Masterful Argument by Old-School Orator

They don’t do it like that anymore.

They don’t rise up on the floor of the Senate the way great men did in the 19th century, when the chamber was filled with the likes of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, whose desk they still fight over.

But Thursday it was as if Dale Bumpers had risen up from Webster’s very seat and, with similar thunder and honey in his words, defended his friend and fellow Arkansan, President Clinton.

Bumpers, who just retired after 24 years in the Senate, spoke to his former colleagues the way great orators used to--before the time of C-SPAN and talking points and legions of press secretaries.

He clipped a microphone to his lapel and, for 58 minutes, was masterly. He wove together personal anecdotes, snippets of history, political wisdom, gravitas and--of all things--humor to appeal to both the heart and history of the Senate for an acquittal of the president.

A Welcome Blend of Humor, Honesty

After days of tortured legalese--never mind a year of relentless scandal--the humor was particularly welcome, and Bumpers used it with great skill. He cracked them up with insider jokes and stories from his days as a divorce lawyer in rural Arkansas. He took the senators for an oratorical ride--from humor to tears and back to humor again--as if to mirror the emotional and political absurdity of the 365 days that had passed since the nation first heard hints of a presidential affair with a former White House intern.

Mostly, Bumpers distinguished himself--probably for a generation to come--by speaking honestly to the senators. He didn’t pretend that the president hadn’t messed up royally. And, unlike other defenders, he didn’t sound like he was making an admission for the sake of strategy. He sounded like a man who understands the way men act and think and how they come to mess up so royally.

“We are here today because the president suffered a moral lapse,” he said. (He threw his whole body into action over that statement, pausing before he got to the word “moral” and then spinning his hands rapidly as if he couldn’t bare to spit out the details of the sexual affair.) But he eventually faced it, sympathetically. He addressed Clinton’s lapse as if he were alone with the senators in the cloakroom.

“We are none of us perfect. Sure, you say, he should have thought it all out beforehand, and indeed he should, just as Adam and Eve should have. Just as you and you and you and you,” he continued, pointing into the chamber at his old friends, “and millions of other people who have been caught in similar circumstances. We are none of us perfect.”

When he tried to get at why the president might have lied about the affair, Bumpers opened a window to Bill Clinton’s tragic family life. Coming from anyone other than a Clinton friend of Bumpers’ standing, the remarks would have sounded manipulative and crass.

“[Clinton] knew this whole affair was about to bring unspeakable embarrassment and humiliation on himself, his wife, whom he adored, and a child that he worshiped with every fiber in his body and for whom he would happily have died to spare her this or to ameliorate her shame and her grief.”

Bumpers was most unsparing when he took apart the tearful summation given last week by Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), the House’s chief prosecutor. Hyde had said that a vote to acquit the president would be a breach of faith with the men who died fighting America’s wars.

But Bumpers turned that argument around with shameless emotionalism. He mentioned by name senators in the chamber who had been injured or fought heroically in an American war and insisted that, if asked, those senators would not agree that they went to war to protect the “rule of law.”

Throughout the speech, Bumpers got intimate with his audience, mentioning by name at least 15 senators. At one point, he even portrayed Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) as if he were one of the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where the language about impeachment was written.

‘I’ve Heard All His Stories,’ Helms Says

But the ultimate measure of Bumpers’ speech is whether it changed any minds--or votes.

Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina clearly was not swayed. Shortly after the speech, he told reporters dismissively, “I’ve heard all his stories. I’ve told some of them.”

Still, Bumpers may have history on his side.

Halford Ryan, a professor of speech at the Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said great speeches are remembered not just for the facts that are conveyed but for the delivery, the cadence of words, the flow and rhythm of sentences that transform a politician’s rhetoric into something moving and memorable.

“In the age of TV, to get all that is rare,” said Ryan, co-editor of a collection of great Senate speeches. “I mean, it’s just never done.”