Clinton’s Enemies Are Feeling a Warm Glow

They are the men and women who have been going after Bill Clinton for years. And Thursday, these relentless protesters scrabbling at the fence finally broke through when the House voted for an impeachment inquiry.

“This is a major milestone along the way,” said former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, who wrote a Clinton-bashing bestseller. He plans to take a few lawmakers who were early to call for impeachment out to lunch next week. “We’ll sit there and have a glass of wine and smoke a cigar,” Aldrich said.

John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, which has financed the latest rounds of Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment claim against Clinton, was feeling positively vindicated Thursday.

“If I hadn’t decided to call Paula Jones and support her, we wouldn’t be here today,” said Whitehead, noting that, if Jones’ legal team had not deposed Monica S. Lewinsky and the president about their relationship, it might have remained a somewhat private matter.

“If Paula ever gets her day in court or settles, that’s when we’ll be popping champagne corks,” Whitehead said. “It’s a little too early yet, but I guess today I feel like we’ve been brought in from the cold.”

But if Clinton’s enemies were feeling a warm glow, it was tempered by what they know about their man’s resilience and their years-long quests to paint him as a liar, a criminal, a philanderer and worse.

“I’ve been up and down on this roller coaster before,” said William C. Triplett, an aide to Senate Republicans investigating Clinton campaign-finance irregularities. “Everytime, I thought, ‘My God, they took money from Chinese arms dealers, that will certainly do [Clinton] in,’ he got away.

“I have hope this is the beginning of the end,” said Triplett, who recently published a book about the campaign finance scandal, “but I can’t say I’m sure.”

From inside the barricades of the White House, people like Triplett and Aldrich and Whitehead are seen as key commanders in a right-wing cabal, loosely linked in a grand effort to bring down this president.

But in their world they are the true believers who after years of being labeled “nuts and sluts” [Aldrich’s words] have earned legitimacy through the investigation of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. He framed their ugly view of Clinton in a context all Americans can understand: the law.

Dave Bossie, for example, has had some involvement in every investigation of Clinton’s alleged wrongdoing, including Whitewater, the alleged improper firing of White House travel office employees, alleged misuse of FBI files and campaign fund-raising. Bossie began agitating against the Clintons while Bossie was working in the Bush campaign in 1992. It was then that he wrote a book called “Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton.”

Bossie has since conducted so many investigations of the Whitewater land deal that Newsweek dubbed him “the secret spinner.” He recently was forced to resign as a top aide to the House committee investigating campaign finance matters after he was accused of tampering with transcripts of the jailhouse phone conversations of Webster L. Hubbell, the former Justice Department official.

“Do I have the ability to now feel that everything I’ve done has not gone to waste, including losing my job?” asked Bossie, who works part-time as a firefighter in suburban Maryland. “Well, we’re not there yet, but we’re a step closer. And it’s taken a lot to get to this point.

“I just hope that as of today Americans will take seriously and understand how very corrupt this administration is and has been.”

Yet Bossie also realizes that Americans don’t share his general view of Clinton as evil. “I understand scandal fatigue, that people are tired of hearing about all this. But our democracy is dependent upon Americans educating themselves and taking action when enough is enough. And enough is enough.”

Another early Clinton foe, once a close friend, Cliff Jackson insisted he was anything but gleeful Thursday.

Indeed, in a telephone interview from his office in Arkansas, he sounded mournful as he talked about all the years he has spent exposing Clinton’s character or, as he described it: “Clinton’s habitual manipulation and exploitation of people--that’s women and men alike.

“I’m sad for Bill Clinton; I’m sad for the presidency; I’m sad for the country and for the lost opportunity of a potentially great president,” said Jackson, who played a major role in getting Arkansas state troopers to disclose Clinton’s alleged womanizing as governor and in exposing Clinton’s avoidance of the draft in the 1960s.

Another Arkansan, Paul Greenberg, an editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, watched the House debate on his office television as he pondered what to write for today’s paper.

“There’s no sense of glory today,” said Greenberg, who for six years has eviscerated Clinton’s public conduct in his editorials. “There’s maybe a confirmation of sorrow. It’s not even an historic day, just one more in the way station in this drama.”

However, at the annual meeting of the national conference of editorial writers a few weeks ago, Greenberg might have felt a little glory when the outgoing chairman of the group publicly told him he was “right” about Clinton.

“I have gone in perception of that group from being a curmudgeonly crank who was down on a homeboy to some kind of farseeing prophet, and, of course, neither view is accurate,” said Greenberg. “I am just somebody who wandered through.”