Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [435]
Leaning forward at his desk, the chief House manager allowed a tinge of bitterness to slip into his voice: “[The Senate] wouldn’t let us produce bodies. We had to use a [video] screen to have them testify. They did everything but put duct tape around our mouths.”
Chairman Hyde had become thoroughly demoralized. “It wasn’t overdramatizing to talk about ‘we band of brothers,’” Hyde recalled of this deflating time. “We were alone.”
WITH the cold weather of February gripping Washington, Chief Justice Rehnquist came down with a nasty flu. Yet he refused to call for a recess, recognizing that any break in the proceeding might cause some new crisis to bubble up, keeping him trapped in the Senate forever. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was concerned that her friend the chief appeared tired and overworked. It was obvious that he was looking forward to the day when he would “not have to spend time over there [in the Capitol].” O’Connor concluded, lifting her steely eyes as if to express the sentiment of every justice, that Rehnquist had ample reason to want to finish his assignment in the Senate. “Good heavens …” she said, leaving her explanation at that.
Yet there was no easy escape hatch. To the dismay of senators of both parties, Chairman Hyde announced that all thirteen managers would make closing statements, like a bad movie that continued to play in a loop. Senator Orrin Hatch, the respected Republican from Utah, proposed adjourning the trial and issuing a stiff resolution rebuking the president in order to snatch acquittal from Bill Clinton’s grasp.
As appealing as the Hatch plan was to some Republicans, the leadership viewed it as a cop-out. “I mean, if our goal was only to make a statement or to embarrass [Clinton] … maybe that would have been okay,” Majority Leader Lott later explained. “But I really thought we had an impeachment process that was laid out by history and precedent and we ought to [finish] it.”
During the House managers’ closing, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina scored points when he played a segment of Monica Lewinsky’s videotaped testimony, in which she commented on a late-night call during which Clinton broke the news that the young woman was on the Jones case witness list. “Where I come from,” said Graham, “you call somebody at two-thirty in the morning—you’re up to no good.” That line elicited a hearty burst of bipartisan snickers among the senators. But the video appearance of Monica Lewinsky, viewed by millions of Americans at home, did nothing to change the trial’s momentum. In fact, many viewers were surprised to see how professionally and deftly the twenty-five-year-old former intern—sporting a chic new hairstyle—had bested her questioners from the U.S. Congress.
White House Counsel Charles Ruff closed for the defense team on February 8, wheeling himself into the middle of the floor and excoriating the House managers for “wanting to win too much.” Ruff ended the trial with the same words he had used to open it. William Jefferson Clinton, he told the senators, “did not commit perjury. He did not commit obstruction of justice. He must not be removed from office.” Parliamentarian Robert Dove, who was seated next to Chief Justice Rehnquist’s chair, could sense that Ruff’s tenacity and intellectual clarity was carrying the day. Dove recalled, “If you are going to acquit, it’s nice to have some plausible argument as to why you should [do it].”
Majority Leader Lott had already done the mental tabulations. “Short of murder,” he had calculated, the Democratic