CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1992-2000
Prior to his election to the presidency in 1992, I didn't really know Bill Clinton. I had met him briefly at the midterm convention in Memphis in 1978, and years later at the funeral of a mutual friend. He had that southern gift of storytelling that kept everyone around him engaged. He didn't forget a name. He loved people. He was a natural politician. After his victory, we established a warm personal relationship. I had longed for a return to a progressive national agenda and was thrilled to see a Democrat back in the White House.
A month after his victory, Vicki and I were invited to a dinner in honor of the Clintons at the home of Katharine Graham. It was a hopeful time and there was much talk of the new agenda. President-elect Clinton said that if he didn't get national health insurance through Congress, he should not be president. Hillary invoked the possibility of tax deductions for educational training programs. Senator Sam Nunn suggested we try a pilot program on national service.
Shortly before his inauguration, the president-elect endeared himself to my extended family when he asked us to accompany him to Arlington Cemetery to visit my brothers' gravesites. About a year later, President Clinton joined us at the rededication of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. I had heard and relished the story he often told of having been inspired to enter politics after meeting Jack at the White House in 1963, as a Boys Nation "senator." As we walked through the library together, he was fascinated and wanted to take his time on the tour. He seemed most moved by the Cuban Missile Crisis film, where he sat next to Jackie and asked questions about Jack's mood during that period. He was particularly interested in the civil rights exhibit, referring to the historic integration of Little Rock, Arkansas. We agreed about how slow progress had been, and how quickly both younger and older generations seemed to have forgotten the struggle that took place.
When we reached the exhibit on the Nixon-Kennedy debate, I asked him how he had felt during his first debate with President George H. W. Bush. Nervous at the start, he said, but then it was like an out-of-body experience: you had to respond to the question and answer it, but you also had to be thinking how it would stack up in terms of the total TV performance. He said he was sure President Kennedy had felt that way too.
I'll never forget one of my first meetings with Clinton at the White House. He had walked into a firestorm over the question of whether gays should be allowed to serve in the military. (I always thought that if he had laid the groundwork in the right way, he could have changed the policy with the support of the military, and all of the brouhaha would have died down. After all, no less a conservative icon than the retired senator Barry Goldwater fully supported the repeal of the ban on gays in the military at this juncture.) He'd invited all the Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee to this gathering. He went around the room, asking everyone's opinion about gays in the military. Some senators gave long answers. Some were terse. Some were flowery and revealing, and others held their cards close to their vest. It added up to a very lengthy meeting.
I remember it well partly because Vicki and I had tickets to the ballet that night. Baryshnikov was dancing at the Warner Theatre. I'd told Vicki to go ahead and that I'd meet her there when I could. But the meeting went on and on and on, for more than two hours--extraordinary by White House standards. Finally, my turn to speak came. I made a brief comment in support of allowing gays in the military, in which I mentioned that all the arguments against such a policy had already been made--in opposition to blacks, and then to women, serving in an integrated military.
Well, I was wrong about that. Almost all the arguments had been used before. The last senator to speak was Robert Byrd, and he came up with a new one on all of us. Senator Byrd stood up and declared to the president in emotional tones that except for his relationship with his wife, his most sacred possession and thought in this world was his grandson. And that he would never, never, never, ever, ever let his grandson go off to the military if we were going to have gays there. And then the senator went off into a long story about Tiberius.
He informed us, with many ornate flourishes, that there had been a terrible problem in ancient Rome with young military boys being turned into sex slaves. I don't remember the exact details, but I think the story involved Tiberius Julius Caesar being captured and abused and used as a sex slave. He escaped and then years later he sought vengeance and killed his captors. Anyway, it was something like that.
The room fell silent. The senator continued. (By this time, Baryshnikov was leaping and a lot of the Democratic senators were stealing glances at their wristwatches.) Then President Clinton stood up.
His response was short and sweet. "Well," he said, "Moses went up to the mountain, and he came back with the tablets and there were ten commandments on those tablets. I've read those commandments. I know what they say, just like I know you do. And nowhere in those ten commandments will you find anything about homosexuality. Thank y'all for coming." He ended the meeting and walked out of the room.
Vicki's foot was tapping when I finally rushed into our box and took my seat next to her at the ballet. "Tiberius. Tiberius. Tiberius," I whispered into her ear. "Write it down. I'll tell you more at intermission, but just remember Tiberius."
That incident was probably the beginning of Bill Clinton's education on Robert Byrd. He was the president of the United States, though he'd only been president less than a month, and here he was being lectured to like a student. But that was not what mattered to him. Clinton was watching us, and he could see that none of us was interrupting the senator, and no one was leaving. Everybody was sitting there, paying deference to Byrd.
That said something to Clinton. He realized then that Byrd had power. He was learning a lesson about how the Senate works. I think Clinton never forgot it, because when the most devastating crisis of his presidency erupted a few years later, Robert Byrd was among those whom Clinton thought of first.
The most important single promise that Bill Clinton brought with him to the White House, from my perspective at least, was that his administration would, once and for all, reform American health care. Clinton had campaigned on the critical need for national health insurance legislation, and Americans seemed to agree. Two-thirds of them supported the idea of major reforms in health care.
I looked forward to working with him, not only in solving the insurance imbalance, but in fundamentally overhauling the entire costly, inefficient, and unfair system: the massive amalgam of doctors, hospitals, drug companies, insurers, health maintenance organizations, and governmental agencies.
I'd remained active in as many health care initiatives as possible in the years leading up to Clinton's election, enjoying some successes and the usual run of disappointments. Getting the Americans with Disabilities Act pushed through under George H. W. Bush was an accomplishment to savor. Yet other good ideas remained non-starters after months of partisan infighting and exhaustive committee work. I was dismayed by the lack of support accorded the eminently simple and reasonable "play or pay" concept that came out of the Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care. Under it, companies would have been required either to provide affordable health insurance to their workers or else pay into a federal fund for the uninsured. The Gulf War of 1990 siphoned off the attention being paid to that idea, and it failed to receive legislative action.
I recommended "play or pay" to President Clinton shortly after his inauguration. I'd hoped that the Democrats could combine it with the moderate Republican John Chafee's bill, which aimed at universal coverage via mandating uninsured individuals to buy insurance from private carriers. Tax deductions and subsidies would make it possible for them to do so. Bob Dole and several other prominent Republicans supported Chafee's bill. But Clinton did not immediately endorse a specific plan.
In January 1993, I began to understand the reason. Word spread through the Senate that the president intended to name Hillary as head of a task force charged with creating a sweeping health care reform bill in one hundred days, from within the purview of the White House. The idea at first seemed thrilling, perhaps even revolutionary. For the first time since the Truman administration, a president was going to battle against a cruelly broken system that perpetuated American suffering and poverty on a needlessly vast scale.
It would not be easy, of course, because all the familiar political enemies of reform were running up all the tattered flags of dissent: health reform would lead to socialized medicine; it would stunt medical research; it would add bureaucracy and limit patient choice. They were aligned with extremely powerful and dedicated groups--the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the American Medical Association--determined to protect their interests.
I offered the resources of my staff and myself to the First Lady and her people. Dan Rostenkowski, the House Ways and Means chairman from Illinois, was far more cautious, and more prescient, as he later recounted in a lengthy interview.
President Clinton telephoned the Democratic congressman to ask, "Danny, what do you think of me making Hillary the head of this group?" Rostenkowski reports that he shot back, "Bill, I didn't know you disliked her that much." Clinton asked what he meant. "You know, you're not in Arkansas anymore," the congressman reminded him. "You're going against probably the most talented group of lobbyists and trade association people in the country. This is their job. You're not going to be able to tell them, 'Well, here's a job for your cousin and I want you to support me.' These people are here, and this is a lifestyle for them."
Rostenkowski (who favored health care reform) then raised another tough line of objection: "The people you're talking about putting together on this issue, Bill--did any of them ever run for sheriff? Did they ever get any dirt underneath their fingernails? Did they ever do anything in their communities for health care, or in the Washington area? You're getting academicians who like to sit back and smoke their pipes and say, Oh, this is the way it should be. That's not the way it is in real life. And you should know this, for God's sake. You're a politician!"
And Clinton, in Rostenkowski's accounting, came back with, "Well, you know, I would love to name Hillary."
He did, which I felt was a bold statement of commitment by the president. He would not have appointed his wife to head a task force if he weren't serious about the issue. In terms of vision, Hillary Clinton performed admirably. But the process clearly got bogged down--and became very complicated.
In March 1993 I tried to move things along by proposing that we include health care as part of the budget reconciliation process. There, it would need only fifty votes to pass, and would not be subject to a filibuster and thus a sixty-vote threshold for passage. With President Clinton's approval, I approached Bob Byrd, to see whether he would agree to waive the "Byrd rule" and allow the measure to go forward. The Byrd rule prohibits the Senate from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill debate.
Byrd turned me down.
Public opinion was shifting against the administration's great undertaking. By the time the plan was formally presented in the fall, the task force had dissolved. President Clinton himself had read the signs of disaster and backed away from it, choosing to emphasize his economic program and, later, the North American Free Trade Agreement instead.
I was not ready to abandon the fight. I wanted to get a health reform bill, even a compromise bill, to Congress for a vote in September 1994. A few other Democrats, notably Tom Daschle, didn't want to give up either.
The road got rougher in early 1994. Republicans managed to exploit Whitewater, the overblown and eventually discredited real estate "scandal" laid at Hillary Clinton's doorstep, for its value in undercutting the public's trust in Hillary and her plan. The task force lost a powerful ally when Dan Rostenkowski was indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and was obliged to resign his position. Hard-line conservatives increased their pressure on moderate Republicans, such as Bob Dole, who had indicated an interest in a compromise bill. These moderates were branded by the far right in news interviews as not being "true believers." Dole himself was warned that his own presidential ambitions in 1994 rested on his willingness to abandon a compromise bill.
In June, I steered my Labor and Human Resources Committee to approval of a reform draft similar to the Clinton plan. It faced opposition not only from Republicans, but from members of my own party such as Daniel Moynihan, who'd succumbed to the belief that only strong Republican support would save the day. Moynihan introduced his own bill, whose centrist provisions he hoped he could merge with Dole's.
The air filled now with contending voices. Bill and Hillary exhorted top White House staffers to keep pressing congressmen for positive action; Hillary summoned leaders from groups that until recently had been allies and demanded that they reenergize themselves, stop their internal bickering, and unite behind the goal of universal coverage. Such groups were running short of money.
Well-intentioned alternative efforts began to fade. John Dingell gave up his efforts to get a bill out of his Energy and Commerce Committee. Dole, hearing the warnings from the right, outflanked his would-be Democratic partner Moynihan by introducing a bill made meaningless by its incrementalism: its silence, for instance, on such essentials as price controls, employer or individual mandates, and premium caps. Business lobbies and the Republican National Committee, naturally, loved it. Moynihan watched his own tepid effort get dismantled in committee.
George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, made a "rescue" bid of his own in July for salvaging health care, and even turned down President Clinton's offer of a Supreme Court appointment to continue his fight. House majority leader Dick Gephardt at the same time started work on his own bill.
In late July the Republican right abandoned all pretense and acknowledged bluntly the real motive for its relentless crusade against a health care bill. Newt Gingrich, his power and ambitions on the rise, frankly told the New York Times that the House Republicans were going to use opposition to the bill as a springboard to win Republican control of the House in the November elections. Less than a month later, abetted by Phil Gramm of Texas, Gingrich made similar use of the president's crime bill, attacking it. His nakedly obvious purpose was to further tie up Congress in paralyzing debate and controversy before adjournment, and thus delay a vote on health care and the accountability such a vote would demand of each congressman before the fall elections.
I could see that we were running out of time. I remained stubbornly committed to persevering on to the end. I wanted that vote. I wanted to put every member of the Senate and the House on record as being for or against health reform, before we adjourned. Now committee jurisdictional battles raged, and further impeded the momentum necessary to salvage this most urgent of social reform causes.
By mid-August, defections from the ranks and gestures of defeat by Democrats were beginning to do the work of the Republicans for them. Many in my party conceded publicly that health care would be delayed indefinitely. Among those holding fast with me was Mitchell, who on August 15 threatened to keep the Senate in round-the-clock session until the Republicans agreed to vote. I was white-hot now for continuing the pushback against the obstructionists, and I let it show at a leadership luncheon on August 18, when I got into a shouting match with Bob Kerrey of Nebraska over whether the debate over health care should be continued. (There was never a problem between Bob and me. Emotions were just running high.)
But it was slipping away. I could feel it. The schedule was running against us. We lost on the schedule. We gave up, in fact. I recall my exasperation when Democrats were told on a Thursday afternoon that we wouldn't work through the weekend.
Well, you have to keep your people around if you want to win. The Senate is a chemical place. Something happens when senators are all in the room, debating an issue, especially when everyone understands that we are going to stay in and not adjourn until we get things done. I had talked to a number of my colleagues who agreed to stay. We had the headcount. We could have held the vote and at least put everybody on the public record as to whether or not they supported health care reform. But we didn't do that. If we'd stayed there, we'd have caught the attention and perhaps the conscience of other senators. If we'd stayed there, we'd have had all the newspapers in the country writing about it. If we'd stayed, we'd have had people all over the country asking why, why, whyare they doing this? And then maybe we'd have had them thinking again about the whole issue, the whole value, of health care reform. Thinking about what it was that we senators believed in enough to be staying all night for.
In a private meeting, I told the Senate leadership that this was a complete abdication (along with some other less elevated words). I'm told that I was in what Vicki would call my "red-faced and full-throated" mode.
I left the meeting and closed the door. But I didn't slam it. I didn't close it all the way. Because I knew I would be back.
The 1994 midterm elections were as disastrous as any Democrat expected, if not worse. Many party stalwarts were turned out of office: Tom Foley, Jim Sasser, Jack Brooks, and New York governor Mario Cuomo. A conviction took hold that the electorate had embraced the conservative cause. This became a settled truth for many pundits, other opinion-makers, and, sadly, for many Democratic leaders as well.
I never accepted this. The Democratic Party may have lurched to the right in response to the elections. The Democratic Leadership Council and, I feared, President Clinton were moving in that direction. But I believed they were chasing a phantom. As I'd put it in remarks to the National Press Club on January 11, "If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose--and deserve to lose." Republicans had made gains by depressing voter turnout. They hadn't won a mandate. They'd gained control of Congress by the narrowest of margins.
I had a couple of telephone conversations with President Clinton after the midterm elections. He said he was "bone tired" from being on the campaign trail in the immediate aftermath of a demanding trip to the Middle East. He believed the National Rifle Association had murdered him in the South by making guns a cultural rather than a law enforcement issue. I mentioned that I thought we had more Democrats voting in the election nationwide, but President Clinton corrected me and said, "No--one percent more Republicans."
I made the case that he would be effective as an underdog and that we could still get some major legislation passed--on health care and student aid for education and job retraining and cuts in corporate subsidies. Then we made a bet on the upcoming basketball game between the University of Massachusetts and the University of Arkansas--a bushel of bay scallops to a bushel of barbecued chicken.
Meanwhile, I continued my advocacy for an increase in the minimum wage. To some extent, the president agreed, supporting the increase in his State of the Union address. But other persuasive voices also had access to the president's ear; people such as his adviser Dick Morris. It was thanks in large part to Morris and his concept of "triangulation," or gaining the large, safe middle ground by co-opting ideas from both the left and the right, that Clinton began his move toward the center.
While I did not agree with all of President Clinton's concessions, I found much to admire in his presidency. I am especially proud of the effort we shared in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
This historic healing required the courage and cooperation of many men and women, of course--Irish, British, and American. Among those who distinguished themselves was my sister Jean Kennedy Smith, who in 1993 stepped gracefully from a life of quiet good works into the world of diplomacy.
My sister Jean and I have always had a special relationship. We are closest in age of all of my siblings. When we were growing up, she was my partner at the small table in the dining room for more years than she would have liked, and she was my companion during those winter school terms in Palm Beach. In later years, we spent much time together. I was extraordinarily close to her husband, Steve, as well, and we all took ski vacations together and enjoyed each other's company enormously.
In 1974, Jean had founded Very Special Arts, now VSA Arts, a nonprofit organization that allowed people with disabilities to participate in and enjoy the arts. She has expanded the organization to include affiliates in more than sixty countries, including Ireland.
At my suggestion, President Clinton appointed Jean ambassador to Ireland not long after taking office. Jean's appointment was very well received by the Irish people. In addition to becoming steeped in issues relating to the Republic of Ireland, she had been a well-informed observer of the turmoil in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s, and had gained the respect both of the Irish people and political leaders, including my friend John Hume. She performed admirably in her confirmation hearings and took up her duties in Dublin. One of Jean's first and most significant accomplishments was to persuade me to support the issuance of a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA.
Jean was convinced that Adams no longer believed that continuing the armed struggle was the way to achieve the IRA's objective of a united Ireland. He was in fact working to convince the IRA's more aggressive members to end the violence and pursue the political path. Most convincingly, Adams had held a series of conversations with John Hume that led Hume to believe a cease-fire and negotiations could soon be achieved.
The State Department refused Adams a visa in March 1993, but in mid-December that year the British prime minister John Major and the new taoiseach (head of state), Albert Reynolds, raised hopes significantly when they issued their joint declaration affirming Northern Ireland's right of self-determination.
Two weeks after the joint declaration, Vicki and I visited Jean in Dublin over the Christmas holidays. It took only a couple hours' conversation with Jean after we landed to discover what was really the most important thing on her mind: the opportunity for a breakthrough in the Northern Ireland stalemate, which she believed depended on a visa for Gerry Adams to visit the United States so that he could bring along those Irish Americans who had, for years, been sending guns and money to the IRA. When I met later on that trip with Albert Reynolds, he was passionate, thoughtful, and brilliantly informed, and quickly reinforced Jean's instinct that this was the right moment to act. He told me he was convinced to a moral certainty that Adams was now an advocate for a peaceful resolution. I returned to the United States primed to do all in my power to help move their hopes to diplomatic reality.
The occasion for commencing my efforts was a sad one: the funeral of Tip O'Neill. Tip had died on January 5 at age eighty-one. The retired Speaker of the House was unquestionably one of the towering American figures of his time, a generous and wise man, and a friend and a political ally.
Tip was an important force in the long struggle to spur the United States to involvement in Northern Ireland. His funeral was held at St. John the Evangelist's Church in what had been a working-class Irish neighborhood of North Cambridge in which Tip grew up. Among the seventeen hundred people present on the freezing day of January 10 were a few players in the peace process who'd flown over from Ireland to pay their last respects. It was almost as if Tip were calling down to us: "C'mon, fellas! I've done everything I could. Now finish the job!"
I had dinner that night with one of the best of them, John Hume. (I took John to a place that would appeal to his Irishman's sense of fine irony, Locke-Ober's, the elegant redoubt of the Protestant Brahmins for more than a century.) New York businessman Bill Flynn, chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, had already done his part to force the Gerry Adams issue by offering the Sinn Fein leader an invitation to speak in New York at the end of the month. Now Hume told me at dinner that the IRA had split over whether to accept the joint declaration, and that a visa for Adams would help him win that internal debate.
I drafted a letter to President Clinton that laid out a list of reasons in favor of granting the visa. Adams could be a critical player in the process, I told the president. The momentum of hope was increasing via the Hume-Adams dialogue and the joint declaration and the British government's activity in talking directly to IRA members. Even should Adams fail to deliver, the visa was a one-time proposition, and the prospect of peace made it well worth the risk. Clinton himself had just established a precedent of sorts: he had met with President Assad of Syria, who in 1982 had 20,000 of his own countrymen killed. Finally, if we refused granting the visa and the fragile peace effort should fall through, America would be blamed for not doing its share.
Even if Clinton went along with my request, I knew that resistance would be strong from both the State Department, which was locked into a view of Adams as a terrorist, and the British embassy, which resented U.S. involvement in what it considered its home affairs. To counter this opposition and bolster Clinton's resolve, my staff and I rounded up as many signatures from senators and congressmen as we could. Eventually more than fifty signed up with us, including such influential figures as Daniel Moynihan, Chris Dodd, George Mitchell, Claiborne Pell, and Bill Bradley. I personally contacted Vice President Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. Other allies telephoned still other White House figures.
We were going up against powerful institutions skilled in the many ways of derailing initiatives they didn't like. On January 26, the day after Chris Dodd and I narrowly averted a White House denial of the visa by personally speaking with chief of staff Mac MacLarty and foreign policy adviser Sandy Berger, the State Department sent a challenge to Gerry Adams in Belfast: a demand for two assurances that the department clearly believed Adams would reject. One was that Adams personally renounce violence and assure that he was committed to working toward that end. The other was that Sinn Fein and the IRA were committed to ending the conflict on the basis of the joint declaration.
And yet Adams did attempt to satisfy the spirit of these demands. Through a back channel that included my foreign policy adviser, Tina Vargo, and Irish-American newspaper publisher Niall O'Dowd, Adams replied that he wanted to see an end to all violence, and that it was his priority to forge an end to armed actions and build the peace process. As for Sinn Fein, Adams said, it had moved under his leadership toward the same direction, in the framework of the Hume-Adams initiative. He was prepared, he affirmed, to go the extra mile.
The next day I called Jean in Dublin. She told me that the Consul General in Belfast, Val Martinez, had just finished interviewing Adams, who'd consented to come there for the meeting, and that as the Sinn Fein leader was walking out the door, the diplomat said to him, "In my opinion, there is no way you will get the visa."
"Well, you know," I said to Jean in the most somber of tones, "if that is the decision, you will have to resign your ambassadorship."
She picked up on the joke at once. "No way," she shot back. "I'm having too much fun."
I called up Anthony Lake at the White House. Their conditions were ridiculous, I told him. I promised him that my alternative would be to add language to the State Department authorization bill, then being debated on the floor of the Senate, saying the Adams visa should be granted. Lake urged me not to do that. I told him that the visa was a hotbutton issue, ten times more important than Irish immigration.
Then I worked the telephones one more time: Al Gore. Mac MacLarty again. Attorney General Janet Reno, whom I could not reach. I phoned up certain key allies and emphasized the need for them to keep up the pressure.
On the following day, January 29, just as the White House seemed on the verge of granting our wish, I learned, confidentially, that hand grenades had turned up in San Diego. Each one had a note affixed, demanding a visa for Adams.
The news would inevitably go public. The White House, aware of it, was preparing three new demands for Adams: denounce the grenades in San Diego, condemn attacks on innocent civilians, and also condemn a recent bombing on Oxford Street in London. I let the White House know that Adams was a serious man and a key to Northern Ireland peace, and it would embarrass and insult him if we went back to him yet again. The White House agreed, and Adams himself consented to condemn the violent incidents if asked by the press.
His visa was granted the next day. The easy work was over. Now we waited seven months until the IRA declared a full cease-fire, and the long negotiations toward peace finally began. On Good Friday, April 10, 1998, representatives from the British and Irish governments and the political leaders of Northern Ireland met in Belfast to sign what became known as the Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement, which was soon approved in a referendum by the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
President Clinton, meanwhile, was finding himself progressively mired in a series of rumors, charges, and investigations that went on and on before yielding nothing.
Vicki and I were watching television on the morning in January 1998 when the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Vicki turned to me at that moment and said, "If this is true, they are going to try to impeach him." I don't think either of us really believed that would happen, but the mood was so poisonous, anything was possible. On August 15, Clinton testified to a grand jury called by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr. On that same evening, he went on television and admitted that he'd had "an inappropriate relationship" with Lewinsky. He called the affair "a personal failure on my part, for which I'm solely responsible." I telephoned the president immediately after his appearance to tell him he could count on my support; that I was standing by to help him through whatever may come. I wanted to support the president--and perhaps, even more, the presidency, which had been under assault almost from the moment he took office. I felt that this kind of attempt to delegitimize a president was dangerous for our democracy.
I should pause here a moment and make clear my feelings about the right to scrutinize public officials.
Do I think such inquiry is fair? Absolutely. But do I think it tells the whole story of character? No, I truly do not. Human beings are much more complex than that. Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don't define the whole picture of who we are.
At any rate, the larger reason for my decision to support the president was this: impeachment talk was indeed in the air. And I could not accept that Clinton's involvement with Lewinsky, or even his doomed attempt at "cover-up," was sufficient reason for impeachment. I'd had lunch around that time with Samuel Beer, who'd been a teacher of mine at Harvard. Sam was an expert on the Constitution and on impeachment law, and how it had developed from the British system. He went all the way back into the twelfth century at that lunch, establishing the parameters of the law that the Founding Fathers had used as their model. Clearly, he declared to me, nothing in this tradition covered personal conduct. It dealt entirely with the abuse of public power in the presidential office. Sam reinforced my belief that this was not an impeachable offense--nor even one meriting censure.
On August 24, Clinton came up to Worcester for a political appearance, and Vicki and I met him there. I showed him a Lou Harris poll indicating that the public's attitude toward the Lewinsky matter had not changed since it first surfaced six months earlier. Fifty-five percent of those interviewed believed there had been an affair; 77 percent believed that Congress should stay focused on the country rather than the president's private life; but 35 percent said that if Clinton had lied about it, he should resign.
Vicki and I were impressed with Clinton's demeanor at Worcester. He was functioning on all cylinders, focused on policy, talking about getting things done. He discussed his recent meetings with Boris Yeltsin and analyzed various races coming up around the country. He had a great deal of support in Worcester, and he was feeding off the energy of the crowds, enjoying his rapport with the people, who obviously felt a deep connection to him. In fact, I remember thinking that the president may have been a bit in denial, not quite ready to deal yet with the depth of his problem and the direction in which things were moving. But his magnetism was still powerful, and its effect extended beyond ordinary voters. John Kerry joined us and several others for lunch, during which the president--after downing his submarine sandwich and fries--sort of polled us informally: "What do you guys want me to do? What do you think?" When he got to Kerry, John seemed that he might have something more to say. But he finally said something like, "Focus on a message and a limited number of issues."
When I asked the president at dinner what I could do to help him, he asked me to talk to Robert Byrd. It was a smart request. The president had indeed learned an important lesson or two while listening to Byrd's peculiar homily about Tiberius being a sex slave. He appreciated the extent of Byrd's influence and understood his strict, old-fashioned code of morality.
There was in fact a great deal of speculation about where Byrd stood on the question of impeaching Bill Clinton. The West Virginia senator was nearly eighty-one then, but still a powerful figure. In fact, some of his greatest days still lay ahead, with his eloquent and passionate stand against George W. Bush's authorization of the Iraq war on the grounds that Bush ignored the constitutional role of the Senate in the matter. Byrd was recognized as the guardian of the Senate as an institution. If it turned out that he believed Clinton should resign or be impeached on constitutional grounds, that would make a huge difference in Clinton's fortunes. And Clinton knew it.
I went to see Byrd at his office in Washington and spoke with him at length about the role of the Senate in this constitutional challenge. I suggested that we needed to proceed in a way that would enhance the American people's view of the Senate, and that this might be done by our remaining above the battle; to concentrate more on establishing the framework for any possible action than on being out front with an opinion. I believe that Senator Byrd welcomed this discussion. He held his fire for the time being, which served everyone's interest.
Nevertheless, after the House Judiciary Committee made public the details of Ken Starr's report, the House voted 258 to 176, with thirty-one Democrats in favor, to authorize the Judiciary Committee to conduct an impeachment investigation.
The midterm elections on November 4 gave a boost to the president's prospects. Against expectations, Democrats gained five seats in the House, and Republican senators Al D'Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina were defeated. The opinion polls showed that the Republicans' losses were tied to a growing disapproval among the public for impeachment. Two days later Newt Gingrich announced his retirement as Speaker of the House. He'd been among the most aggressive advocates for Clinton's removal.
On the same day of Newt's announcement, nearly nine hundred legal scholars and historians issued a statement declaring that the charges against Clinton did not rise to the level of impeachable offenses--a statement that powerfully buttressed my own efforts to head off this action. Even the influential Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter went on record saying the impeachment effort should stop, and that Clinton should answer instead to the criminal justice system at the end of his term. House Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde, reading the prevailing mood, quickly moved to scale back his hearings to one witness, Starr, as a concession to the public's wish for a quick resolution. At the end of November, President Clinton reluctantly let it be known that he would be receptive to the idea of censure and a large fine.
On December 4, Byrd rejected the idea of censure--but only to declare that if the House voted impeachment, the Senate must hold a trial, on pain of "shirking its duty" under the Constitution. Censure, Byrd said, should be considered only when impeachment had run its course.
Clinton's mood seemed privately to plummet during this period. But even as he finally accepted that his presidency was imperiled, he still didn't seem able to confront the ultimate cause. In telephone conversations with him, I sensed that this was not yet a place he could go: the awareness that his affair with Monica Lewinsky had deeply disturbed and disheartened people. And that perhaps they were even more disturbed that he had lied about it to his wife and the members of his cabinet and allowed them to be humiliated by publicly defending a falsehood. In his mind, it continued to be all about the Republicans, what they were doing to him, not what he had done.
I continued to be supportive. I met with him nearly every day as 1998 wound down. I was there for him in mid-December, when the Judiciary Committee rejected censure and voted for impeachment along party lines. I was there for him when the House Republican leaders called on him to resign and spare the country an ordeal. I spoke with him several times on the phone--he usually called late at night--as we pursued a plan developed by John Breaux of Louisiana to find thirty-five senators, one more than was necessary to acquit in a trial, to sign a letter saying they agreed with those legal scholars and historians who found the charges unimpeachable. Clinton brightened at this idea, saying that it would put him "back in the driver's seat" while a lesser punishment was worked out. In any event, I could find only fifteen or sixteen senators willing to sign, and learned from Tom Daschle that not even thirty-five would be enough to ward off a trial; at least fifty-one would be needed.
When Byrd learned about this proposed letter, he got angry. He went to the Senate floor and admonished, "Mr. President, do not tamper with this jury!"
Clinton did not seem to hear this. He remained fixated on getting the Democratic senators to sign a letter. "If we let Bob Byrd have his way on this procedure, they'll stay after it until my numbers go down," he told me. "Once that letter is out, from that time on, I can be president. I can't be president without that being out there." He talked about a lynch mob. He said, "I feel strongly about this. If they force me to resign, this is the end of the Democrats. Of course I'm not going to resign."
Then Bill Clinton asked me to say that the president must not resign. He had to deal with Iraq, he pointed out. "Every important decision I make will be second-guessed. They want to hound me out of office, drive my numbers down, and then go after the Democrats." He repeated, "This is a lynch mob, and it's out of control."
Less than a week before Christmas, President Clinton's private anguish was affecting his political optimism. Meeting with him at the White House to go over his legislative program for the coming Congress, I learned of a new fear: that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who would preside over the trial, would not give him "a fair shake," as he put it. At the same time, he was fitfully imagining scenarios of regaining his full power and prestige: "If we can get this over by the State of the Union, then I'll make a great State of the Union speech." This, the president believed, would change the mix, halt the drift of his presidency. But these hopeful ideas were interlaced with grim defiance: "We can drag this thing out with process and procedure. They're not going to get rid of me. I'll stay here. I'll never resign. They're never going to get rid of me."
On January 5, 1999, with the trial scheduled to begin in two days, the Senate found itself in the grip of partisanship and the fear of chaos. The future of President Clinton, momentous enough in itself, was now rivaled by an issue of perhaps even greater magnitude: the future of the United States Senate as an institution of unquestioned integrity and authority.
Specifically, the House impeachment managers wanted to call witnesses--as many as twelve of them, by implication including Monica Lewinsky. President Clinton's lawyers insisted on standard pretrial procedures for each witness to ensure preservation of their constitutional rights. This posed the danger of a drawn-out trial that could have paralyzed the government for months. Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Slade Gorton of Washington floated a compromise idea that would reduce the trial's duration to about a week, limited to presentations by the House managers and the president's lawyers, followed by a test vote to determine whether the sixty-seven votes needed for impeachment existed. Witnesses would be called only if the Senate decided to proceed with the trial. Majority Leader Trent Lott said he personally did not think witnesses necessary, but if the House managers considered them vital, the Senate would have to honor their opinion.
The day before the trial, Democratic senators caucused in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room in the northeast corner of the Capitol, part of the extension that was built from 1851 to 1859. In that august space, Robert Byrd spoke of the historic nature of what lay immediately before the Senate and the need for all to adhere to the constitutional process so essential to the legitimacy of American tradition. Senator Daschle reported that although Trent Lott supported the Lieberman-Gorton plan, some twentytwo Republicans insisted on the longer proceeding.
After rising to speak, I argued that the entire process had been politicized, and that it was essential to try to restore bipartisanship. Tom Daschle was trying to do this, I pointed out; but if it became clear that the impeachment process was going to be a sham, then the Senate should move toward a test vote as quickly as possible so as not to dignify a partisan process. Then we should move on with the Senate's crowded legislative agenda. The caucus broke up without reaching a decision.
Opening day of Bill Clinton's impeachment trial on January 8 was filled with emotion, as senators, belatedly in some cases, tried to reconcile their partisan passions with an awareness that history had its eye on them. We met in closed session in the Old Supreme Court Chamber, a setting that virtually insisted on dignity and solemnity.
Robert Byrd pushed himself upright to speak first. His manner and words cast a spell that resonated with the surroundings. His heavy-lidded eyes swept over every one of us. With his shock of white hair parted fiercely over his high forehead, his dark suit showing not a wrinkle, and, above all, the bell-chimes of his West Virginia inflections, Byrd seemed to unite the past and the present of our institution.
"The White House has sullied itself," Byrd began. "The House has fallen into the black pit of partisan self-indulgence. The Senate is teetering on the brink." The senator implored his colleagues to "restore some order to the anger which has overtaken this country and the chaos which threatens this city."
Byrd's sense of the moment took hold among the senators. Chris Dodd arose to invoke a famous reminder of what can happen when things get out of control: the legendary Senate floor caning of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by the South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks in 1856.
The next speaker was Phil Gramm of Texas. Gramm was no friend of mine, politically or personally. He had been an effective and destructive opponent of affordable health care and other causes I championed. But in this moment, I heard him quote Daniel Webster: "I wish to speak not as a Massachusetts man, but as an American.... I speak for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause."
Gramm then sought to close the partisan gap, especially on the critical question of calling witnesses to the impeachment trial. He pointed out that, with the exception of the witness question, there was no significant disagreement among the senators about using the rules of procedure laid down for the only other impeachment trial in American history, that of Andrew Johnson in 1868. As to witnesses, Gramm declared, it was not necessary to foreclose the use of them in advance: the rules required us to vote later in the proceedings on what witnesses, if any, to call.
I saw an opportunity here, and rose to grasp it. "Senator Gramm is right," I declared. "Both sides are willing to begin the trial with evidence based on the public record only, and defer the witness question until later. We're already agreed on how to get to first base and second base. We can see later on how we're going to get to third."
It worked. The novelty of me and Phil Gramm coming together on any issue cleared the air of partisanship, at least for a time. "Stranger things have happened in politics," John McCain remarked later, "but the Kennedy-Gramm alignment was one of the strangest." The caucus instructed Gramm and me and a handful of other senators to draw up a resolution on the initial procedure. The Senate approved our resolution unanimously.
Over four days beginning January 31, the Senate questioned Monica Lewinsky and Clinton advisers Vernon Jordan and Sidney Blumenthal in closed-door depositions. A day after those sessions ended, the Senate voted not to compel Lewinsky to testify in open hearings, but to allow House managers to use parts of her videotaped deposition.
On February 12, President Clinton was acquitted on each of the two articles of impeachment, perjury, and obstruction of justice.
As the Clinton administration entered its final years, the president and I continued to enjoy a good relationship. In the summer of 1997, we went sailing together near Martha's Vineyard. President Clinton took the helm of the boat, even though he'd never sailed before, and steered it into Menemsha Harbor under full sail, not knowing how tricky (and dangerous) it was. We were ready to drop the sails and start the engine if anything went wrong, but the president was a natural.
In 1998, Vicki and I joined the president on Air Force One on a trip to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Time magazine in New York City. The previous night, we'd all attended a benefit for the Kennedy Library, which prompted Clinton to say to Vicki, "You've had two big nights in a row."
Vicki smiled and said jokingly, "Yes, Mr. President, and they've been with you."
The president laughed and said, "Well, you better be careful, you'll get subpoenaed."
The subject changed to movies. President Clinton had seen every movie nominated that year and offered a detailed opinion of each one. To our amusement, he interpreted The Full Monty, a comedy about a group of unemployed British working-class men who become strippers, as a sociological picture that Senator (and former Harvard University sociologist) Daniel Patrick Moynihan would enjoy because it showed how people suffer loss of self-esteem when they lose their jobs.
We fell short of our most ambitious goals during the Clinton years, but we accomplished a lot, including portable health insurance; the largest increase in health insurance for children since the creation of Medicaid; and an increase in the minimum wage.
On January 3, 2000, I met with Vice President Al Gore at his home to indicate my strong support for his candidacy. I was impressed by his positions on health and education and civil rights. I sought his support for a prescription drug benefit for catastrophic cases, which he had been resisting because of its cost. I asked him to advocate the minimum wage on the campaign trail and he agreed it was an important issue. I told him the lines that work best for me in describing it: This is a women's issue because the majority of minimum-wage workers are women. It's a children's issue. It's a civil rights issue. It's a fairness issue. He wrote it all down and, concerned about being accused of plagiarism, asked, "Can I use those?" I told him he was welcome to, and that I'd picked it all up from other sources myself.
He was optimistic about his chances and the future. The economy was benefiting from rapid reductions in the cost of transferring information and knowledge. This information revolution would be a golden opportunity to make progress in universal health and education and civil rights, the whole domestic agenda.
We talked for an hour. He was charming, relaxed, gracious, personable.
He told me, I believe I'm going to win this.