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By Root 1688 0

gray and chilly. A cold front, moving east with light showers, kept temperatures hovering below fifty degrees. Over municipal buildings, red, blue, and white state flags of Arkansas snapped in the breeze. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had already begun printing Sunday papers bearing the black headline “Impeached.” Salvation Army volunteers along West Markham Street held their bells silent. The Rose Law Firm, where First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had launched her legal career before moving to Washington, seemed to be paralyzed as if hit by an ice storm. Festive holly wreaths adorning the wooden doors hung like flora stricken by a killing frost. A dozen Mercedes in the parking lot sat idle, as if their batteries had unexpectedly died. Inside the redbrick building, lawyers sat frozen in front of portable television sets, watching replays of the vote tally.

The latest reports from Washington cut in over sound systems of downtown department stores, momentarily interrupting Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas,” a sacred anthem in Little Rock. Elvis was still king in this Southern town; yet even Elvis had to take a backseat today to the shocking news being broadcast from Washington.

Bill Clinton’s closest friends were numb from disbelief.

Skip Rutherford, who had cast one of Arkansas’s electoral votes during Clinton’s triumphant victory of 1992, drove home from his downtown Little Rock office, collapsed in front of the television in his den, and refused to take calls. In this same room, Rutherford had answered a barrage of media calls the night his friend Vince Foster had committed suicide in 1993—after Vince had gone to Washington to help Bill and Hillary make a difference. Now all Rutherford had the strength to do was watch a flickering Walton Family Christmas Special, one of his childhood favorites about an honest mountain family that struggled through hard times in the Depression. He watched for hours, with the telephone wire yanked out of the wall, until sleep extinguished this bad dream.

Joe Purvis, who had attended kindergarten with Clinton in the little town of Hope, back when Bill Clinton’s name was still “Billy Blythe” and their mothers had pushed them on swings together, was traveling to Washington to attend a White House Christmas party. Purvis and his wife, Susan, caught the news while changing planes in Cincinnati. The couple looked at each other in horror. Purvis whispered, “My God.…” The burly Purvis was big enough to pick Clinton up and throw him into the nearest river, and he felt like doing it now. Among other things, Bill had lied to his face, by flat-out denying the affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Yet the real culprit, Purvis felt, was not Bill Clinton. Whatever had happened with this young intern “was really no one’s business but Bill’s and Monica Lewinsky’s and Hillary’s.” In Purvis’s mind, the true villain here was Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel run amok. “I was appalled that Mr. Starr would issue this report that bordered on voyeurism,” he would explain, “trying to get a minute description of every sordid little detail of an encounter. Then printing it up … and Congress publishing the thing and putting it on the Internet and turning it loose. Talk about obscenity.”

Purvis believed there was another group of bad guys—the extremists leading the Republican Congress, who had decided to press impeachment at all costs. They had proclaimed: “We don’t give a damn what the American people have said [in rebuffing the Republicans in the November elections]. We want impeachment, and we’re going to do it.” They were hell-bent on killing Bill Clinton’s presidency, regardless of the destruction it rained down on the country.

Arkansas Supreme Court Justice David Newbern had known the Clintons since his days teaching at University of Arkansas Law School, back when Bill and Hillary had arrived in Fayetteville as young professors. Then-Governor Clinton had appointed him to the Court of Appeals in 1978. Now, on the verge of retirement from the state’s highest court, he owed a great debt of gratitude to