My life

In the middle of the month, I settled the Paula Jones case for a large amount of money and no apology. I hated to do it because I had won a clear victory on the law and the facts in a politically motivated case. Jones’s lawyers had appealed her case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the governing case law was clear: if the Court of Appeals followed its own decisions, I would win the appeal. Unfortunately, the three-judge panel assigned to hear the case was headed by Pasco Bowman, the same ultra-conservative judge who had removed Judge Henry Woods from one of the Whitewater cases on the basis of spurious newspaper articles after Woods had rendered a decision Starr didn’t like. Pasco Bowman, like Judge David Sentelle in Washington, had shown that he was willing to make exceptions to the normal rules of law in Whitewater-related cases.

Part of me almost wanted to lose the appeal so that I could go to court, get all the documents and depositions released, and show the public what my adversaries had been up to. But I had promised the American people I would spend the next two years working for them; I had no business spending five more minutes on the Jones case. The settlement took about half our life savings and we were already deeply in debt with legal bills, but I knew that if I stayed healthy, I could make enough money to take care of my family and pay those bills after I left office. So I settled a case I had already won and went back to work.

My promise to leave the Jones case behind would be tested once more, and severely. In April 1999, Judge Wright sanctioned me for violating her discovery orders and required me to pay her travel costs and the Jones lawyers’ deposition expenses. I strongly disagreed with Wright’s opinion but could not dispute it without getting into the very factual issues I was determined to avoid and taking more time away from my work. It really burned me up to pay the Jones lawyers’ expenses; they had abused the deposition with questions asked in bad faith and in collusion with Starr, and they had repeatedly defied the judge’s order not to leak. The judge never did anything to them.

On December 2, Mike Espy was acquitted on all charges brought against him by independent counsel Donald Smaltz. Smaltz had followed Starr’s playbook in the Espy investigation, spending more than $17

million and indicting everybody he could in an effort to force them to say something damaging against Mike. The jury’s stinging rebuke made Smaltz and Starr the only two independent counsels ever to lose jury trials.

A few days later, Hillary and I flew to Nashville for a memorial service for Al Gore’s father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., who had died at ninety at his home in Carthage, Tennessee. The War Memorial Auditorium was full, with people from all walks of life who had come to pay their respects to a man whose Senate service included his role in building the interstate highway system, his refusal to sign the segregationist Southern Manifesto in 1956, and his courageous opposition to the Vietnam War. I had admired Senator Gore since I was a young man, and always enjoyed the chances my association with Al gave me to be with him. Senator and Mrs. Gore had campaigned hard for Al and me in 1992, and I got a big kick out of hearing the Senator give his old-fashioned stump speeches full of fire and brimstone. The music at the memorial service was moving, especially when we heard an old tape of Senator Gore as a rising young politician playing the fiddle in Constitution Hall in 1938. Al delivered the eulogy, a loving and eloquent tribute to the father, the man, and the public servant. After the service I told Hillary I wished everyone in America could have heard it.

In mid-month, just as I was about to leave for Israel and Gaza to keep my commitments under the Wye River accord, the House Judiciary Committee voted, again along straight party lines, in favor of impeaching me for perjury in the deposition and the grand jury testimony, and for obstruction of justice. They also passed a fourth count accusing me of giving false answers to their questions. It was a truly bizarre proceeding. Chairman Hyde refused to set a standard for what constituted an impeachable offense, or to call any witnesses with direct knowledge of the matters in dispute. He took the position that a vote for impeachment was simply a vote to send the Starr report on to the Senate, which could determine whether the report was factually accurate and whether my removal from office was warranted. A bipartisan group of prosecutors told the committee that no normal prosecutor would charge me with perjury on the evidence in this case, and a panel of distinguished historians, including Arthur Schlesinger of City University of New York, C. Vann Woodward of Yale, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton, said that what I was alleged to have done did not meet the framers’ standard of impeachment