Hyde Was Driving Force Behind Day of Reckoning

The polls were closed. The first snow of autumn pelted the strip malls that splayed out along western Chicago’s flat suburban terrain. Inside the Cascade, a clubby banquet hall beneath the flight path from O’Hare airport, a well-fed mob of Republican committeemen knocked down Scotches and teethed on cigars, celebrating another seamless election night. Only one among them, the winner, Rep. Henry J. Hyde, was mired in a funk.

The Illinois Republican had cruised to reelection Nov. 3, but Hyde took little comfort in his own fortune. The white-haired chairman of the House Judiciary Committee was hoping for an election night mandate for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, a process Hyde had started barely two months earlier. Polls indicated that Americans were wary of overturning a two-term president. But a wave of Republican congressionalgains across the country, Hyde hoped, would signal impeachment’s acceptance, suffusing his inquiry into Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky with the aura of moral legitimacy.

Hyde’s mandate was nowhere in sight. Instead of the 20 new Republican congressional seats that top party leaders had promised in the final weeks of October, they had lost five.

“It’s pretty clear,” Hyde said, his voice croaking in the din, “that impeachment dropped off the public’s radar screen.” He slumped in his seat, his shirt sagging inside his blue blazer. He stared off through plumes of cigar smoke, toward two plainclothes District of Columbia Capitol policemen standing nearby. They were following him everywhere, even into restrooms. There had been death threats.

Hyde sighed. “I can’t speak for other members, but I know what I have to do.” The next morning, he met in the bowels of the O’Hare Hilton with a trio of aides. Hyde had talked of wrapping up the committee’s inquiry by Christmas, but until election night, there was no urgency to do so. Now the loss of seats altered the landscape. He was locked into his pledge. Impeachment would have to be delivered within two months. “Let’s just lay it out,” Hyde said.

This is the chronicle of Henry Hyde’s construction of a “process,” the gray, neutral term he and his 20 House Judiciary Committee Republicans used repeatedly to describe the wrenching, tidal movement that has placed a president in the docket of the Senate for the first time in 130 years.

As he built momentum for his process, Hyde used every numerical advantage and tactic available to him, wielding his Republican Judiciary members as shock troops, employing his seasoned staff of lawyers to frustrate Democratic resistance at every turn. Hyde patiently made sure that impeachment thrived in his Judiciary fiefdom, then found allies to take his case to the House, outmaneuvering White House veterans who expected impeachment would wither after the American public failed to give Hyde his mandate in the November election.

Impeachment unreeled like nothing in modern American political history, a passage that thrived on parliamentary guile instead of popular will. The process fed on the art of persuasion, nurtured in the arcane rules of the House, an institution whose bylaws few Americans know and whose faces are even less familiar.

He Kept Focus on Job at Hand

At 74, Hyde was the driving force of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the helmsman of a constitutional reckoning. He would keep the Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority focused on that goal through the desultory days following the election and during an early December stretch when his own party’s moderates rushed to accept the president’s pleas for a censure. At the moment of truth, the moderates returned to the fold, bucking popular opinion as Hyde had: ignoring Clinton’s apologies and Democrats’ cries of foul play, echoing Hyde’s arguments that Clinton had done the unpardonable.

For Hyde, the march toward impeachment was both personal and constitutional--Clinton, in Hyde’s mind, had tarnished the White House, violated his vow of office, tainted the sanctity of the courtroom. It was generational and cultural too. Clinton represented the sullying of values Hyde cherished--”the significance,” he explained, “of military service, this idea that everything is relative, that stretching the truth is acceptable because everyone does it.”

So Hyde felt he had to continue, no matter what. “In the end,” he said “we really don’t have much control over how history looks at us. . . . I hope it’ll be that I did my job fairly and when I finished, I walked away with my head up. If I ever got the chance [to do this] again, I’d say thanks, but no thanks.”

The impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton lurched forward in four months of telescoped frenzy, less a chartable historic process than an unrelenting display of brinkmanship.

Beyond the range of television cameras, there was no place safe from partisanship, no private nook where accommodation flowered. From the first tap of Hyde’s gavel in late September through Saturday’s final vote accusing the president of perjury and obstruction, the factional rancor in public was mirrored behind the scenes by more private jousting. A flurry of secret, back-channel entreaties from White House intermediaries to Hyde failed to alter the chairman’s stance. Even a last-ditch meeting between Hyde and Washington’s Democratic eminence, former White House Counsel Lloyd N. Cutler, just days before the panel’s impeachment vote, left the president’s strategists without options.

As Judiciary Committee members went through their elaborate public theatrics over the Lewinsky affair, Republican staff investigators were quietly interviewing more than three dozen witnesses, hunting new leads to gather a “pattern-and-practice” trail of perjury and obstruction. Agents for the panel interviewed Kathleen Willey, the former White House aide who accused Clinton of an Oval Office groping, and two other women about allegations of presidential obstruction. The raw evidence was not added to the files of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr only because Hyde was rushing to propel articles of impeachment to the full House and feared these controversial new tendrils might jeopardize the main case against the president.

The impeachment process took on a life of its own. “Can you believe this?” a weary Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the Democrats’ besieged senior Judiciary Committee leader, asked moments after the first historic vote was approved last week by committee Republicans. “We’re actually impeaching a president. How the hell did this happen?”

In the end, nothing worked but the process.

And the process spared no one.

Immunity Deal Delays Starr Referral

They had waited for the call since morning.

As early as mid-July, Hyde’s staff had been ready for the call from the independent counsel’s office that Starr’s report was on the way. Republican sources claiming to have lines into Starr’s office kept assuring Judiciary Committee lawyers that the boxes would arrive July 13. A room was readied. The sergeant-at-arms was notified. Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was told to prepare.

Then, nothing. Starr had yet to firm up an immunity deal with Lewinsky. Without her cooperation, there was no pressure on the president. Congress, like everyone else, had to wait.

So, when Judiciary Republican staff director Thomas E. Mooney and his Democratic counterpart, Julian Epstein, huddled with majority counsel David Schippers and minority counsel Abbe Lowell on the morning of Sept. 9 to call Starr’s office, they were nonplused by the reply. Starr’s people would get back to them later in the day.

The four men had been in limbo for months. Mooney, 55, an affable lawyer and Irish tavern owner, had an architect’s eye for drafting legislation, the author of the bipartisan rewrite of the Watergate impeachment articles against President Nixon. Epstein, 37, was as brash and smooth as Mooney was homespun. They would be at Hyde’s side through four months of hearings.

Schippers and Lowell were hired hands, brought in for the inevitable impeachment face-off. Lowell, 46, a Bronx-born partisan who long ago adapted to Washington’s corridors, had been tapped by Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) for his insider’s savvy.

The growling, barrel-chested Schippers, 68, was a Chicago mob prosecutor who brought along a handpicked staff of former FBI men, Chicago police detectives and eager young Illinois prosecutors. Schippers came highly advertised as a South Side Democrat, a fact that mattered less to the Judiciary minority than his loyalty to Hyde, a friendship nurtured by their mutual induction as papal knights and their veneration of Sir Thomas More, the 16th century patron saint of lawyers.

They would all need More’s help by the time they were done.

Vans Rolling: One Blue, One White

The four were in Mooney’s office at 3:30 p.m. when the phone rang. It was Jackie Bennett, one of Starr’s deputy prosecutors.

The vans were rolling, Bennett said, “one blue, one white.”

“What have you got?” Mooney asked.

“Thirty-six boxes, that’s a double set.”

“What? I’m not sure we’ve got room. Where are you taking them?”

Bennett paused, embarrassed. “Uh, where should I take them?”

The vans had left Starr’s office compound on Pennsylvania Avenue, but as they weaved into traffic, deputy prosecutor Robert Bittman and Starr spokesman Charles G. Bakaly III realized they had no idea where they were going.

“Do we go to the [Gerald R.] Ford House Office Building? To the [Judiciary] committee?” Bakaly recalled everyone asking. “To us, the House meant the Capitol.”

Mooney gave directions over the phone, and the vans pulled into the main Capitol parking lot.

From the first day that Judiciary staff lawyers made their way into the evidence room to pore over the Starr referral’s 60,000 pages, they were forced to cooperate on most procedures. Protocol called for joint contacts with Starr’s office, equal access to evidence. But Schippers’ staff was larger and the Starr documents were right across the hall; the Democrats had to flash identification to guards to make their way inside.

Immediately, there were tugs of war that hinted at the battle to come. Susan Bogart, one of Schippers’ staff prosecutors, told minority counsels the first night that they could not stay in the evidence room past midnight. The Democrats argued they needed more time. But at 12, they left.

For several weeks, both sides were careful to contact Starr jointly. But as the need for contacts increased, each side agreed they would start reaching Starr’s people on their own. Democrats soon became convinced the Republicans were receiving back-channel guidance from friendly lawyers on Starr’s staff. “They always just seemed to be prepared for everything new that came over,” one Democratic counsel said.

And the Democratic lawyers grew increasingly frustrated by Schippers’ failure to set up procedures for evidence-gathering. They wanted well-defined guidelines to ensure that both sides would always be notified of any new interviews of witnesses. Lowell sent letters to Schippers seeking to come up with a policy. But the Chicagoan never replied.

“There was no reason to,” a Republican aide said later. “We had some investigative priorities and there was no need for [the Democrats] to be around.”

The Democrats kept sending over requests. No one answered. The silence told them all they needed to know.

Walking Tightrope at the White House

At the White House, aides were walking a tightrope.

Deputy Chief of Staff John Podesta and Communications Chief Ann Lewis, among others, combed every speech and press release for phrases that might cause problems.

Innocent words like “role model,” long a mainstay of Clinton speeches, were now verboten. “Anything the press can pick up and use as a news clip to embarrass us is out,” said one aide. Revised drafts had to endure a “Monica edit,” picked over and returned with scrawls in the margins: “Wrong phrase.” “Find another word.”

The release of the Starr report, with its flood of information about life inside the White House, left Clinton aides super-sensitive to their surroundings. One aide walked by Clinton secretary Betty Currie’s desk and saw her typing away, even as television sets nearby flashed with new revelations from the Starr report--the stained dress, the gifts, the late-night phone calls. “It’s like a Fellini movie,” the aide said. “I keep looking for the cameras.”

At night, White House staff working late roamed past the hallway that led to the anteroom where, according to the report, Clinton and Lewinsky had huddled together. “People bring their families by. You can see them nudging each other,” said an aide. “It’s part of the tour now.”

To save his presidency, Clinton sometimes had to make his own case to wavering Democrats. One morning in late September, Democratic Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois was called in rapid succession by the president, Vice President Al Gore, then-White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and a parade of congressional Democrats.

A Jackson Hears From President

Jackson had written a proposed newspaper commentary, which he was showing top Democrats. In it, he suggested that Clinton “articulate the possibility that he had lied under oath,” a move Jackson believed would clear the air around the White House and short-circuit the impeachment drive.

Returning to his Hill office from a bruising session with senior Democrats over his piece, Jackson was told Clinton was calling from Air Force One.

The president got to the point: “Jesse, listen, have you read this morning’s New York Times?”

“No I haven’t, sir.”

“Well the polls are in our favor,” the president said. “This thing is backfiring on the Republicans. We need Democrats to hang in there with us.”

“I do not want you to be impeached,” Jackson recalls replying. “I’ve come up with a strategy to support you and keep you in office.”

“I appreciate that,” Clinton said. “Our strategy is to keep the poll numbers up. They’re [Republicans] going too far. We need to stick together.”

The plane-to-ground call crackled out. It was then Jackson realized the president had been talking about his problems as if they were merely political--and he wondered if Clinton had even read his article. Jackson’s piece eventually appeared, but not before he had smoothed out the offending phrase.

While Jackson revised his article, Judiciary Committee members had begun meeting in secret in the Rayburn House Office Building. Sometimes it was the Republicans, hidden away inside their chambers leading into the Judiciary Committee meeting room. So too were the Democrats, caucusing in their cramped offices. Even as the secret sessions of the committee’s early days gave way to televised hearings, both sides continued to go behind locked doors, in “executive session.”

Congressional reporters milled in packs outside, sometimes for hours, waiting for an unlucky Judiciary Committee member to emerge. It was like spearing salmon in a stream. Sometimes they came in schools, sometimes not at all.

When the closed meetings stretched on, reporters crowded around Republican and Democratic spinners for news crumbs. The Republicans had the advantage of an entire staff, led by Sam Stratman, a voluble Hill veteran who barked out the daily GOP line and dispensed jokes as he raced down Rayburn’s long corridors.

Scandal veteran Jim Jordan spun for the Democrats. He looked perpetually weary--a lone wolf who delivered up quotes off the top of his head with the panache of a seasoned speech writer. Jordan and Stratman shadowed each other as they worked the clusters of reporters in the halls, volleying insults like broadsides from battleships as they passed.

“God, you’re good,” Stratman cracked as Jordan went through the lines one morning. “You’re not,” Jordan replied.

When the heavy oak doors opened, reporters bolted forward. Sometimes they found Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) motoring down the corridor like an R. Crumb character, head back, legs churning. Frank’s wit tumbled out like a splice of a Marx Brothers movie, but he could suddenly grow snappish: “What in the English language,” he asked one reporter, “don’t you understand?”

Sometimes it was New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat with a talent for driving opposing debaters batty. Or Pennsylvania Republican Rep. George W. Gekas, a Dickensian figure with flaring black eyebrows and a sly sense of humor who finished one long burst of oratory by letting out a deep breath and admitting: “Well, I’ve exhausted myself.”

Sometimes it was the best catch of all, Hyde himself, lumbering slowly through a thicket of cameras and boom mikes, amused by his sudden popularity. Tall and fleshy, perched on his chairman’s throne, Hyde had been slowed by a prostate operation. He preferred slipping out a side door and taking an elevator to the Rayburn garage, where a security man drove him away.

Hyde was rarely seen in the early weeks of September after Salon, an Internet magazine, exposed an affair that the Judiciary chairman described as “a youthful indiscretion”--though he was in his early 40s at the time. He was devastated by the story and hid in his office for nearly two weeks. Publicly he said nothing, but to friends he wondered aloud whether the White House was behind the story’s release. The incident did not harden Hyde toward Clinton, friends said, but it did make him more receptive to some of Starr’s charges.

“Sure, it influenced him,” said one Republican staffer. “He’s not a vengeful guy, but it gave him a sense of what he was up against.”

It was a mind-set common among other Judiciary figures. Schippers said he became an impeachment proponent after concluding that Clinton’s White House spin operation had laid plans to smear Lewinsky as a “stalker.” Republican Rep. Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina outraged White House lawyer Charles F. C. Ruff during a hearing by alleging a similar plan. And last week, as Judiciary Committee members and staff met for a candlelight Christmas party, Hyde aides passed around copies of a breaking news story about Speaker-elect Bob Livingston’s extramarital affairs, whispering angrily: “They’re doing to him what they did to Henry.”

Ran His Office Like Country Judge

Hyde’s aides were protective of his reputation, and Hyde reciprocated the loyalty--running his office like a country judge. Old staffers were never fired. Mooney and Hyde dined out together, sometimes at Mooney’s pub in Alexandria, Va. The tavern became an extension of the Judiciary Committee. Hyde dined in a back room with House colleagues. Mooney sometimes used the place as a secret rendezvous, where he and Hyde met with congressional sources and Republican leaders who preferred to stay out of the limelight. One night, half the Judiciary Republicans filed into the bar to listen to Irish folksingers.

But Hyde’s collegial nature rarely extended to the Democratic side of the committee. He had a reputation for fairness, and showed it often as he wielded the gavel over the impeachment hearings. He granted extra time to minority and White House lawyers and allowed Democrats to bring up the idea of a presidential censure.

Once he and his senior aides concluded in late September that they would push for Clinton’s impeachment, however, the chairman showed little desire for compromise. He talked about bipartisanship, but from October on, he did not consider censuring Clinton a viable, constitutional option.

That stance was critical to impeachment’s course. Up until then, several Judiciary Republicans considered censure as a possibility. Rep. Howard Coble of North Carolina, a silver-tongued hoot owl look-alike, wondered about it. So did Rep. James E. Rogan of Glendale. But their interest was fleeting.

“The more I looked at it, the less I liked,” Rogan said. “Constitutionally, it didn’t hold up.”

But any chance for agreement on compromise was lost, because Republicans kept their short-lived interest to themselves. Even moderate Democrats, such as Rick Boucher of Virginia, never learned that the GOP had toyed with the idea. Unlike most of his more liberal colleagues, Boucher had joined Judiciary not for ideological reasons but because of his interest in Internet and technology law. Coble, who chaired the subcommittee on courts and intellectual property, knew Boucher represented a conservative district, but he never reached out. “Most of us,” Coble said of the majority side, “didn’t think it was our job to woo anybody.”

Breakfast Meetings Were Bipartisan

Reps. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) and William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.) began meeting informally in a group they called the “Breakfast Club.” Soon joined by Graham and Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Mission Hills), they met for breakfast and sometimes at night. The roster kept expanding, but Democrats still couldn’t sell Republicans on the idea of censure.

“We figured early on the Breakfast Club was the Democrats’ pipeline to pushing censure,” Mooney said.

Hyde’s quick thumbs down on what the club was trying to do reduced its talk to chatter. From that point forward, Judiciary leadership would not take the meetings seriously. Delahunt felt the club “kept things civil” among some panel members; Hutchinson said “it was worth the effort.”

But after the election, club attendance dwindled. By December’s final debates, Delahunt and Hutchinson were reduced to sparring over what they had for breakfast.

As the wall between the factions thickened, Hyde stayed resolute against repeated White House efforts to broker a deal to allow for censure. Intermediaries working on Clinton’s behalf called regularly, several Judiciary aides said, only to be courteously rebuffed.

As impeachment’s fortunes fell after the November election, calls began coming from influential Democrats. “It was never pressure, just inquiries,” said one Judiciary official. “These were old friends. They wondered how he felt. He was always nice to them, but he never gave them much to go on.”

Election Results Troubled Some

One of those reaching out was Cutler, who served under both Clinton and former President Carter. Cutler and Hyde met privately in downtown Washington the Tuesday before the final Judiciary Committee impeachment vote. Hyde left unmoved.

“He made his decision long ago,” a Hyde intimate said.

After the election, Judiciary Republicans straggled back to Washington. They had signed on for impeachment, but a number were still worried about the election’s impact. But Hyde already had laid out the path for them. He was bringing in Starr for a full day’s hearing.

Unable to compete with the Republicans’ 21-16 edge, Democrats flooded them--and the media--with reams of protests. They argued over the length of Starr’s cross-examination and complained that Republicans were bulldozing them.

“You see little examples of cracks in the wall,” said Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, “but when you check it out, it’s just empty chatter. They’re not showing us any daylight at all.”

Starr came and went, spending a grueling day of cat-and-mouse with the lawyers. His staff had expected the heat. “The White House runs it like a political campaign, which requires a villain, and Starr has been made out to be a villain,” Bakaly said.

Hyde Feared Stalled Proceedings

Meanwhile, Hyde and his aides feared that growing interest among Republican moderates in considering censure could stall impeachment on the House floor. Gingrich was gone, and Livingston had quietly told Hyde that he wanted impeachment dealt with before he assumed his new post. On a Sunday three weeks ago, Mooney called Hyde at his home in Chicago.

“We need help,” he said. Hyde pleaded with Tom DeLay of Texas, the conservative majority whip and a backer of the impeachment process. DeLay assured Hyde the troops would be handled.

The pace accelerated. Starr sent over more boxes, new referrals--on Willey and on Webster L. Hubbell, an Arkansas lawyer and close friend of the Clintons who had legal problems of his own. Schippers and Mooney laid plans to depose Willey’s former lawyer, an influential Democratic fund-raiser who was under investigation for obstructing justice and two prominent lawyers who have worked for the president.

Schippers then made an end-run at the House’s stalled campaign-finance investigation, winning a judge’s permission to read secret Justice Department memoranda in the case. After a long afternoon of reading, Schippers and Democratic deputy counsel Kevin Simpson emerged onto the street.

“See anything that jazzes you?” Simpson asked.

“Nah.”

But in private, Schippers was urging Hyde and Mooney to allow him to range beyond the Lewinsky case. Because Hyde had promised to finish by Christmas, he wanted to concentrate solely on Lewinsky. If Schippers could find new leads that bolstered the perjury and obstruction charges, Hyde said he would back him. Otherwise, he would stick with the Lewinsky charges.

Still, citing his “duty of due diligence,” Schippers looked back to last January’s deposition of the president in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case. If Clinton had committed perjury to avoid acknowledging his affair with Lewinsky, Schippers wondered, did the president similarly break the law in denying any involvement or harassment of the other five “Jane Does” in the Jones lawsuit?

Schippers’ investigators contacted three of the women. One, Dolly Kyle Browning, a Dallas woman who alleged she had had an affair with Clinton, was eager to testify. She was represented by Larry Klayman, the head of Judicial Watch, an anti-Clinton group that had delivered reams of material to Hyde’s committee.

Browning took a flight to Washington to talk with Schippers and his agents. They met twice, on Nov. 29 and 30. Browning recalls that she answered questions for more than four hours, “until my stomach growled.”

Two weeks later, Schippers flew Browning back to Washington, intending to question her under oath on Dec. 9, the day that White House lawyers defended the president before the committee. But Hyde and committee Republicans shelved the Browning deposition at the last minute, leaving her to stew in her hotel room for two days.

Schippers did not stop with Browning. Also in November, accompanied by Judiciary agents, he drove to Fredericksburg, Va., where he interviewed Willey. And Judiciary investigators flew to Arkansas to interview a third witness in the Jones suit.

When Lowell learned about the Browning deposition from The Times last week, he was furious.

“It’s outrageous . . . for the majority staff to [explore] issues not before the committee,” Lowell said. “People who make accusations against the president can say just about anything they want, but are they [the committee] planning to dignify every allegation that comes out of left field?”

What worries committee Democrats and constitutional experts is whether such raw evidence collected by Schippers can be used in the Senate trial of Clinton. Though Republican trial managers will have the final decision on whether to use the non-Lewinsky files, one senior Judiciary Republican said that Hyde assured Schippers that the new evidence would be used in a Senate trial if it is deemed strong enough.

“We’re beyond Monica,” he said.

In December, the White House was in a downward spiral. Political strategists realized they had erred in assuming the election neutralized political support for impeachment.

Hyde, aided by DeLay, had outflanked them. The Judiciary Committee was on the verge of passing articles of impeachment. And the Republican moderates who had come out for censure were wavering.

Clinton was showing signs of worry. At night, according to intimates, he channel-surfed among political talk shows. “He talks about [the shows] all the time,’ one said. Judiciary Committee Republicans were always on: Bob Barr of Georgia, the grim executioner; Hutchinson, the Arkansas prosecutor who went after the president’s brother; Graham, the South Carolinian who was now accusing Clinton of trying to smear Lewinsky.

Only Henry Hyde stayed off the air.

“That’s not Henry’s style,” an old friend said. “He doesn’t need the boob tube to get things done.”

Yet Hyde was there, on television, as the impeachment process reached its conclusion Saturday. Walking as erectly as his hobbled gait allowed, impeachment’s architect silently led a contingent of his floor managers through the Capitol Rotunda, somberly clutching a blue leather binder containing the historic charges against Cinton.

Not until he presented his charges to Gary Sisco, the secretary of the Senate, did Hyde regain his voice. “I present to you these articles of impeachment,” he managed.

It was a day that ended in solemnity but not triumph.

Only a week earlier, following his Judiciary Committee’s impeachment vote, Hyde and Mooney rode over to a Capitol Hill bar. As he peered over a hamburger and a bottle of non-alcoholic beer, Hyde’s face sagged.

“Nobody wins these things,” he said. “Nobody.”

In Washington, Times staff writers Geraldine Baum, Edwin Chen, Janet Hook, Robert L. Jackson, Marc Lacey, Alan C. Miller, Jack Nelson, Ronald J. Ostrow, Judy Pasternak, Alissa J. Rubin and Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.

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Key Events in Investigation

May 6, 1994: Paula Corbin Jones files suit alleging Clinton sexually harassed her in a Little Rock, Ark. hotel room while she was a state clerk and he was governor.

Aug. 5: Kenneth W. Starr is appointed.

Nov. 5, 1996: Clinton is re-elected.

Dec. 6: Monica S. Lewinsky named on a list of potential witnesses in Jone’s lawsuit.

Jan. 7, 1998: Lewinsky signs affidavit for Jones case saying she had no sexual relationship with Clinton.

Jan. 12: Linda Tripp, a confidant of Lewinsky, provides Starr’s office with taped conversations between herself and Lewinsky.

Jan. 13: Tripp wears a hidden microphone for the FBI and records a conversation with Lewinsky.

Jan. 17: Clinton testifies in Jone’s lawsuit and denies a sexual relationship with Lewinsky.

Jan. 26: Clinton declares, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . .I never told anybody to lie.”

Jan. 27: Starr opens a grand jury inquiry.

March 15: Former Clinton aide Kathleen Willey appears on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” saying Clinton made a sexual advance to her in 1993.

Aug. 6: Under immunity from prosecution, Lewinsky testifies for the first time before the grand jury.

Aug. 17: Clinton is questioned before the grand jury. He then says in a televised speech, “I did have a relationship with Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”

Oct. 8: House votes to authorize an impeachment inquiry by the Judiciary Committee.

Nov. 3: Democrats pick up five House seats in the election. Exit polls show almost two-thirds of voters don’t want Clinton impeached.

Nov. 13: Clinton agrees to pay Jones $850,000 to drop her sexual harassment lawsuit, with no apology or admission of guilt on the president’s part.

Dec. 11: The committee approves the first three articles of impeachment. A fourth, dealing with perjury in response to written questions to the president from the House panel, is approved the next day.

Dec. 18: House begins consideration of articles of impeachment.

Dec. 19: House is stunned by announcement by Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), that because of his disclosure of illicit sexual affairs, he withdrawing as speaker-designate and will resign his seat.

Dec. 19: President Clinton impeached by House.