My life

On the day after the speech, with the highest job approval ratings I had ever had, I flew to Buffalo, with Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore, to speak to an overflow crowd of more than twenty thousand at the Marine Midland Arena. Once again, in spite of all that was going on, the State of the Union address, with its full agenda for the year ahead, had struck a responsive chord with the American people. I ended the month with a major speech at the National Academy of Sciences, outlining my proposals to protect America from terrorist attacks with biological and chemical weapons and from cyberterrorism; a trip home to Little Rock to view tornado damage in my old neighborhood, including the loss of several old trees on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion; a visit to St. Louis to welcome Pope John Paul II back to the United States; a meeting with a large bipartisan congressional delegation in the East Room to discuss the future of Social Security and Medicare; and a memorial service for my friend Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida, who had died suddenly not long before. Lawton had given me courage for the current fight with one of his favorite sayings: If you can’t run with the big dogs, you ought to stay on the porch.

On February 7, King Hussein lost his fight against cancer. Hillary and I immediately left for Jordan with a delegation that included Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush. I was very grateful for their willingness, on short notice, to honor a man we had all worked with and admired. The next day we walked in his funeral procession for almost a mile, attended the memorial service, and paid our respects to Queen Noor, who was heartbroken. So were Hillary and I. We had enjoyed some wonderful times with Hussein and Noor in Jordan and in the United States. I remembered with particular pleasure a meal the four of us had shared on the Truman Balcony of the White House not long before the king died. Now he was gone, and the world was a poorer place.

After meetings with the new monarch, Hussein’s son Abdullah, as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Assad, President Mubarak, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Boris Yeltsin, and President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey, I flew home to await the Senate vote on my future. Though the outcome wasn’t in doubt, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering had been interesting. Several Republican senators were upset with the House Republicans for putting them through the trial, but whenever the right wing turned the pressure up, most of them backed down and went along with dragging the whole thing out. When Senator Robert Byrd moved to have the charges dismissed as having no merit, David Kendall’s partner, Nicole Seligman, made an argument on the law and the facts that most senators knew was undebatable. Nevertheless, Byrd’s motion was defeated. When Senator Strom Thurmond told his Republican colleagues early on that the votes weren’t there to remove me and the process should be stopped, he was overruled in the Republican caucus.

One Republican senator who was opposed to impeachment kept us informed of what was going on among his colleagues. Several days before the vote, he said there were only thirty Republican votes for the perjury count and forty to forty-five for the obstruction of justice count. They were nowhere near the two-thirds majority the Constitution requires for removal. A few days before the vote, the senator told us that the House Republicans had said they would be humiliated if neither count got at least a token majority of the votes, and their Senate colleagues had better not humiliate them if they wanted the House to stay in Republican hands after the next election. The senator reported that they would have to whittle the number of Republican “no” votes down.

On February 12 the impeachment motions failed. The vote on the perjury count failed by 22 votes, 45–55, and the vote on the obstruction of justice count failed by 17 votes, 50–50, with all the Democrats and Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and John Chafee of Rhode Island voting no on both counts. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama, Slade Gorton of Washington, Ted Stevens of Alaska, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and John Warner of Virginia voted no on the perjury count.

The vote itself was anticlimactic, coming three weeks after the close of my defense. Only the margin of defeat was in doubt. I was just glad the ordeal was over for my family and my country. After the vote I said that I was profoundly sorry for what I had done to trigger the events and the great burden they imposed on the American people, and that I was rededicating myself to “a time of reconciliation and renewal for America.” I took one question: “In your heart, sir, can you forgive and forget?” I replied, “I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.”