My life

I don’t know all the individual carrots and sticks that were used on the moderates, but I did find out about some of them. One Republican committee chairman was plainly distraught when he told a White House aide that he didn’t want to vote for impeachment but he would lose his chairmanship if he voted against it. Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican, told Mack McLarty he might lose his seat on the Appropriations Committee if he didn’t vote to impeach me. I was disappointed when Jack Quinn, a Buffalo, New York, Republican who had been a frequent guest at the White House and who had told several people, including me, that he was opposed to impeachment, did an about-face and announced that he would vote for three articles. I had carried his district by a large majority in 1996, but a vocal minority of his constituents had apparently put a lot of heat on him. Mike Forbes, a Long Island Republican who had supported me in the impeachment battle, changed when he was offered a new leadership position on Livingston’s team. When Livingston resigned, the offer evaporated. Five Democrats also voted for impeachment. Four of them came from conservative districts. The fifth said he had wanted to vote for censure, then bought the argument that he was doing the next best thing. The Republicans who voted against impeachment included Amo Houghton of New York and Chris Shays of Connecticut, two of the most progressive and independent House Republicans; Connie Morella of Maryland, also a progressive whose district had voted overwhelmingly for me in 1996; and two conservatives, Mark Souder of Indiana and Peter King of New York, who simply refused to go along with their party’s leadership in converting a constitutional question into a test of party loyalty. Peter King, with whom I had worked on Northern Ireland, withstood weeks of enormous pressure, including threats to destroy him politically if he did not vote for impeachment. In several television interviews, King made a simple argument to his fellow Republicans: I’m against impeachment because if President Clinton were a Republican, you’d be against it, too. The pro-impeachment Republicans who appeared on the programs with him never had a good response to that. The right-wingers thought every person had a price or a breaking point, and more often than not they were right, but Peter King had an Irish soul: he loved the poetry of Yeats; he was not afraid to fight for a lost cause; and he was not for sale.

Although the pro-impeachment forces were said to have had prayer meetings in DeLay’s office to seek God’s support for their divine mission, the impeachment drive was fundamentally neither about morality nor the rule of law, but about power. Newt Gingrich had said it all in one phrase; they were doing it

“because we can.” My impeachment wasn’t about my indefensible personal conduct; there was plenty of that on their side, too, and it was beginning to come out, even without a bogus lawsuit and a special prosecutor to do the digging. It wasn’t about whether I had lied in a legal proceeding; when Newt Gingrich was found to have given false testimony several times during the House Ethics Committee investigation into the apparently unlawful practices of his political action committee, he got a reprimand and a fine from the same crowd that had just voted to impeach me. When Kathleen Willey, who had immunity from Starr as long as she told him what he wanted to hear, lied, Starr just gave her immunity again. When Susan McDougal wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted her. When Herby Branscum and Rob Hill wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted them. When Webb Hubbell wouldn’t lie for him, he indicted him a second and a third time, and indicted his wife, his lawyer, and his accountant, only to drop the charges against the three of them later. When David Hale’s first story about me was disproved, Starr let him change it until Hale finally came up with a version that was not disprovable. Jim McDougal’s former partner and my old friend, Steve Smith, offered to take a lie-detector test regarding his assertion that Starr’s people had prepared a typewritten statement for him to read to the grand jury and kept pressuring him to do so, even after he had told them repeatedly that it was a lie. Starr himself didn’t tell the truth under oath about trying to get Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire.

And the House vote certainly wasn’t about whether the House managers’ accusations constituted impeachable offenses as historically understood. If the Watergate standard had been applied to my case, there would have been no impeachment.