Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [167]
Justice Stevens, however, would express no regret about his ruling. Seated in his Supreme Court chambers several years later, the eighty-year-old justice said, “The opinion was just part of a day’s work.” Stevens had been assigned the job of authoring the majority opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who undoubtedly selected him with political considerations in mind (Stevens said, eyes twinkling) because he was viewed as a reliable liberal, which meant that Rehnquist could shield himself from criticism “if the opinion was written by me rather than him.”
Stevens did not anguish in drafting the opinion in his Florida condominium during the Court’s winter break. In his small office facing the Intracoastal Waterway, surrounded by blue waters and clear skies, he had tapped away at his home computer. “When I wrote it, I had no sense that it would have a dramatic effect on anything,” Justice Stevens said candidly. “It has been criticized as being naive. That is quite misguided, I think. The likelihood that any decision would have let him [President Clinton] get off without even a deposition being taken was about one chance in one million.” Even if the trial had been postponed until the president left office, Justice Stevens underscored, discovery would still have gone forward. No matter how one sliced it, Bill Clinton was going to be forced to testify under oath. “If anything,” Stevens pointed out, “the plaintiff’s lawyers would have had to take a deposition faster to preserve testimony, if the trial was delayed.” One way or another, said the senior justice, regardless of the constitutional nuances, President Clinton was going to have to give sworn testimony in the Jones case and face the consequences.
Justice Stevens also stressed, folding his hands patiently, that the problems that resulted from the Jones decision were of President Bill Clinton’s own making. The Court had no way of predicting that this president would eventually be caught having an affair with a young intern and fibbing about it—this was not something that even Clinton’s most ardent enemies could have dreamed up. “The possibility that this man would have done something so unwise and let himself get caught,” said the eighty-year-old jurist, “was extremely remote.”
In the end, Justice Stevens would stand behind the soundness of the Court’s decision in the Jones case. Congress was perfectly free to create immunity from civil suits for presidents; it had not yet chosen to do so. It was simply not the Court’s job to invent constitutional privileges out of whole cloth.
Stevens sat back on the small sofa under his chambers, having just returned from a brisk match of tennis that had energized him. When it came to the national scandal that eventually engulfed the Clinton presidency, Justice Stevens made clear that he had not even a smidgen of guilt that his opinion had caused it. “I never had that thought for a second. I never had the slightest regret about a single word of the opinion. I wouldn’t change a word.”
“The only thing that came out of our case,” Stevens said firmly, placing a copy of the U.S. Reports on the coffee table in front of him, indicating that it was time to get back to work, “was that President Clinton had to give a deposition.”
ON August 11, 1997, Michael Isikoff published a piece in Newsweek titled “A Twist in Jones v. Clinton,” sending a shiver through the White House. A week earlier, a gossipy new Internet publication called the “Drudge Report”—hosted by quirky California introvert Matt Drudge—had scooped the Isikoff story and dumped an advance version onto the internet. Now the lurid account was all over the world. It included the grotesque particulars of Kathleen Willey’s allegations, down to Clinton’s alleged kissing and fondling of her the day before her husband committed suicide. Now there was a new twist: Both publications revealed that a