Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [431]
Bumpers continued to resist. Even if the speech were a “howling success,” he said, he wasn’t sure he could do much to slow the Republicans’ momentum. “Frankly,” recalled Bumpers, “I didn’t feel up to it.”
Three days later, Bumpers stood in the well of the Senate, delivering the most important speech of his political career, even though his career was over.
Bumpers had been told to keep the speech to twenty-five minutes. Now, as he stepped up to the lectern, holding twenty-one pages of scattered notes, White House aides whispered that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott might introduce a motion to permit testimony from Monica Lewinsky and other witnesses. They needed to stop that train; Bumpers was instructed to keep talking and double the length of his remarks.
The retired senator looked into the sea of former associates’ faces and began his oratory. “You can take some comfort, colleagues, in the fact that I am not being paid,” he joked, “and when I finish, you will probably think the White House got their money’s worth.” Gusts of laughter swept through the room. Finally, the senators were listening to one of their own. Bumpers was folksy. He was humorous. Unlike the House managers, he didn’t sound vengeful. This was music to their senatorial ears.
Paul Wellstone, Democrat from Minnesota, was suffering from back problems and was forced to listen from the cloakroom. The remaining ninety-nine senators all were seated upright in their chairs, fully attentive. “It was a really awesome time,” Bumpers would later say, shaking his head. “A most memorable, historic time.”
Bumpers began by admitting that he was a longtime friend of Bill Clinton. They had gone on political jaunts together in Arkansas, one time flying in a twin-engine plane that had crashed on the way to the Gillett Coon Supper (a yearly gathering in Gillett, Arkansas, at which fresh raccoons were cooked in kettles before being smoked). Bumpers noted that he and Clinton had both jumped out of their twin-engine plane on that snowy evening “and ran away unscathed, to the dismay of every politician in Arkansas.” As the senators laughed appreciatively, Bumpers grew more serious: “The President and I have been together hundreds of times at parades, dedications, political events, social events. And in all of those years and all of those hundreds of times we have been together, both in public and in private, I have never one time seen the President conduct himself in a way that did not reflect the highest credit on him, his family, his state and his beloved nation.”
Bumpers had soon found a rhythm, strolling back and forth in front of the lectern, nearly yanking the twenty-two-foot cord on his microphone out of the wall. There was “danger” afoot in these historic proceedings, he told his former colleagues—the United States Constitution could be horribly abused if the senators were not vigilant. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 65 had made clear that the purpose of impeachment was to remove a leader who posed a threat to the state. Bumpers now waved his hands so that no senator could miss his point: After five years of relentless investigations of President Bill Clinton, and after $50 million spent by Ken Starr’s office, there was not a single scrap of evidence of criminal wrongdoing. “Nothing,” Bumpers stated, shaking his fist in the air.
“We are here today”—Bumpers was now on a roll—“because the President suffered