The End of the Affair

One year ago, the Senate voted to reject the impeachment charges against President William Jefferson Clinton. The senators found no high crimes and misdemeanors, no lofty crimes against the state and no damage to the republic, at least by the president. Now, with hindsight and solid research, Jeffrey Toobin has marshaled the evidence and connected the dots: The whole business, he maintains, was about sex and a vast conspiracy to humiliate and eventually destroy the president.

But Toobin knows this is not a “good guy-bad guys” story. Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition and undoubtedly would have admitted nothing without Monica Lewinsky’s soiled dress souvenir. Toobin forcefully underlines the president’s lies, deceits and less-than-artful dodging. And, like Richard Nixon, he gave his enemies a sword. That they used it frivolously is the best thing to be said in his defense. Most congressmen and most Americans probably favored some rebuke, some censure of the president. But, like most of this story, such a solution could simply not cross the political minefield without partisan factions vetoing it for momentary advantage.

Toobin has reconstructed the story, eager to present the journalist’s “rough first draft of history.” In “A Vast Conspiracy” Toobin contends that the legal system was hijacked for political ends, a development that he says has been part of our national life for the last three or four decades, dating to the civil rights movement and Watergate. It is, in fact, much older. The historical landscape is filled with such moments, most of them unsavory, such as the Sedition Act controversy of 1798, the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and the political repression of radicals and dissenters following World Wars I and II. More compellingly, Toobin offers another explanation for Clinton’s impeachment: The whole affair involved petty, personal, partisan politics on an unprecedented scale, propelled by self-aggrandizing, largely irresponsible media. Sometimes the simple will do.

Toobin underlines the media’s important role in stoking the fires of the story and keeping it alive. But it is also clear that Clinton’s enemies knew they could use the media for their own purposes, all the while making it seem as if the media truly had uncovered the story. Lawyers, publicists and prosecutors played the media like an organ. Michael Isikoff is a prime example.

Toobin scathingly describes Isikoff as the man who “had helped to invent an entire new field in American journalism--sexual investigative reporting”--and singles him out for his role in giving the Clinton-haters a national platform. Isikoff, after all, was a very real prize: a journalist at the Washington Post before he left under cloudy circumstances and moved his operations to Newsweek. Sour, churlish, Isikoff was a man on a mission. He believed that Clinton “was far more psychologically disturbed than the public ever imagined.” Isikoff hated the president. That anger, coupled with his ambition to be a Woodstein, made him putty in the hands of New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, no novice when it came to seducing the media.

Toobin’s portrait of Kenneth Starr is devastating. Starr was neither Joe Friday nor Inspector Javert, but he was deeply immersed in anti-Clinton causes and institutions. The quiet consensual demise of the independent counsel statute is one of Starr’s more substantive legacies. When he tried to leave his post for the quiet shores of Malibu in 1997, he already knew what he quietly admitted at the end: More than four years of investigation of the president--for Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and whatever else could be conjured to trivialize Watergate--had yielded nothing to link the president to any criminal, let alone impeachment-worthy, offenses. Starr wisely decided to leave and let others write a null hypothesis. But his conservative friends prevailed on him, and he remained at his post, apparently not anxious to antagonize his supporters and patrons. And then, we might say, Monica Lewinsky fell into his lap.

*

Starr connived to gain the independent counsel appointment after the conservative-dominated judicial panel removed Robert Fiske. He was unfamiliar with the criminal justice system and especially with prosecutorial work. Starr eagerly sought to identify with Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, but such comparisons border on the ludicrous. Unlike Jaworski, Starr seems to have been a passive figure, greatly reliant on his staff for tactical and strategic decisions. He surrounded himself with second-raters, many of them government career lawyers (not by choice), most of whom shared his passionate antipathy toward the president. They were determined to display their “toughness,” even if it cost them substantive advantages. Witness, for example, their hostility toward Lewinsky’s lawyer, William Ginsburg (scorned by the Washington establishment but treated more fairly in “A Vast Conspiracy”), which scuttled an immunity deal with Lewinsky shortly after the revelations of her affair with the president. Toobin persuasively argues that this gave the president about seven months of her silence, allowing him a significant opportunity for political maneuvering and for allowing the story to settle down.

The story comes down to proportionality. Did the president lie about his personal sex life? Of course he did. But was the Republic in dire danger, teetering on the edge of legitimacy? Bill Clinton is hated and despised by many people; certainly they were eager to humiliate him and destroy his presidency. But many people, who neither admired nor liked him, firmly believed that impeachment was an absurd, misguided and evil concoction that served a narrow political agenda. More than that, they found his lies about sex a common failing, of which too many people are “guilty,” and preferred to let the subject alone. But the Republican leadership and the rank and file in the House of Representatives seemed obtuse about this and sacrificed common sense to party discipline.

The affair alternately titillated and disgusted Americans for more than a year. Is there anything serious or important to emerge from all this? We learned a little about DNA, about illegal taping, about the desperate clamoring for attention by a spoiled young woman (who did stalk the president), about the intensity of our culture wars and about the self-important and self-aggrandizing role of the media. Certainly, however, this was not an important event in the nation’s constitutional history.

Toobin spends more than three-fourths of his book tracing the vast conspiracy that emerged to destroy Clinton’s presidency shortly after he was elected. It began with local Arkansas enemies but soon sprawled across the nation. Crooked land deals, bribes, drug-running and, finally, the National Dirty Joke. But the ultimate joke was the impeachment process itself. It never was a serious affair. Pity that Toobin does not emphasize this. To do so, of course, is to make the leading characters in this story all the more incredulous and ridiculous.

Three American presidents have been threatened with removal from office. In 1868, Congress voted 11 impeachment articles against Andrew Johnson, centering on the charge that he had undermined the congressional Reconstruction program. In 1973-74, the House Judiciary Committee passed three impeachment articles against Richard Nixon, charging him with obstructing justice in a felonious case of political espionage and abusing power by using federal agencies to cover the crime and to advance his political power.

A quarter of a century later, Congress, hoping the concepts of “abuse of power” and “obstruction of justice” would resonate, used them to charge Clinton with lying--about sex. Such is the great moment for American constitutional history in 1998-’99. Clinton’s tormentors will not do very well in the history books.

The November 1998 elections and the fall of Newt Gingrich should have sobered the Republicans. But the House Judiciary Committee was one strange place. Despite Henry Hyde’s (R-Ill.) loquaciousness about a bipartisan solution, a promise of a careful deliberative process and his constitutional fetishism, the outcome was obvious. The committee members accepted Starr’s report without question or witnesses, save Starr himself--and then howled when the Senate would not call a laundry list of witnesses that the House managers belatedly requested. They rushed to judgment because Congress was about to expire and the new Congress would have a reduced Republican majority.

The Senate contemptuously treated the House charges, much to Hyde’s dismay and scorn. The most revealing moment came when the Senate voted to acquit the president. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Ark.), surely one of the Senate’s most vociferous partisans, voted not guilty on the charge of perjury but guilty on the obstruction of justice count. But Stevens had no illusions. For him the world still was a dangerous place, and he would not vote to remove the president if he knew that his vote would be decisive to the outcome. With remarkable candor, he said that Clinton had “not brought that level of danger to the nation which . . . is necessary to justify such an action.” Stevens correctly gauged the national mood; this trial simply was not serious.

*

There are no heroes in this tale, no redeeming moral and social virtue to offer in this rendering of American history. It is a smarmy story, filled with petty politics, all of it pushed along by an out-of-control media. The most constant theme is that the perpetrators remained wholly disconnected from that amorphous thing we call “the people.” Incredibly, the national mood was indifferent all along and yet, as Toobin suggests, powerful interests managed to propel the story for nearly two years. We are neither Puritans nor prudes; but probably the real subject here was infidelity, and that is a subject too many have had to contend with but prefer not to. In the end, the American people saved Clinton--almost in spite of himself.

After Johnson’s impeachment trial, regret quickly settled on the nation and, in the aftermath, impeachment was discredited for more than a century. Nixon’s egregious actions revived the concept in 1973, and after two years of conflict, the process resulted in his resignation. Clinton’s accusers never believed much in history, at their own great cost. Now our choices seem plain. Either impeachment will be used with promiscuity as a partisan weapon or it will be moribund once again. Sad business: Either result is bad for the American constitutional system.