounds exist for … impeachment,” and the result reflected a very different reading of public opinion. Republicans remained unanimously in favor, but more than 100 Democrats who had voted for the earlier resolution voted against this one, joined by 5 Democrats who had missed the first vote. A broad bipartisan coalition had been replaced by a partisan split, both in the country and in the House. In fact, as the debate played out, and it became clear that prevailing public opinion opposed ending Clinton’s presidency, the politics of the situation flipped. Virtually all Democrats felt free to vote against impeachment, while for some Republicans it became a wedge issue that we could use against them: They were forced to choose between party pressure to vote yes and an electorate that wanted them to vote no.

Unwisely for them, and fortunately for us, the Republicans ignored this development in public opinion. Chairman Hyde moved forward with his plan for the proceedings, with no input from Democrats as to how to structure them. This was the first clear sign that this impeachment would not resemble Nixon’s. In 1974, Democratic chairman Peter Rodino worked closely with the ranking committee Republican, J. Edward Hutchinson, to adopt rules and schedules. In the Senate, Democrat Sam Ervin and Republican Howard Baker had done the same.

Hyde compounded his mistake by insisting, contrary to the facts, that he was emulating Rodino’s bipartisan approach. I received wide attention for my comment that if the committee’s actions were bipartisan, then the Taliban was a model of religious tolerance.

By the time the committee formally took up the matter, the midterm elections had taken place. Gingrich and DeLay had been counting on impeachment to produce Republican gains. Instead, House Republicans suffered an unusual loss of five seats—the opposition party almost always makes gains in the sixth year of a presidency. Among the casualties was Michael Pappas of New Jersey. His Democratic challenger, Rush Holt, had aired a commercial featuring Pappas’s paean to the prosecutor on the House floor, “Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr.”

In this unpromising environment for Republicans, the hearings started on November 19, and things only got worse for them. One weekend I turned on
Saturday Night Live
to see our committee conducting a hearing on oral sex, with a scantily clad Richard Simmons imitator as a main witness. In the sketch, the actor playing my colleague Maxine Waters complained that the Republicans were demonstrating their sexism by focusing only on male recipients of oral ministrations to the exclusion of females. I admired the wit but not the visuals, although I did enjoy being able to tell Waters that while I was disappointed that the guy playing me was so fat, at least he was better looking than the guy who portrayed her.

Personally, I was at a career high point. In the late summer, I’d done the right thing in an unfavorable political situation. And now, my good deed was rewarded. The Republicans had frightened much of the public with their obsessive crusade, and I was often thanked for standing against them. Indeed, I became so confident of their defeat that I misread the situation. I assumed the Republicans would accept the face-saving solution we offered: a vote to censure Clinton, not oust him.

Our offer was not motivated by any sympathy for their plight—we deemed the Republicans fully responsible for their own woes and we knew that forcing them to drop the impeachment effort would reverberate to our benefit. At the same time, most of us believed that the process was doing serious civic damage and had to end.

The Republicans surprised us by rejecting our offer. To the dismay of many, including Henry Hyde, the party leadership was determined to press ahead. We had underestimated the importance of hating the Clintons to the Republican right. DeLay and other House leaders knew that if they seemed to be letting their archenemy off the hook, they would sow confusion in their own ranks. Driving Clinton out of office was the best they could do; second best would be to go down fighting, blaming weak-kneed moderates and a biased media for the president’s survival.

Our counterattack combined principled indignation and ridicule. Starr had accused the president of committing perjury when he gave the wrong date for the beginning of his intimacies with Lewinsky. This gave me the chance to comment from my seat on the dais that Starr was exemplifying Marx’s insight that “history repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” During Watergate, Senate Republican leader Howard Baker had famously asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Now, I noted, Starr’s central question amounted to, “What did the president touch, and when did he touch it?”

If Charles Sandman had been alive in 1998, he would have had every right to be jealous of me. He scoffed, ridiculed, and belittled his way into losing his seat. My similar behavior served me well.

*

Before the committee voted on the impeachment counts against the president, both Democrats and Republicans internally debated whether to call witnesses. After much discussion, both sides agreed that there would be only one witness in that phase: Kenneth Starr. As Jeffrey Toobin noted in his insightful book
A Vast Conspiracy
, Democrats hoped to force the Republicans to rally publicly behind “a physical embodiment of the most unpopular man in American politics.” But Starr proved to be skillful in his testimony.

At the risk of off-putting immodesty, I will quote Toobin’s account of what happened next.

As usual, though, Barney Frank was operating a few steps ahead of everyone else. Listening to Starr’s opening presentation, Frank noticed that, in passing, the prosecutor had conceded that he had found no evidence of impeachable offenses in the Travelgate and Filegate areas within his jurisdiction. This admission dashed the Republicans’ central hope in summoning Starr—that he had some new bombshell to drop. But Frank, characteristically, was thinking of a further implication of this disclosure by Starr. Frank noted that Starr had said he sent the information about impeachable offenses to Congress “as soon as it became clear.” But when, the congressman asked, had he decided that there was no information incriminating to the president in Travelgate?

“Some months ago,” Starr conceded.

“Let me just say, here is what disturbs me greatly,” Frank replied. Starr had filed his report about Lewinsky before the election, but his office had actually been studying the Filegate and Travelgate affairs for much longer than they had been scrutinizing Lewinsky, “yet now, several weeks after the election, is the first time you are saying that.

“Why did you withhold that before the election when you were sending us a referral with a lot of negative stuff about the President and only now … you give us this exoneration of the president several weeks after the election?”

Starr mumbled a meager answer that began, “Well, again, there is a process question”—but it was more than a process question. Starr and his team had worked to exhaustion to get their Lewinsky allegations in front of Congress and the public at the most politically perilous moment for Clinton’s party. But they felt no rush to reveal their exoneration of the Clintons on Filegate and Travelgate. Again, there was nothing illegal about Starr’s priorities, but they did reveal a great deal about the “process” that was under way in his suite on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Asking Dick Cheney to defend the security clearance ban was my first great success in trapping a witness. This was my second. I take continuing pride in the fact that both Bill and Hillary Clinton cite the exchange in their memoirs as a highlight of the proceedings.