Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [426]
The chief’s aides, however, viewed these stories as reflecting a failure to understand a genuinely private man with a dry sense of humor who was innately fair to a fault. Jim Duff, himself a distinguished Washington lawyer, later said that the notion that the chief had an ax to grind with Clinton constituted a colossal misunderstanding.
“I’d like to say that to President Clinton someday,” said Duff, who served as a pallbearer in Rehnquist’s funeral in 2005. Even if the chief had made an innocent joke on occasion, he said, “I can’t imagine that he meant anything by it.” In fact, throughout the course of the entire impeachment proceedings, said Duff, “I never heard him utter a negative thing about President Clinton whatsoever.”
What drove Rehnquist more than anything in handling this assignment, those close to him concurred, was his firm grasp of history. Years earlier, the chief had authored Grand Inquests, a book about the great impeachment trials in American history. Rehnquist was keenly aware that Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who had presided over the trial of President Andrew Johnson a century earlier, had seriously tarnished his own reputation, along with that of the Court, by favoring the overly aggressive House managers who had utterly failed to make their case against the president. Rehnquist had no intention of repeating that mistake as his legacy to American history.
His paramount concern was to make sure this Senate trial did not disrupt his duties at the Supreme Court. “He was going to get the work of the Court done,” Duff said. “Every break, he spent reading briefs. We had some brutal snowstorms during that time. He never closed the Court. He was from Wisconsin; these things didn’t phase him.”
Even many White House loyalists came to change their opinions of the chief justice. One Clinton adviser confessed reluctantly, “There was (initially) a presumption if Rehnquist could screw us and get away, that he would.” As the trial moved forward, however, “while we weren’t interested in paying him any compliments, privately or publicly, I think on balance we felt like, other than his imperialness, that he played it straight.”
Still, neither Democrats nor Republicans were placing any bets. Despite later accounts that suggested that the outcome of the trial was foreordained, this was not the feeling that pervaded the Senate chamber. As it entered its second week, the Clinton impeachment trial seemed more like a game played according to “bar room rules,” by which participants “sit in a bar and make rules up while they’re drinking.” Anything could change; any contestant could switch sides without warning; any rule in the rule book could be rewritten without notice.
Explained one White House insider, the only thing that was perfectly clear was “how inevitable nothing was.”
CHAPTER
49
A SCOTTISH VOTE
Charles Ruff, representing the president of the United States, locked up his wheelchair in the middle of the Senate well. His hands were trembling. On this day, Tuesday, January 19, he was perspiring noticeably. It was one of the rare times, other than the day he learned of the president’s indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, that colleagues had seen the unflappable Ruff worked up.
Ruff appeared uncomfortable with his back facing the chief justice; as a courtroom lawyer, he was trained to show respect to the presiding judge. Glancing over his shoulder to wait for Rehnquist’s nod, he finally began: “William Jefferson Clinton is not guilty of the charges that have been proffered against him. He did not commit