Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [397]
Democrats were becoming increasingly fearful that the other shoe could drop at any moment. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Ken Starr himself made clear that he did not rule out “further impeachment referrals.” Feeling empowered and emboldened, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee defeated the moderate Democratic “Boucher plan” by a straight party-line vote of 21 to 16. Barney Frank told his skittish Democratic colleagues, “This is the Russian Army. They can’t maneuver. They’re just going to go straight ahead.” On October 8, the full House, led by resolute Republicans, voted 258 to 176 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to commence a wide-open impeachment investigation.
THE president was not the only one on the ropes. On October 30, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson named a “special master” to investigate Ken Starr and his prosecutors, to determine if they had illegally leaked grand jury material to the media.
The details of this piece of the Clinton-Starr saga, although significant, were largely hidden from public view. The special master appointed to handle this sensitive inquiry was Judge John W. Kern III, a senior judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, the equivalent of a state supreme court jurist. Judge Kern was a straight-shooting, conservative Democrat who was appointed in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson. At age sixty-nine, Kern had a caseload light enough that he was willing to accept the assignment. Kern’s job was to put witnesses under oath, as an “agent” of Chief Judge Johnson, and to write a report on his findings. His office, unknown to the rest of Washington, was tucked away in the Watergate complex, sharing space with a small law firm to remain hidden from view. In the same building where Monica Lewinsky was holed up in her apartment, Judge Kern began quietly preparing to investigate the investigators. He hired a former law clerk to serve as his assistant and then secured a second room in the bowels of the John Marshall Court house, tiptoeing around the press and gathering evidence to determine if Starr and his team had crossed the line that separated aggressive prosecutors from criminal lawbreakers.
THE midterm election, scheduled for November 3, represented a test of mettle for both sides. For months, House Speaker Newt Gingrich had boasted publicly that the Republicans would pick up twenty-two seats in the House, increasing their commanding majority in that chamber while simultaneously boosting their numbers in the Senate. Indeed, Gingrich had bet the farm by allocating $10 million of Republican funds for television and radio ads that showcased the nasty Clinton scandals, pounding away at the president’s moral debauchery and the disgrace he had visited upon his office. The confident Speaker went as far as to tell Clinton, during a private phone conversation, that he (Clinton) should start drafting his letter of resignation. The midterm elections, Gingrich predicted, would mark the beginning of the end of the defiled Clinton presidency.
Yet politics was an unpredictable business. As one Clinton insider would note, the Republicans’ overzealousness provided Bill Clinton with just the escape hatch he needed. “If in October of 1998 Newt Gingrich had accepted the Democratic impeachment resolution,” this adviser pointed out, “then all of a sudden, there would have been a unanimous inquiry.” A united Democratic-Republican front, the White House understood too clearly, would have likely ended the Clinton presidency. To the relief of many top Clinton political advisers, however, the Republicans kept marching forward and went for a total victory.
Not only was Gingrich’s bold prediction about the outcome of the November election wildly off the mark, but the unexpected election results proved to be the beginning of the end for Gingrich himself. Rather than picking up a dozen seats in the House, the GOP lost five, whittling down its majority from 223 to 218. It was the first time since 1934 that the party not occupying