Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [410]
The House Republican caucus crowded into a basement room in the Capitol to watch televised coverage, as tracer lights arced through the sky and bombs rained down on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad shortly after 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time. With dark bags under his eyes, President Clinton delivered a sober address to the nation, explaining the necessity of swift military strikes to disarm Iraq’s “nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.” If left unchecked, Clinton warned, “Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.” The haggard-looking president declared that even the current crisis in Washington would not “distract Americans or weaken our resolve to face [our enemies] down.”
Defense Secretary Bill Cohen hurried over to Capitol Hill, seeking to calm the jitters of vacillating members of Congress. In the meantime, House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston scheduled the opening of impeachment debates for Friday, December 18. He would postpone impeachment hearings one day, Livingston allowed, in deference to the troops. But Bill Clinton was not going to avoid his day of reckoning by picking fights with Iraqi dictators.
Experts in the American presidency would forever speculate on whether the stress of five years’ worth of scandals and, now, an imminent impeachment vote, were finally beginning to cloud President Clinton’s judgment. The party line, expressed by the president’s inner circle, was that Clinton compartmentalized matters so masterfully that he was able to block out this (and any other) distraction.
A number of advisers speaking off the record, however, acknowledged that in these circumstances it was humanly impossible for Clinton or any other mortal to keep from being shaken to the core. Underneath the crisp presidential suits, Bill Clinton was hurt, angry (at himself and others), and fearful of what would happen when the House vote arrived. “There is not a way in the world that you can have all this crap going on and it’s not going to affect you,” one aide said. “And just the energy level, distraction, whatever the criteria … it’s just mathematically an improbability that you can have all that going on and it doesn’t have an impact.”
Ordinarily, Bill Clinton had an uncanny ability to deflect distractions. “He was like a summer thunderstorm,” said a high-level adviser. “He could work himself up into quite a fuss and then literally get over it and go on to the next thing.” This time, however, things seemed different.
At some moments, during this period of incessant stress and upheaval, Clinton “was there, but he really wasn’t there. Either he was tired or distracted.” Ordinarily, William Jefferson Clinton was a “game-day player” who could “suck it up” and wrap his mind around issues even when chaos was unleashed around him. By the middle of December 1998, however, Clinton’s legendary mental reserves were nearly tapped out.
Clinton’s advisers were acutely aware that President Richard M. Nixon had slowly become obsessed with Watergate, lashing out daily in the media about the scandal and ultimately causing his own demise. For this reason, the Clinton team tried to keep their boss focused on his job, creating a “parallel universe” in which the impeachment maelstrom did not even exist. Recalled Paul Begala: “Almost every day in private he would vent” to force the anger “out of his system.” Then his staff would hustle him off to his next presidential engagement to shift his mind to other subjects.
At a White House Christmas concert held on December 17, with the impeachment vote dangling like the sword of Damocles over the executive mansion, guests observed Bill Clinton trying valiantly to appear “in control,” presiding over the receiving line with the First Lady, shaking hands and giving bear hugs to close friends. The concert, celebrating thirty years of the Special Olympics, ironically was dubbed “A Very Special Christmas from Washington D.C.” A star-studded cast of well-wishers led by host Whoopi Goldberg lined up to take pictures with the president and then boarded