Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [87]
If you think about the impeachment process in a way that would make sense, the House of Representatives was like a grand jury. The articles of impeachment were like a criminal indictment. The indictment is sent to the Senate for trial, but now the grand jurors—or their representatives, the House managers—are the prosecutors and the senators are the jury. The House managers were apparently not chosen because of their skill in presenting a case; they were partisans, making political speeches, inside and outside the chamber. The President, on the other hand, had real defense lawyers, and the Clinton defense team was good at what they did. The evidence would be the sworn statements the President had given special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and the evidence of three key witnesses—Vernon Jordan, Monica Lewinsky, and Sidney Blumenthal. The House managers and the Senate wanted—rightly, I think—to avoid the spectacle of Monica Lewinsky in the well of the United States Senate, so it was agreed that the three witnesses’ testimony would be taken by videotaped depositions. The House managers and the Clinton defense team would do the questioning, and representatives of the jurors—six senators—would preside over the depositions.
In his first weeks as a senator, John was chosen to be one of the six presiding officers. It made sense; he had more trial experience, and more recent trial experience, than anyone else in the Senate. In a place where seniority means everything, it was an extraordinary opportunity to participate in this moment of history. Extraordinary, too, was the fact that John’s first speech on the floor of the Senate would be given from the well of the Senate to ninety-nine other senators and to the Chief Justice of the United States. Most senators speak for the first time on the floor of the Senate from their desks to a nearly-empty chamber, and they wait months to do even that. This was very different.
John called me from the Democratic cloakroom, which is just off the floor of the Senate. His Senate staff had written a speech that tried to bridge his displeasure with the President’s conduct—horror really—and his conclusion that the House managers had not proven an impeachable offense. So couched was every phrase that the draft, which tried to disparage the President’s conduct while exonerating it, managed to say nothing at all. John called me to say he didn’t like it. “Write your own speech,” I told him. “It’s what you should have done in the first place.” John always had this management style: he would let younger lawyers make the opening argument in a trial; he would let them question key witnesses. It was training, and it was opportunity. I always complained about it, because I thought the client always deserved him. He was doing it again, and I said what I had always said—no one can say it like you can say it.
The speech wasn’t hard for him. John wanted to do the right thing and be responsible. He had said to me many times that if he thought Clinton was guilty, politics would not have kept him from voting to impeach. But it was never an issue. The House had miscalculated on the charges in order to get the most political effect, but in doing so had charged him with offenses on which no jury would have convicted him if they were following the law. The best proof of this was in a question that John and Herb Kohl, senator from Wisconsin, asked the House managers, the prosecutors: “Would you agree that whether President Clinton is guilty or not is an issue about which reasonable people could disagree?” If the answer is yes, that means it is