For original reprints (with graphics) available
http://www.rsicopyright.com/ics/prc_main/prs_request.html/December 28, 1998 /
January 4, 1999, U.S. Edition
SECTION: SPECIAL REPORT; The War at Home; Beltway; Pg. 40
LENGTH: 2105 words
HEADLINE: How Clinton Lost the Capital
BYLINE: BY EVAN THOMAS AND DEBRA ROSENBERG With MATTHEW COOPER, MARK HOSENBALL, GREGORY L. VISTICA, JOHN BARRY, DANIEL KLAIDMAN. MICHAEL HIRSH and MATT BAI
HIGHLIGHT:
After Newt's fall, the president was supposed to be home free, buoyed by the country's disgust with scandal. But impeachment only looked dead. Behind the Beltway hardball that pushed Clinton to the wall.
BODY:
LAST WEDNESDAY NIGHT, AFTER the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet traveled to Capitol Hill to give a secret briefing to the House of Representatives. Police sealed off the second floor of the Capitol and closed the doors to the House Chamber. Shelton displayed blow-ups of satellite photos of Iraqi targets and explained the details of the U.S.-led attack. Cohen stood at the podium in the well of the House floor to take questions from the members of Congress. Their mood, Cohen later recalled, was "toxic."
The GOP lawmakers demanded to know: Was this a "Wag the Dog" scenario? Had the president started a war to stall his own impeachment? Republican Whip Tom DeLay asked if there was any national-security reason to hold off on the impeachment vote. "I think it's up to you," replied Cohen. Looking at the Republicans (Cohen, a former senator, is one himself), he appealed for national unity. The House members dutifully applauded. But the next day they scheduled a vote to impeach the commander in chief.
As the Year of Monica staggered to a close, it had come to this: some hard-core Republicans strongly suspected a president of using airstrikes to avoid impeachment. Most of the nation clearly does not want Clinton removed, and many Americans traditionally rally round their leader at times of military action. Yet in Washington, Bill Clinton's motives are relentlessly questioned and impugned. How did the president, a champion schmoozer and manipulator, wind up so friendless and powerless in his own capital? It's a story of arrogance and hardball politics, and how a cunning politician made a basic political mistake by underestimating the unreason of his foes.
On election night, Nov. 3, Clinton's aides were thrilled as the returns came in. The public, it appeared, was expressing its scandal fatigue by cutting down the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to just six votes. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to take a fall. White House aides did not try very hard to conceal their gloating. Surely, Clinton's advisers reasoned, the House GOP would not ignore the will of the voters.
If there was a moment to strike a deal, to find a way to punish the president short of impeachment, this was probably it. But the warring staffs were already accusing each other of bad faith. An early meeting on Oct. 21 between Hill Republicans and the White House defense team seemed to be cordial. But then Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer brought in to manage the impeachment defense, walked into a scrum of reporters and denounced the GOP for a partisan witch hunt. The GOP staffers watching him on TV were surprised and angered. Craig's characterization (the House Republicans have also been called "the Taliban" and "Shiites") was not much of an exaggeration, but it did not exactly foster an atmosphere of compromise and conciliation.
Though few realized it at the time, the Democrats would come to miss Gingrich. Between bursts of bombast, Gingrich was capable of statesmanship. Had he survived, Newt might have tried to work out a compromise to punish the president short of an impeachment vote. Without Gingrich, the House was left with a leadership vacuum. The speaker-elect, Bob Livingston, chose to keep a low profile. GOP Whip DeLay, a former Houston pest exterminator who is pleased to be known as "the Hammer," stepped into this void. DeLay has insisted that he just told congressmen to vote their consciences on impeachment. But DeLay has a threatening aura. House moderates anxiously noted DeLay's close ties to the Christian Coalition; there is little that a Republican centrist fears more than a primary challenge from a Christian conservative. DeLay's most effective tactic was to insist that members not even be allowed to vote on a motion to censure the president.
But at the time, in mid-November, Clinton's advisers weren't too worried. They felt confident that an impeachment vote would fail, and the president would be home free by Christmas. Clinton's lawyers adopted a legalistic and dismissive tone in answering the 81 questions posed by the House Judiciary Committee. The first, rather tendentious, question from the House GOP was: confirm or deny that the president is the nation's chief law-enforcement officer. Instead of a simple "yes" answer, Clinton's legal team equivocated for a paragraph. The president's lawyers waited until the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend to submit their answers. Republican lawmakers, who, like all congressmen, crave respect, grumbled that Clinton had been too busy playing golf. The Republicans took to the Sunday shows to excoriate the president. It began to dawn on the White House that the president was in serious trouble.
SCRAMBLING, THE PRESIDENT'S defenders lobbied Republican waverers. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, a maverick and a moderate, got a call from the Democratic state chairman in Iowa, Roxanne Conlin, urging him to vote against impeachment. An aide to Leach said the congressman came away from the conversation with the impression that the Democrats would make sure he faced a weak challenge in the next election if he voted no. If such an inducement was offered (Conlin denies it), it didn't work. Leach announced that he would vote to impeach. In Florida, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart had been pressing the White House to send more aid to hurricane victims in Central America. To Diaz-Balart the White House had seemed indifferent -- until, a week before the impeachment vote, a White House aide called and opened the conversation by discussing the GOP lawmaker's concerns. And by the way, said the Clinton aide, White House counsel Chuck Ruff is standing by to answer any questions about impeachment. Diaz-Balart did not talk to Ruff, and he did not vote with Clinton.
The Democrats looked for other ways to slow the tide. They begged for censure, plus a whopping fine, plus an apology by the president on the House floor. But many congressmen have a "fix it later" attitude. They figured they could vote to impeach in part because they believed the Senate would never vote to convict.
At the White House, some of Clinton's aides believed that the president's only hope of winning over the moderates was to admit that he lied. But Clinton's lawyers were dead set against any admissions; they continued to fear a perjury indictment from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The president, his friends say, continues to believe that he did not lie. Still, on Friday, Dec. 11, the president told his aides that he wanted to say something. In longhand, he wrote out another apology, and his secretary, Betty Currie, typed it up. With full lip bite, he went into the Rose Garden and said, "Quite simply, I gave in to my shame."
In Washington, it was too little, too late. Some House Democrats fantasized about sending Hillary Clinton on to "60 Minutes" to stand by her man, but White House aides didn't even bother to pass the suggestion along. The moderates continued to come out for impeachment: it was looking ever bleaker.
Throughout December, Clinton seemed remote and above the fray. It was not an act. He, along with a small group of advisers, already knew that there was a strong chance that American warplanes would be bombing Iraq just before the impeachment vote in the House. When the president called off an attack on Saddam on Nov. 14, he made it clear that the next time the Iraqi strongman blocked U.N. arms inspectors, the bombs would fall. There was still some feeling among U.S. diplomats that
Saddam would get the message and go along with the arms inspections at least long enough to force a review of U.N. economic sanctions in January. But Saddam was openly defiant. U.N. inspectors did resume their search for documents detailing Saddam's program to build weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors found empty rooms; the Iraqis removed not only documents but the furniture.
By Thanksgiving, the Clinton administration was almost certain that airstrikes would be necessary; the only question was when. Defense Secretary Cohen and his generals pulled out a calendar. Mid-December looked about right: there was a narrow window between Clinton's scheduled trip to Israel and Gaza on Dec. 12-15 and the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim religious holiday, on Dec. 19.
The official justification for launching airstrikes was expected to be a report by Richard Butler, the chief U.N. weapons inspector. On Sunday, Dec. 13, after Clinton had landed in Jerusalem, the White House learned that Butler would very likely submit a hard-nosed report accusing Saddam of resisting U.N. inspectors. Talking to Washington by speakerphone from Israel, Clinton discussed what to do with his top deputies. His national-security advisers were unanimous: he should order airstrikes. Some feared that if Clinton failed to attack, word would leak that he had defied his national-security team for political reasons. At the meeting, national-security adviser Sandy Berger did obliquely raise what he called "other factors" -- meaning the impeachment vote. But according to his aides, Clinton clearly stated, "There is no basis on which I can make the decision other than national-security factors." He added: "I'm going to be criticized and accused of playing politics whatever I do." The military was ordered to get ready to attack within 72 hours. Surprise was important: Saddam must not be given time to disperse his most valuable WMD assets.
Back in Washington on Monday, chief of staff John Podesta and Cohen briefed Hill leaders that military action was looming. No one, on either side, was happy. According to top White House aides, Gingrich argued that the White House should postpone action until after the impeachment vote. Livingston was "queasy" about the timing, this aide said. Even Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House, and Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, warned that the timing of the attacks would be used against the president.
In his hotel suite in Tel Aviv on Monday night, after a long and frustrating day of trying to make peace between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton was told about the unrest. The president was described as saddened by the news from home. The old ideal that foreign policy should be above politics was gone.
As the president flew home on Tuesday, the calls came pouring into Air Force One from Clinton's disheartened political team back in Washington: one moderate after another was declaring his intention to vote for impeachment. For a while aides did not bother to awaken the sleeping president, who was clearly exhausted. Sen. Sander Levin, who had come along on the trip, wandered over to Hillary Clinton. He remarked on the disconnect: Clinton had seemed strong and effective in Israel, but he was being hanged back in Washington. Hillary sadly agreed. "You know," she said, "he's my president, too."
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, CLINton put on his suit and tie, went to the Situation Room and gave the order to attack Iraq. Before the first bomb fell, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott issued a statement opposing military action. (He later backed down.) The president's team was still fighting impeachment -- Vice President Al Gore canceled a political swing through New Hampshire and denounced the Republicans for dividing the country. But the political battle was lost.
In the Oval Office, Clinton received one of the very few Republican moderates willing to stick with the president. At 72, Amory (Amo) Houghton, a wealthy upstate New York aristocrat, can afford to be independent (though he, too, may face a challenger from the right next election). Houghton had brought Clinton a biography of Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford philosopher who was one of the last great voices of 20th-century liberalism. The president chatted and listened respectfully. But for the most part, recalled Houghton, the president just seemed worn out.
His own party largely stood by him, but in truth Clinton has never been part of the club on Capitol Hill. Last Saturday, when House Democrats rode buses down Pennsylvania Avenue after the vote to stand with their president in the Rose Garden, Clinton kept them waiting. Some lawmakers shivered in the cold. If the president is to survive on his own terms, he'll need to be a better host when senators come calling.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(283 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
