After a Disastrous Day, Clinton Expresses Resolve

Anchored in front of the Oval Office with his wife by his side and scores of House Democrats behind him, President Clinton on Saturday declared his determination to serve until “the last hour of the last day of my term.”

Clinton spoke just three hours after the House made him the second U.S. president to be impeached.

“I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life, and I have invited members of Congress to work with us to find a reasonable, bipartisan and proportionate response,” he said. “That approach was rejected today by Republicans in the House, but I hope it will be embraced by the Senate.”

Clinton left to Vice President Al Gore and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who had spearheaded a passionate attempt to stave off impeachment, the task of diminishing the vote as an outrageous example of partisan politics.

As if staking out his turf, Clinton walked through the colonnade from the White House mansion where he lives to the Oval Office where he works.

Hillary Rodham Clinton walked arm-in-arm with her husband, the couple grasping hands and looking fondly at each other.

About 75 House Democrats had come to the White House to show their support.

The president, speaking forcefully but without a tinge of bitterness, picked up on the disconnect between the public, which opinion polls show still gives him approval ratings in the mid- to high-60s, and Congress, which had just impeached him.

“For six years now, I have done everything I could to bring our country together across the lines that divide us, including bringing Washington together across party lines,” Clinton said. “Out in the country, people are pulling together. But just as America is coming together, it must look--from the country’s point of view--like Washington is coming apart.

Despite the increasingly loud calls, mostly from Republicans, for his resignation, the president said he is “still committed to working with people of good faith and goodwill of both parties.”

Vote a ‘Disgrace to Constitution’

His goals for the last two years, he said, are to reform Social Security, regulate health maintenance organizations and improve schools.

Clinton spoke about the need to “get rid of the poisonous venom of excessive partisanship, obsessive animosity and uncontrolled anger.”

Gore and Gephardt lashed out at House Republicans, who, with the help of five Democrats, passed two articles of impeachment against Clinton.

“We’ve just witnessed a partisan vote that was a disgrace to our country and our Constitution,” Gephardt said.

“Our founders anticipated that there might be a day like this one, when excessive partisanship unlocked a form of vitriol and vehemence that hurts our nation,” Gore said. “What America needs is not resignations but the renewal of civility, respect for one another, decency toward each other and the certain belief that together we can serve this land and make a better life for all of our people.”

On a day when American warplanes still were attacking Iraq, Clinton was meeting in private with the Rev. Tony Campolo, one of three ministers counseling him because of his extramarital affair, when the first vote on impeachment occurred.

The president then joined Chief of Staff John Podesta and Douglas B. Sosnik, a top aide, in the adjoining dining room to watch on television as the House voted on the remaining three articles.

“As we watched, in the room there was no shock or surprise about the outcome,” Sosnik said later.

One aide added that, nonetheless, the president was “disappointed, [because] he’d worked for a bipartisan solution.”

The president then met with about 80 House Democrats in the East Room.

Surrounded by Christmas trees and other holiday decorations, Gephardt later was said to have adamantly told the president: “You cannot, you must not, you cannot, you must not, you cannot, you must not resign.” Clinton said that he had no intention of doing so.

In an emotional moment, the vice president hugged the minority leader, a potential rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, after congratulating Gephardt on the floor speech he had given decrying the angry tenor of the debate.

Clinton told the assembled Democrats: “I was proud to see you stand up for the Constitution today. . . . We need to take the hatred out of our public life,” a spokesman recounted later.

Commenting on the decision of House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston (R-La.) to resign, the president told Democrats: “The politics of personal destruction needs to end.”

And, he said of the resignation: “It broke my heart.”

Before the first vote was cast, the first lady met with House Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Speaking personally and emotionally, she told the president’s most loyal supporters that “I love and care deeply about my husband. . . . We have committed our lives to the values of quality of opportunity and a better life for the children of America,” according to Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas).

Most impressive, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) said, was Mrs. Clinton’s poise. “That touched the most people. It sure was quiet. To have a room that size, so hushed, so attentive, is very rare in a political setting.”

While the day was momentous and the White House mood somber, there were moments of surrealism.

A lively game of street hockey continued outside on Pennsylvania Avenue as the members of Congress arrived at the White House. Some demonstrators held signs and shouted chants outside the gates, but there were more people opposing the military action against Iraq than making their voices heard about impeachment.

Even White House staff members were more cheerful than might have been expected, photographing reporters gathered to cover the president’s response to impeachment.

Inside, White House officials were engaged in a kinetic behind-the-scenes effort to prevent conviction in the Senate.

“We want this thing to be fair, expeditious and bipartisan,” Sosnik said.

White House officials have reached out to influential former senators on both sides, among them Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the former majority leader who challenged Clinton for the presidency in 1996, and Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), another former majority leader who has been Clinton’s special envoy to Northern Ireland.

The president’s attorneys have been considering various ways to challenge the impeachment in the House as unconstitutional because it was approved by a lame-duck Congress. But no decisions have been made, and there are concerns that a Supreme Court appeal likely would draw out the process and anger Senate Republicans, making such a course less than attractive.

White House Is Optimistic

White House officials were optimistic that they would have more control over the process in the Senate than in the House. The senior White House staff is packed with former Senate aides; the minority has more leverage as individual members in the Senate than in the House; and the White House will direct its own defense in the Senate, unlike in the House.

“The Senate is set up to be more judicious and fair,” one senior White House official said.

The president’s advisors stressed that, despite the impeachment, Clinton is determined to continue to carry out his duties the way he has for six years.

“He’s not going to slow down. He’s not going to stop. You’re going to see a vigorous president,” said Sosnik.