Baker Peter - The breach: inside the impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton

We have to impeachthe bastard

B ob Livingston was looking for a place to escape. He moved wordlessly through the chamber of the House of Representatives, where his fellow congressmen were arguing about whether the president of the United States should be removed from office for the first time in American history for high crimes and misdemeanors. Republicans were crying about the rule of law, Democrats about partisan witch-hunts. Livingston tuned out the raging speeches and brushed past the milling congressmen. Finally he made his way to the door leading to the Republican cloakroom and ducked inside. Here he hoped to find a few moments of peace.

With a row of phone booths, a few worn leather couches, a coffeepot, and a droning television, the L-shaped cloakroom on most days was a useful, if inelegant, hideaway from the monotony of legislative business. At this moment, it was also an effective refuge from the political storm that had swirled around Livingston in the last few days. It was Friday, December 18, 1998, and Livingston stood on the precipice of power, slated to become the next Speaker of the House. And yet he had the look of a haunted man, hiding from the swarm of television cameras staking out his office elsewhere in the Capitol. His tall, lanky form slumped into a chair in the cloakroom. His face was drawn, his eyes looked empty. Just two nights before he had been forced by a pornographer to publicly confess to marital infidelities, and now he presided over impeachment proceedings that had their origins in President Bill Clintons own sexual indiscretions. As if the situation were not surreal enough, suddenly the country was at war half a world away as Clinton ordered American warships and planes to bombard Saddam Husseins Iraq.

Pen in hand, Livingston had been scribbling on some paper, trying to work on his speech for the impeachment debate, but he felt it was missing something important. He got up and squeezed himself into one of the cloakrooms phone booths and made a few calls. Finally, the weight of it all just hit him. The world had gone mad, it seemed to Livingston. How could all of this be happening at once? Across the room he spotted an aide walking into the cloakroom and gestured for him to come over.

Weve got to stop this, Livingston said. This is crazy. Were about to impeach the president of the United States.

Livingston had lost his nerve. He could not go through with it. He instructed his aide to summon the other members of the House Republican leadership for an emergency meeting in an hour. Were going to have a censure vote.

The import of those words was instantly clear. It meant no impeachment. It meant surrender. At the behest of his partys conservatives, Livingston had been blocking attempts by Clintons Democratic allies to offer a nonbinding resolution on the floor that would reprimand the president rather than impeach him. If the House were allowed to vote on such a censure measure, moderate Republicans would have a vehicle to express their disapproval of Clintons behavior without feeling compelled to go along with those seeking to make him the first president impeached in 130 years. Censure would pass and impeachment would failat least that was the conventional wisdom. Five days earlier, prodded by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, the powerbroker from Texas who had helped him secure the Speakership in the first place, Livingston had announced he would not permit such a vote. Now, almost literally at the last minute, he was changing his mind.

Livingstons aide, Mark Corallo, was alarmed. A feisty former military man, Corallo was convinced that Clinton was guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice for trying to cover up his affair with onetime White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky. Whats more, just that morning Corallo had been told by a friend about an even more explosive allegation contained in the locked vault at the Gerald R. Ford House Office Building where the secret evidence sent by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr was stored, a sensational if uncorroborated charge that Clinton had sexually assaulted a woman more than twenty years earlier when he was the attorney general of Arkansas. Corallo had rushed over to the cloakroom to tell Livingston, when he found the new Speaker dispirited and ready to give up.

Wait a minute, Corallo told Livingston. You need to go to the Ford Building and see the evidence.

No, Ive heard about some of it, Livingston replied. People have told me.

No. You need to go look. Boss, we have a rapist in the White House.

The nation was not yet familiar with the name of Juanita Broaddrick and her harrowing tale of a motel room encounter that had left her with a swollen lip and a terrible secret that two decades later would be splashed out in the nations newspapers and television sets despite the presidents denial. At that point, Broaddrick had refused to speak about it publicly, and her case had only been hinted at cryptically in the newspapers. Livingston had heard the story, at least wisps of it, in the hallways of the Capitol, but he stood quietly and listened as his aide poured forth indignation.

If you allow a censure vote, he gets away with it, Corallo argued. He has flouted the law. He has attacked you and everything we stand for. We may take a short-term hit in the polls, but in the long run, well be remembered as the guys who stood up for the rule of law.

Livingston thought about it. A tough-minded, fifty-five-year-old former criminal prosecutor, he believed in the rule of law as strongly as anyone. Certainly he had no great affection for Clinton. But this was