Washington Insiders Couldn’t Cut Juice to Impeachment Engine

Quietly and privately, in discreet telephone calls and secluded meetings that are only now coming to light, Washington’s insiders tried to avert the impeachment showdown that ended in President Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate.

New details emerging about secret contacts among the president, his defenders and his political enemies reveal how desperate they were to find an accommodation and how they repeatedly let opportunities slip away.

The behind-the-scenes efforts included not only well-known attempts by White House and Democratic Party emissaries to fashion a censure deal but also a censure proposal floated secretly in November by House Judiciary Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.).

The retired political leaders, former diplomats and lobbyists who form this city’s old guard have long gravitated, almost by force of nature, to assume backstage roles in solving Washington’s most intractable problems. But their failure to avert the chaos of impeachment came as a breakdown in the way business is frequently done here, according to some of the power brokers who struggled to reach an accord.

“In hindsight, I think we missed some real opportunities,” said former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who called publicly for censure and made several private entreaties.

Rumors of GOP ‘Exit Strategy’

Although rumors of Republican leaders anxiously searching for an impeachment “exit strategy” had long echoed through the Capitol, these new disclosures show that such key players as Hyde and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr expressed a willingness to create a strategy for averting the partisan bloodshed. Ultimately, however, they and others were unwilling to abandon the process they had started.

Even after Clinton was impeached, according to several sources, an intermediary for Starr informed the White House that he might be willing, as part of a censure deal, to agree not to seek an indictment of Clinton in the courts.

But that offer was never followed up by either side. The late-December feeler was too tentative and came too late, said presidential impeachment counsel Gregory Craig.

“A back-channel resolution turned out to be impossible because the Republican leadership in the House insisted upon impeachment as a precondition to settle the matter,” Craig said.

Veteran Washington hands such as lobbyist and former ambassador Robert S. Strauss and Harry McPherson, a lawyer who has been a fixture here since his days as an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, were shaken by their impotence at bridging impeachment’s ideological chasm--a challenge unlike those they typically confront.

“I didn’t get the feeling that anybody outside the players intimately involved had any effect,” McPherson said. “That’s what’s so puzzling and so unsettling.”

Congressional newcomers, said former Sen. David Pryor of Arkansas, “don’t have the same appreciation for the institutions as the older members. Do they know Bob Strauss? Probably not. Do they know the role Bob Dole has played? Maybe. Memories fade pretty quickly.”

One by one, Democratic deal-makers--among them retired ambassador Strauss and former White House Counsel Lloyd N. Cutler--and Republican “graybeards,” including Dole and former House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois, tried to find common ground but eventually retreated in frustration.

“There were too many moving parts,” Strauss said.

Cutler conferred repeatedly with Hyde but was unable to persuade him to interrupt the impeachment process. Dole promoted censure but, worried about antagonizing other GOP leaders, refrained from calling the Judiciary Committee chairman. Strauss tried to involve Michel in negotiations that had Hyde’s silent approval, but he bowed out after concluding that top Republicans wanted impeachment to “run its course.”

Hyde has steadfastly declined to discuss his private conversations with White House and Democratic Party go-betweens. But he acknowledged just before the Senate vote that he had “considered an alternative, but it wasn’t feasible given the circumstances, the fast pace we were moving under, the polarization that was developing in the country.”

Neither Hyde nor Clinton was willing to compromise over the process itself. For Clinton, impeachment had to be stopped before he would accept censure. For Hyde, censure was possible only after impeachment had followed its constitutional course.

Clinton Quietly Queries Dole

Clinton first reached out to Washington’s eminences just two days after his fateful Aug. 17 testimony before Starr’s federal grand jury and his televised confession of his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. During a White House meeting on tensions in Kosovo, Clinton quietly asked Dole if there were a way to head off impeachment.

Perhaps, Dole replied, but the timing was not right.

“You wonder,” Dole said last week, “if there was ever going to be a right time.”

Dole continued to speak to other prominent Democrats, such as Strauss, but out of concern for party politics never called Hyde. As it was, Dole’s pre-impeachment-vote call for censure angered his successor, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

Soon after the November election, Hyde was considering his own secret overture. The Republicans had lost House seats to the Democrats, a defeat that quickly led to the toppling of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). The Judiciary Committee chairman was adamant about driving the impeachment process to its natural constitutional finish in the Senate, which meant that he would never accept a premature end to his committee’s work.

But Hyde was also aware long before his committee voted Dec. 19 to impeach the president that bipartisanship was unlikely and that Clinton would never be convicted in the Senate. Hyde “was looking for a way to get this over quickly and spare the country of all the bloodshed,” said one intimate. The revelation about Hyde’s overture contrasts with a widespread sense that the chairman was unwilling to consider a compromise.

The outlines of Hyde’s grand design took shape in conversations with top aides. Under his scheme, “three or four” committee Democrats would agree to vote for impeachment. The president and House Democrats would acquiesce in impeachment’s passage. The Senate would quickly vote on articles of impeachment, presumably against them, and then devise a censure resolution. Congress would asked Starr to agree not to prosecute Clinton at the conclusion of his term.

Hyde Turns Deaf Ear to Democratic Stalwarts

As his staff began preparing for committee hearings, Hyde decided to broach the idea with a few key Democrats and the White House before consulting with Starr, GOP leaders and committee members. At the same time, however, Hyde was exhorting his committee majority to stand fast against compromise--and turning a deaf ear to entreaties from Democratic stalwarts like Cutler and Strauss.

“I never discussed this with very many people,” Hyde said last month. Most GOP leaders were kept in the dark, a Hyde aide said, because the election had divided them and “we first had to know from the other side whether we were even in the same ballpark.”

They were not. Hyde’s top aide, Majority Staff Director Thomas E. Mooney, approached his counterpart, Julian Epstein, with the basic outline. Neither man would recount details of their talks, but Mooney and others confirmed that the proposal was taken to several key Democrats and swiftly shot down.

“It wasn’t workable,” said Laura Nichols, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), one of those who vetoed the idea.

Several White House aides, informed of Hyde’s plan, also described it as a “nonstarter.” Among its flaws, they said last week, were that it failed to interrupt the process, that the president would have to accept his own impeachment and that Starr or the GOP leadership might renege on its complex parts after Clinton had publicly committed to the idea.

The swiftness with which Democrats spurned Hyde’s overture dismayed the Judiciary chairman and his aides--and may have hardened Hyde’s reaction to later Democratic peace initiatives.

“Here Republicans were trying a compromise and reaching out, and the Democrats weren’t willing to take it seriously,” Mooney said.

For their part, Clinton aides said that Democrats who thought Hyde might respond to back-channel feelers phoned him repeatedly. White House Counsel Charles F. C. Ruff, they said, had “substantive” conversations with Hyde.

Before his panel began its hearings, Hyde also gave private indications to one Democratic Judiciary Committee member, Rep. Howard L. Berman of Mission Hills, that he might be willing to listen to a compromise proposal.

Berman, who declined to discuss his role, contacted White House aides. They asked Strauss to try his hand. Strauss, who had already urged Dole to press for censure, then called Michel. According to Strauss, Michel “said that was interesting and he would get in touch with Hyde and if there was anything to it he would be in touch with me. But he never called me back.”

Instead, Michel contacted Gingrich. “I could tell from Newt that they weren’t about to do anything less than sticking it to the president,” Michel said.

Michel’s decision to call Gingrich and not Hyde was indicative of the uncertainty, even at the highest levels of the GOP, over who was running the process.

Cutler also was involved in the intriguing post-impeachment feeler from Starr’s office.

According to several officials involved in the talks, an intermediary for Starr told Cutler that the independent counsel would consider dropping the option of prosecuting Clinton for perjury if Congress passed a censure resolution similar to a proposal by former Presidents Carter and Ford. They called on Congress to severely rebuke Clinton, for Clinton to admit lying under oath and for Starr to “publicly forgo the option” of indicting the president.

Starr’s spokesman, Charles G. Bakaly III, declined to comment, but several knowledgeable sources confirmed that there was such an offer.

White House lawyers took a dim view of the whole idea. They never heard back from Starr’s emissary, but neither did they take the initiative.

“We were preparing for trial at that time, and if others wanted to explore a settlement along [those] lines, we were certainly open to any kind of reasonable proposals,” Craig said. “Our position was well known. They knew where to find us.”