My life

On the nineteenth, my legal team began its three days of response. Chuck Ruff, the White House counsel and a former U.S. attorney, led off, arguing for two and a half hours that the charges were untrue and that even if the senators thought they were true, the offenses did not come close to meeting the constitutional standard for impeachment, much less removal. Ruff was a mild-mannered man who had been wheelchair-bound for most of his life. He was also a powerful advocate, who was offended by what the House managers had done. He shredded their evidentiary arguments and reminded the Senate that a bipartisan panel of prosecutors had already said that no responsible prosecutor would bring a perjury charge on the facts before them.

I thought Ruff’s best moment was when he caught Asa Hutchinson red-handed in a telling misrepresentation of fact. Hutchinson had told the Senate that Vernon Jordan began helping Monica Lewinsky to get a job only after he learned she would be a witness in the Jones case. The evidence proved that Vernon had done so several weeks before he knew or could have known that, and that at the time Judge Wright made the decision to allow Lewinsky to be called as a witness (a decision that she later reversed), Vernon was on a plane to Europe. I didn’t know whether Asa had misled the Senate because he thought that the senators wouldn’t figure it out or because he thought that they, like the House managers, wouldn’t care whether the presentation was accurate or not. The next day Greg Craig and Cheryl Mills addressed the specific charges. Greg noted that the article charging me with perjury failed to cite a single specific example of it and instead tried to bring my deposition in the Jones case into play, even though the House had voted against the article of impeachment dealing with that. Craig also pointed out that some of the allegations of perjury now being made to the Senate were never made by Starr or any House member during the debates in the Judiciary Committee or on the floor of the House. They were making up their case as they moved along. Cheryl Mills, a young African-American graduate of Stanford Law School, spoke on the sixth anniversary of the day she began her work in the White House. She dealt brilliantly with two of the obstruction of justice charges, presenting facts that the House managers couldn’t dispute but had not told the Senate about and that proved their claims of obstruction of justice to be nonsense. Cheryl’s finest moment was her closing. Responding to suggestions by Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others that my acquittal would send a message that our civil rights and sexual harassment laws are unimportant, she said, “I can’t let their comments go unchallenged.” Black people all over America knew that the drive to impeach me was being led by right-wing white southerners who had never lifted a finger for civil rights.

Cheryl pointed out that Paula Jones had had her day in court and a female judge had found that she didn’t have a case. She said that we revered men like Jefferson, Kennedy, and King, all of whom were imperfect but “struggled to do humanity good,” and that my record on civil rights and women’s rights was “unimpeachable”: “I stand here before you today because President Bill Clinton believed I could stand here for him. . . . It would be wrong to convict him on this record.”

On the third and final day of our presentation, David Kendall led off with a cool, logical, and systematic dismantling of the charge that I had obstructed justice, citing Monica Lewinsky’s repeated assertions that I never asked her to lie and once again detailing the House managers’ misstatements or omissions of critical facts.

My defense was closed by Dale Bumpers. I had asked Dale to do it because he was a fine trial lawyer, a careful student of the Constitution, and one of the best orators in America. He had also known me a long time and had just left the Senate after serving twenty-four years. After loosening his former colleagues up with a few jokes, Dale said that he had been reluctant to appear because he and I had been close friends for twenty-five years and had worked together for the same causes. He said that while he knew the Senate might discount his defense as the words of a friend, he had come not to defend me but to defend the Constitution, “the most sacred document to me next to the Holy Bible.”

Bumpers opened his argument by bashing Starr’s investigation: “Javert’s pursuit of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables pales by comparison.” He said, “After all those years . . . the President was found guilty of nothing, official or personal . . . we are here today because the President suffered a terrible moral lapse.”