My life

This was about power, about something the House Republican leaders did because they could, and because they wanted to pursue an agenda I opposed and had blocked. I have no doubt that many of their supporters out in the country believed that the drive to remove me from office was rooted in morality or law, and that I was such a bad person it didn’t matter whether or not my conduct fit the constitutional definition of impeachability. But their position didn’t meet the first test of all morality and just law: The same rules apply to everyone. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, no man is above the law, but “no man is below the law either.”

In the partisan wars that had raged since the mid-1960s, neither side had been completely blameless. I had thought the Democrats wrong to examine the movie tastes of Judge Bork and the drinking habits of Senator John Tower. But when it came to the politics of personal destruction, the New Right Republicans were in a class by themselves. My party sometimes didn’t seem to understand power, but I was proud of the fact that there were some things Democrats wouldn’t do just because they could. Shortly before the House vote, Robert Healy wrote an article in the Boston Globe about a meeting that had occurred between Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Reagan in the White House in late 1986. The Iran-Contra story was out; White House aides John Poindexter and Oliver North had broken the law and lied about it to Congress. O’Neill did not ask the President if he had known about or authorized the lawbreaking. (Republican senator John Tower’s bipartisan commission later found that Reagan did know about it.) According to Healy, O’Neill simply told the President that he would not permit an impeachment proceeding to go forward; he said he had lived through Watergate and wouldn’t put the country through such an ordeal again.

Tip O’Neill may have been a better patriot than Gingrich and DeLay, but they and their allies were more effective in concentrating power and using it to whatever extent they could against their adversaries. They believed that, in the short run, might makes right, and they didn’t care what they put the country through. It certainly didn’t matter to them that the Senate wouldn’t remove me. They thought if they trashed me long enough, the press and the public would eventually blame me for their bad behavior, as well as for my own. They badly wanted to brand me with a big “I,” and believed that for the rest of my life and for some time thereafter, the fact of my impeachment would loom far larger than the circumstances of it, and that before long no one would even talk about what a hypocritical farce the whole process had been, and how it was the culmination of years of unconscionable conduct by Kenneth Starr and his cohorts.

Just after the vote, Dick Gephardt brought a large group of the House Democrats who had defended me to the White House so that I could thank them and we could show unity for the battle ahead. Al Gore gave a stirring defense of my record as President, and Dick made an impassioned plea to the Republicans to stop the politics of personal destruction and get on with the nation’s business. Hillary commented to me afterward that the event almost had the feel of a victory rally. In a way it was. The Democrats had stood up not just for me but, far more importantly, for the Constitution. I certainly hadn’t wanted to be impeached, but I was consoled by the fact that the only other time it had happened, to Andrew Johnson in the late 1860s, there were also no “high crimes and misdemeanors”; just like this case, that was a politically motivated action by a majority party in Congress that couldn’t restrain itself.