My life

It seemed to me that the Republicans were trying to put me in a lose-lose situation. If I went around wearing a hair shirt, they would say I was too damaged to lead. If I was happy, they would say I was gloating and acting as if I’d gotten away with something. Six days after my acquittal in the Senate, I had gone to New Hampshire to celebrate the seventh anniversary of my New Hampshire primary. Some of my congressional critics said I shouldn’t have been happy, but I was happy—and for good reasons: all my old friends came out to see me; I met a young man who said he’d cast his first vote for me, and I had done exactly what I said I would do; and I met a woman who said I had inspired her to get off welfare and go back to school to become a nurse. By 1999, she was a member of the New Hampshire Board of Nursing. Those were the people I got into politics for.

At first I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how the Republicans and some commentators could say I’d gotten away with anything. The public humiliation, the pain to my family, the huge debts from legal bills and settling the Jones suit after I’d won it, the years of press and legal abuse Hillary had endured, and the helplessness I felt as countless innocent people in Washington and Arkansas were persecuted and ruined financially—these things took a terrible toll on me. I had apologized and tried to demonstrate my sincerity in the way I’d treated and worked with the Republicans. But none of it was enough. It would never be enough, for one simple reason: I had survived and continued to serve and fight for what I believed. First, last, and always, my struggle with the New Right Republicans was about power. I thought power came from the people and they should give it and take it away. They thought the people had made a mistake in electing me twice, and they were determined to use my personal mistakes to justify their continuing assault.

I was sure that my more positive strategy was the right thing for me as a person and for my ability to do my job. I wasn’t as sure it was good politics. The more the Republicans pounded away at me, the more the memories of what Ken Starr had done or how they had behaved during impeachment faded. The press is naturally focused on today’s story, not yesterday’s, and conflict makes news. That tends to reward the aggressor, whether the underlying attack is fair or not. Soon, instead of asking me whether I could forgive and forget, the press was asking those earnest-sounding questions again about whether I had the moral authority to lead. The Republicans were barking away at Hillary, too, now that, instead of being a sympathetic figure standing by her flawed man, she was a strong woman finding her own way in politics. Yet, on balance, I still felt good about where things stood: the country was moving in the right direction, my job rating was high, and we still had plenty to do.

Although I would always regret what I had done wrong, I will go to my grave being proud of what I had fought for in the impeachment battle, my last great showdown with the forces I had opposed all of my life—those who had defended the old order of racial discrimination and segregation in the South and played on the insecurities and fears of the white working class in which I grew up; who had opposed the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay-rights movement, and other efforts to expand our national community as assaults on the natural order; who believed government should be run for the benefit of powerful entrenched interests and favored tax cuts for the wealthy over health care and better education for children.

Ever since I was a boy I had been on the other side. At first, the forces of reaction, division, and the status quo were represented by anti–civil rights Democrats. When the national party under Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson began to embrace the cause of civil rights, the southern conservatives migrated to the Republican Party, which, beginning in the 1970s, formed an alliance with the rising religious rightwing movement. When the New Right Republicans had taken power in Congress in 1995, I had blocked their most extreme designs and had made further progress in economic, social, and environmental justice the price of our cooperation. I understood why the people who equated political, economic, and social conservatism with God’s will hated me. I wanted an America of shared benefits, shared responsibilities, and equal participation in a democratic community. The New Right Republicans wanted an America in which wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of the “right” people, who maintained majority support by demonizing a rolling succession of minorities whose demands for inclusion threatened their hold on power. They also hated me because I was an apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted.