Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [1]
A strange unease gripped the House chamber. Pornographer Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, had just run a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering a million-dollar bounty for information leading to “evidence of illicit sexual relations” involving members of Congress, especially prominent Republicans. Flynt had dubbed the Starr Report “more depraved and scandalous” than any act Bill Clinton had committed. Now the pornographer had set out to expose the “hypocrisy” of this impeachment drive. As the seventy-four-year-old Hyde stepped to the microphone, he cursed how things had taken such an ugly turn.
It was bad enough that Hyde himself had recently been the victim of an attack by the liberal Internet publication Salon. That magazine had revealed that Hyde had engaged in an adulterous affair with a hairdresser named Cherie Snodgrass in 1965, back when Hyde was forty-one years old. Now, thirty-three years later, with his wife Jeanne dead of breast cancer and his four grown children raising children of their own, Hyde had been forced to confess his “youthful indiscretions,” the most humiliating experience of his four decades in public life.
In this city infested with political vipers, it seemed that no politician was safe. A day earlier, Flynt’s offer of blood money had ensnared Hyde’s colleague, Representative Bob Livingston (a Republican from Louisiana), the man slated to replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House in the wake of the disastrous midterm elections in November. Capitol Hill’s Roll Call now reported that Livingston had engaged in a host of extramarital liaisons—with a female judge in Louisiana, with a lobbyist, and with a member of his own staff. Representative Livingston had tried to blunt the attack, calling Flynt a “bottom feeder.” To this, Flynt replied smugly, “Well, that’s right. But look what I found when I got down there.” Everywhere one turned, there appeared to be destruction, carnage, bodies littered across the road. On this historic Saturday morning, Henry Hyde was still determined to do his constitutional duty.
Democrats and Republicans took turns at the microphone, alternately defending and excoriating President Bill Clinton. Chairman Hyde yielded two minutes of time to his friend, Speaker designate Bob Livingston. What Livingston would say, under these odd circumstances, Hyde had no idea.
“You know,” Hyde whispered to Livingston as he brushed past him stiffly, “these things blow over.”
Speaker pro tem Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), a huge American flag draped behind him, wielded the gavel like a railroad man prepared to pound steel ties into the track. He pronounced somberly: “Proceed.” Livingston arranged his typed remarks on the lectern. Tall, thin, silver-haired, and famous for his unflappable demeanor, Bob Livingston was a model of congressional comportment. Today there was something ill at ease about his appearance.
“Mr. Speaker,” he began. The time was 9:45 A.M.
Livingston had completed writing out this statement the previous night in a fit of insomnia, wrestling with demons that this Clinton madness had unleashed. He wore a dark pin-striped suit and a Christmas tie; the latter conveyed not a hint of yuletide cheer. “We are all pawns on the chessboard,” Livingston read through his bifocals, “and we are playing our parts in a drama that is neither fiction nor unimportant.”
Those who knew Bob Livingston recognized that there was something strange about his delivery. The normally strong and confident fifty-five-year-old lawyer from New Orleans was fiddling with his fingers and straightening his tie. “I will vote to impeach the president of the United States and ask that his case be considered by the United States Senate,” said the Speaker designate. He touched the microphone