Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [432]
The senators were all ears.
“And when you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’” Bumpers declared, delivering the punch line, “it’s about sex.”
The senators erupted with laughter. Now Bumpers had them eating out of his hand. He moved in for the kill. “There is a human element in this case that has not even been mentioned. That is, the President and Hillary and Chelsea are human beings.” Although Bill Clinton’s conduct had been shameless and abhorrent, what the House managers were trying to do—heaping pain and ignominy on Clinton after he had been publicly disgraced—was “too much for a family that has already been about as decimated as a family can get.”
Why had Bill Clinton lied? For the same reason any man or woman in his position would have done it, declared Bumpers: “Well, he knew this whole affair was about to bring unspeakable embarrassment and humiliation on himself, his wife whom he adored, and a child that he worshipped with every fiber of his body and for whom he would happily have died to spare her or to ameliorate her shame and her grief.”
House Manager Henry Hyde was squirming in his seat. He would later complain that this seventy-three-year-old Arkansas populist made him grit his teeth. Hyde would say of Bumpers’s closing argument: “It was sawdust in the meatloaf.” Yet others in the room were listening with rapt attention.
“We are, none of us, perfect,” Bumpers declared, pacing back and forth. “There is a total lack of proportionality, a total lack of balance in this thing. The charge and the punishment are totally out of sync.” Bumpers reminded his colleagues, almost in a whisper, that 65 to 70 percent of the American public believed Clinton should remain in office. He concluded, his voice quivering, “They are calling on you to rise above politics, rise above partisanship. They are calling on you to do your solemn duty, and I pray you will.”
A throng of senators jumped up to shake Bumpers’s hand. These included dozens of Republicans, including the elderly Strom Thurmond, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and William V. Roth, Jr., of Delaware.
When Bumpers returned to his home in D.C., exhausted, his wife handed him the phone: President Clinton was on the line. Clinton had watched every minute of the speech on television. If the senators could have voted “within an hour after [Bumpers] spoke,” the president told his elder Arkansas friend, he would have been acquitted on the spot.
That evening on the national news, Senator John Chafee, a moderate Republican from Rhode Island, told a national audience that every senator needed to reassess his or her position in light of the former Arkansas senator’s speech. Bumpers felt a sense of quiet satisfaction with his work. Even if his remarks did not change a particular senator’s views, he felt, at least maybe they “knocked [a few] off the log.”
THE next day, a sheet of paper was circulated within the Senate chamber: “Statement by U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd—a Call for Dismissal of the Charges and End of the Trial.” In this brief document, which Byrd personally handed to Henry Hyde, the West Virginia senator announced that he would file a motion to dismiss all charges against President Clinton. Senator Byrd wrote: “I am convinced that the necessary two-thirds for conviction are not there and that they are not likely to develop. I have also become convinced that lengthening this trial will only prolong and deepen the divisive, bitter, and polarizing effect that this sorry affair has visited upon our nation. I see a motion to dismiss as the best way to promptly end this sad and sorry time for our country.”
Byrd’s announcement not only threw the House managers for a loop, but also nearly knocked the Democratic leadership out of their chairs. Byrd was the antithesis of a Clinton coddler. He