Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [416]
As he bid farewell to the woman who had reared him and taught him to lead a humble and honorable life, Ken Starr found a bitter irony in the fact that his face was appearing on the covers of millions of copies of Time magazine—covers that his mother would never see. The Time article, in feting two men locked in a political fight to the death—as the country tumbled into a new year with a Senate impeachment trial pending—amounted to a backhanded compliment to both recipients. It was as if the magazine were presenting a dubious award to two combatants who had engaged in a prolonged, bloody, undignified struggle that had stripped away the mystique of public service, thus hastening the death of American virtue.
The Time piece began: “For rewriting the book on crime and punishment, for putting prices on values we didn’t want to rank, for fighting past all reason a battle whose casualties will be counted for years to come, Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr are TIME’s Men of the Year.”
CHAPTER
48
THIRTEEN ANGRY MANAGERS
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was sitting in the den of his home on the Gulf of Mexico in Pascagoula, Mississippi, as the House of Representatives registered its historic vote to impeach President Bill Clinton. The handsome former cheerleader from Ole Miss, who favored an American flag pin on his lapel to display his ardent patriotism, was not in the least pleased. As a member of the House for sixteen years, he represented a district that abutted that of Congressman Bob Livingston, just across the Pearl River in Louisiana. The Livingston and Lott children had grown up together; wives Trish Lott and Bonnie Livingston were dear friends. Watching the “staggering sequence of events” that had forced Livingston to step down after Larry Flynt had “outted” him was like a knife driven into Lott’s own heart. This president, whom Lott didn’t especially like, had engaged in disgraceful conduct. Yet the Mississippi senator had no desire to manage an unseemly impeachment trial. As he stared at the television, Senator Lott’s jaw fell open. He remembered thinking, “This bomb [is] being pitched into my lap.”
Lott picked up the phone and dialed the home of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Democrat from South Dakota. The two men’s relationship was at times prickly; yet of late, they had been working together productively. Lott calmly told his colleague, “Tom, we’re going to have to deal with this thing. And I hope we can do it with the proper decorum and dignity and fairness.”
The two senators agreed on one point—the whole impeachment effort had been “mishandled in the House.” It had turned into “far too politicized and far too confrontational an experience.” They would now have to manage the trial “in keeping with the expectations of the American people” in a fashion that would withstand history’s scrutiny. To do this, the two leaders would have to eliminate the stench of partisanship, however difficult that might be.
Quietly, the Senate had already begun printing copies of a memo called “Procedures and Guidelines for Impeachment Trials in the United States Senate.” This obscure document had been authored by the Senate parliamentarian during the Watergate era; it covered the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in 1868, with updates to include more recent trials of federal judges in the late 1980s. This pamphlet was all the Senate had as a road map for the Clinton impeachment trial. Using only a four-digit document number to keep reporters from catching wind of it, the Senate staffers had quietly ordered thousands of copies to be published and bound, readying themselves for an onslaught of questions concerning a trial for