Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [440]
In response to the claim of Hyde and other managers that they were vindicated—because the name “William Jefferson Clinton” would always have an asterisk next to it in American history books as the second president ever to be impeached by the House—the former president made no effort to hide his contempt. “They were disgraced, and he [Hyde] knows it,” Clinton said, his voice becoming accusatory. “They didn’t stick up for the rule of law. They conducted no independent investigation.… They ran a partisan hit job run by a bitter right-winger, Henry Hyde, who turned out to be a hypocrite on the personal issues. But he pleased Tom DeLay and his right-wing masters. That’s what I believe.” Clinton leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table of his Chappaqua study, before unloading more thoughts: “Yeah, I will always have an asterisk after my name, but I hope I’ll have two asterisks: One is ‘They impeached him,’ and the other is ‘He stood up to them and beat them. And he beat them like a yard dog.’ Because the way they behaved was atrocious, and [Hyde] knows it.”
Politics, like professional mud-wrestling, was a strange business. Within weeks of the impeachment trial’s shutting down, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was back in the White House dealing with President Clinton on matters relating to social security and global debt relief. As they exchanged pleasantries in the Oval Office, neither politician spoke of the past. “There was nothing to be really said,” sighed Lott. “I mean—I didn’t want him to thank me. And I didn’t want to heckle him, so probably we were two sons of the South just putting that chapter behind us.”
Bill Clinton behaved with equal civility when he met with Henry Hyde and other Republican House members who had tried to expel him from office. The president would tell world leaders like Yasir Arafat, president of the Palestinian National Authority, and others who marveled at his graciousness toward his political enemies: “These guys that impeached me, they come in and out of the White House all the time. They want to come to the Christmas parties and have their picture taken with their children.” Any political leader who was incapable of blocking out personal feelings, he would tell them, needed to “quit your job and get another line of work.” His mother, Virginia, had often lectured: “You must never become bitter. That’s the ultimate failure in life.” Bill Clinton had taken this advice to heart. He vowed that he would never display a hint of ill will, even toward those who had sought to destroy him politically, no matter how much he was boiling inside. “As far as they know, I don’t remember any of it,” he said of the impeachment proceedings that had nearly ended his presidency.
AT least one governmental official sat quietly on the sidelines, waiting for the dust to settle.
Precisely two months after the Senate voted to acquit President Clinton and a full year after she had thrown out the Paula Jones lawsuit, Judge Susan Webber Wright surprised court watchers by holding President Bill Clinton in civil contempt for giving “intentionally false” testimony in his Jones deposition. In a stern thirty-two-page rebuke of the president, dated April 12, 1999, the federal judge from Arkansas reprimanded Clinton for giving “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Judge Wright noted that it did not take a rocket scientist to figure out, in light of the vast sea of evidence that had washed ashore during the congressional impeachment proceedings, that Clinton had lied through his teeth during his deposition. He clearly had uttered falsehoods when he had denied being alone with Monica Lewinsky; he had flagrantly misled the court when he insisted