Bill, read this article from the NYT if you get a chance. More proof that it's all just politics.
December 12, 1998
Clinton's World Keeps Turning, in Its Separate Spheres
By JAMES BENNET and MELINDA HENNEBERGER
WASHINGTON -- This is how it is to be Bill Clinton these days:
--Describing your desolation over the damage you have done in the office you dreamed of
from boyhood -- only minutes before being dismissed as a liar and becoming the third
president recommended for impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee.
--Giving baseball's Iron Man, Cal Ripken Jr., and his wife and kids a tour of your treasured
Oval Office on a bright Friday afternoon, while congressmen a few blocks away debate
precisely how -- in those same rooms -- you touched a young woman not your wife.
--Giving an address on your hopes for peace in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, then pulling a
Republican House member aside to ask how you can stay the full House from delivering the
historic blow of impeachment.
--Holding a round of cheery Christmas parties where your guests gobble your baby lamb
chops and speculate, out of your earshot, whether you will keep your job.
--Attending a private viewing with old friends of "Enemy of the State," even as you are being
accused of being just that.
Clinton is as famous for compartmentalizing duty and scandal as he is notorious for having to
do so. For eleven months, he has resolutely plugged away at his job and smiled for the
cameras as the details of his affair with Monica Lewinsky seeped and then streamed out.
This week -- in the holiday season, on the cusp of the second presidential impeachment vote
ever in the House -- the polar ends of Bill Clinton's presidency stretched farther apart than
they ever had.
Friday, in the Rose Garden, he abruptly brought them together when he addressed the nation.
"There is no greater agony," he said of the pain he has caused his family he said in the brief
address he decided on Thursday night to address doubts that he was preoccupied by anything
except budget meetings and Christmas shopping.
A trip backward through the week, however, suggests that the possibility of impeachment has
been the thread binding his busy days together. Clinton attended two funerals, one for a
mentor in Arkansas and one for his vice president's father; he gave an award to Bill Cosby
and accepted one for his work in Northern Ireland. He beamed for hundreds of grip-and-grin
photographs, and sang along -- "ParrUM-pah-pah-pum" -- to "The Little Drummer Boy."
All the while, Clinton's friends and associates say, he was fretting about the judgment of the
House, and of history. Late last week, he was deeply discouraged -- as down as he had ever
been seen, one Clinton associate said -- but his spirits rebounded somewhat as he came to
believe his fortunes were improving.
"Obviously he's concerned about the whole impeachment question," said Rev. Philip J.
Wogaman of the Foundry United Methodist Church, who has been providing spiritual advice
to Clinton. "And he's distressed about his own behavior that led to it, there's no fudging on
that." But, he added, "Even if the worst comes, and of course he hopes it doesn't, his life will
go on, and he feels that, too."
On Thursday, as Republican and Democratic lawyers presented their final arguments,
Clinton's distinct worlds seemed to touch, if glancingly. He had gone to the Department of
Agriculture to unveil a portrait of his old friend and former cabinet secretary, Michael Espy.
Espy has said Clinton made him a promise when he resigned as agriculture secretary four
years ago, but he and the White House have refused to disclose it.
After the prayers and gospel singing, Clinton stepped up to the microphone. He referred to
Espy's acquittal this month by a jury on corruption charges brought by an independent
counsel.
"With his head held high, he persevered and he triumphed," the president said. He quoted
Isaiah: "Be not afraid. I have redeemed you."
And, not incidentally, Clinton made a point of thanking Espy's lawyers. "They did a heck of a
job," he said, and the audience applauded.
"So here he is," one of those lawyers, Reid Weingarten, said later. "Up on the Hill they're
saying all kinds of horrible things about him, and he was so happy for Mike. I mean, who
knows with Clinton, but I had a sense that for that moment he was believing and feeling
everything he was saying, and that must be what gets him through the day."
That night, Clinton decided to make another public apology, and began making notes at the
White House residence for the remarks that he delivered in the Rose Garden Friday
afternoon.
Otherwise, Clinton left it to his lawyers to defend him publicly. He received regular briefings
on the progress of his defense, and he questioned aides who were not involved in damage
control about how they thought he was doing. But he has no television in the Oval Office, and
he did not watch the hearings during the day, associates said.
On Wednesday, as the White House began its second day of defense, Clinton brought the
family of an old friend, Sen. Dale Bumpers, into the Oval Office. "We were in there a solid 30
minutes on a day like that and you'd never know anything was wrong," said Bumpers' son,
Brent Bumpers, a Little Rock lawyer.
He said that the president let all six grandchildren sit in his chair and "spent five minutes telling
us the story of his desk, the whole history of the ship that brought over the wood that made
the desk."
"Three, two, one," the president counted later that evening, even as the House Judiciary
Committee was toting up four draft articles of impeachment against him. "Light the tree!"
On Tuesday -- one of several late nights for him this week -- Clinton gave two speeches. In
one, at a "Peace on Earth" gala held by a group called Peace Links, he offered a wistful
recollection of small town life in Arkansas. There, he said, "people knew about you, all about
you. And they loved you anyway."
In the second speech, an acceptance of the peace award, he said: "As long as I am president,
I will do everything I can to advance the cause of peace, democracy and human rights."
He later pulled aside Rep. Peter T. King, a New York Republican who opposes
impeachment, to talk about Northern Ireland -- and to ask what he needed to do to rally
support in the House. "If I didn't know any better or didn't know the topic we were talking
about, I wouldn't have realized how important it was," King said. "He was very calm and very
controlled. He was genuinely concerned, but he was not showing any panic."
One person familiar with their half-hour conversation said, "King told him, he had to reach out
to other Republicans to find out what they wanted, that he had to contact any of them that he
had a relationship with."
This person said that King told the president that many Republicans were upset at his answers
to 81 questions submitted to the House Judiciary Committee and that he "had to work on
them."
Some Republicans seemed to compartmentalize his troubles as much as the president himself.
Speaking Tuesday at a conference convened by the White House to discuss fixing the Social
Security system, Rep. Clay Shaw, a Republican who says he's undecided on impeachment,
compared Clinton to President Nixon. In a good way.
ike Richard Nixon going to China," he said, "you uniquely are in a strong position to
successfully change the course of Social Security."
And on Monday night, the Clintons held the annual "Congressional Ball" at the White House.
The Marine Band played swing music, and about a thousand guests -- Democrats and
Republicans -- ate shrimp, drank eggnog, and admired the hand-made ornaments from across
the country that decorate the Christmas tree in the Blue Room.
The chatter among the knots of politicians, according to some people who were present,
returned again and again to impeachment, as Clinton's guests handicapped his prospects.
The president was downstairs, on the ground floor, in his usual posture at such affairs: smiling,
shaking a hand, exchanging a few words, posing for a picture, and then reaching for the next
hand.
"I got to visit with him for a hot second," said Rep. J.C. Watts, the Oklahoman who is
Republican conference chairman. "I got to remind him that the Razorbacks are having a pretty
good football season this year." Watts said that he did not discuss impeachment with the other
guests.
Even two Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee -- Bill McCollum of
Florida and Elton Gallegly of California -- turned up for the party. They did not, however,
stand in line for a presidential photograph. |
