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2.14.99
New England was pivotal in Clinton trial The impact of the region's lawmakers on the impeachment, trial and acquittal of the president shows "that New England is back as a political force," a Brown University political scientist says. By JOHN E. MULLIGAN Journal Washington Bureau |
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It may be the land of the Puritan and the witch trials, but, in the end, politicians from New England played a prominent part in the survival of President Clinton. Some of the help came from expected sources. Rhode Island Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy avoided the media for the first week of what was to become a 54-week watch on the White House scandal front. But when he spoke up, on the day of last year's State of the Union address, he outstripped even the president's wife for ferocity. Kennedy excoriated the "scandal-mongering media" in a flurry of interviews near the Capitol. He put Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr at the center of a "right-wing conspiracy." He proclaimed that President Clinton would ride out the storm. And as the embattled president took the House speaker's rostrum that night, the 30-year-old congressman leaped to his side to grasp Mr. Clinton's hands. No other New Englander - indeed, few politicians anywhere - matched Kennedy for brashness in defense of Mr. Clinton this past year. But a look back at the Monica Lewinsky affair through the regional lens shows that Mr. Clinton also needed help from New England politicians who were appalled by his conduct. "What this whole thing shows me is that New England is back as a political force," Brown University political scientist Darrell M. West said yesterday. "Southern conservatives for several years had become really dominant in Congress. It was the Southerners who pushed the whole impeachment," West said, referring to such figures as House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. New England had emerged from the 1996 elections more Democratic and more liberal than before, and gave Mr. Clinton a clean sweep in his reelection bid. It's no coincidence, West said, that " New England turned out to play an incredibly critical role in his survival." That was true not only of Mr. Clinton's most mordant advocates, such as the Fall River-area Rep. Barney Frank. Mr. Clinton is also indebted, in a sense, to some of the Democrats most repelled by his recklessness and deceit. Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman and Rhode Island Rep. Robert A. Weygand, for example, cut against the partisan grain last summer when they stood up to condemn Mr. Clinton for his lies and evasions of responsibility. But such Democrats lent moral weight to the winning argument in the midwinter presidential trial: Mr. Clinton's alleged crimes, even if proved, did not threaten the nation; he should not be removed from office. Finally, in the noon hour of Lincoln's birthday, it was the tiny cadre of the Republican Party's once-dominant Northeastern wing that helped make Mr. Clinton's acquittal bipartisan. Sen. John H. Chafee and his fellow Republican moderates stressed their reliance on standards of legal proof. But they also acknowledged the political element in their vote. "I kept trying to imagine how I would defend a vote to convict," said Chafee. "Removal of the president is a very serious business. You don't want to do that over charges that look at all flimsy." A YEAR AGO at this time, the charges looked very grave to many in Congress. Democratic Sen. Jack Reed's initial reaction to the news of the Lewinsky probe was actually sharper than Chafee's. Like Chafee and many other senators, though, Reed generally avoided judgments in his commentary on the case. If Mr. Clinton is impeached, "I actually get to judge" the evidence in a Senate trial, he said. For most of Congress, Mr. Clinton's adventures were a spectator sport until Aug. 17. That day, Starr's team questioned him before a grand jury. That night, he made his grudging admission to the illicit affair he had denied for so long. Now it was clear that Starr's referral of evidence might be nigh and impeachment a possibility. The battle lines in Congress began to harden. Rep. James P. McGovern, of Worcester, played an early role on the national stage for the Democrats, casting Swansea in a bit part. McGovern gave Mr. Clinton a warm welcome at a hastily scheduled presidential visit to Worcester, at the Northwestern edge of the 3rd congressional district. The visit, Mr. Clinton's first post-confession sojourn away from his Martha's Vineyard vacation on Aug. 27, received heavy news coverage. Again and again, McGovern quoted ordinary Bay Staters, including some he had just met at a meeting in Swansea, to this effect: We want the president and the Congress to attend to our needs in education, health care, Social Security. We don't want any more focus on scandal. Democrat Lieberman rocked the White House with an entirely different focus, on the Senate's first day back to work after the August recess. "I was deeply angered by the president's recklessness and purposeful deceit," Lieberman recalled the other day. Quoting a famous historian, he called the president the people's "one authentic trumpet," and lamented the notes that Mr. Clinton had sounded - particularly as they had fallen so loudly on the ears of children. Coming from a long-time political ally and friend of Mr. Clinton, Lieberman's speech gave credibility to the charges against him even before they arrived in Congress. They arrived, explosively and in raw form, on Sept. 9, when Starr delivered his referral to the Capitol steps by truck. Two days later, Congress released most of the evidence of allegedly impeachable crimes to the public. Chafee, Reed and Weygand called for a formal inquiry. Kennedy was avoiding comment on the Lewinsky matter at that point. Frank, preparing for his role as Mr. Clinton's point man on the House Judiciary Committee, began his methodical, caustic campaign against the impeachment. In retrospect, Frank seems to have helped goad the Republicans into some crucial, early blunders. Frank cried foul from the first release of the Starr evidence. He also gave a non-stop political play-by-play as the Republicans scrambled for the right presentation of what seemed like a gold mine of evidence against Mr. Clinton. If there was a proper presentation, they missed it. Frank helped the media to interpret the torrent of sexual detail from Starr's office in the worst possible light for the GOP. "They have a political problem," Frank said early and often. "Their case is based on body parts and people don't like that," he said, referring to some of the X-rated details that Mr. Clinton allegedly lied about in his sworn testimony. That line of attack carried through the Judiciary Committee proceedings that produced the articles of impeachment in December and into Mr. Clinton's trial defense team in January. Two other Massachusetts Democrats, freshman William D. Delahunt, of Quincy, and Martin T. Meehan, of Lowell, joined Frank on the attack during the hearings in the Judiciary Committee. Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R-Ill., the chief manager of the prosecution case, ruefully admitted on Friday that the Democrats had maneuvered him into a major tactical mistake back in September: the promise of a swift impeachment probe that eventually froze into a Christmas deadline. That blocked the examination of witnesses and the introduction of new evidence. MEANWHILE, KENNEDY broke his silence on the first day of October, enlivened by long talks with Hillary Rodham Clinton during a disaster-relief trip to Puerto Rico. Mr. Clinton's misconduct warranted no punishment, Kennedy said; he should be sentenced to "time served" under the unfair scrutiny of Starr and the media. He said impeachment "will make it almost impossible to restore a sense of stability and order" in the nation. Kennedy also acted as a sort of junior Democratic counterpart to GOP Whip DeLay in the debate, whipping at least one wavering partisan with a brand of hardball rarely glimpsed outside the cloakrooms. That was Rhode Island's straight-arrow freshman. Weygand was "trying to cover his backside" by supporting the impeachment inquiry, Kennedy said. He ridiculed Weygand's insistence that he was voting his principles and said that only House members in conservative districts, or difficult reelection fights, were permitted a "free vote" on the impeachment issue. But when Weygand joined 30 other Democrats in voting to launch the inquiry in early October, a more conservative colleague said his position was far from politically safe in liberal Rhode Island. Rep. James P. Moran, a combative Massachusetts native who represents northern Virginia, said Weygand's stand took guts - and would bring credibility to a later vote against impeachment. When the articles were debated during the last days of the 105th Congress, the pressure intensified on such moderate Republicans as Rep. Nancy L. Johnson and Christopher Shays, both of Connecticut, who agonized before voting to impeach. But the Northern GOP moderates played a crucial role in Mr. Clinton's Senate defense that was little-noted at the time. They helped to defeat the article alleging perjury in Mr. Clinton's deposition in the Paula Jones case in January 1998. The defeat of that article freed Mr. Clinton's lawyers from the burden of having to defend what Reed later called his "far more blatant" deceptions in the Jones deposition. THERE WAS NO stranger bit of political bedfellowship than the alliance briefly struck in the first crisis of the trial, on Jan. 8. Liberal Mass. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy joined Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to seal a deal on ground rules for the first two weeks of the trial. The deal was classically senatorial and set a harmonious tone that prevailed throughout. The parties agreed not to fight on the volatile issue of calling Lewinsky as a witness until absolutely necessary. Two days later, Chafee drew his line in the sand. He wanted the trial to proceed straight to "a vote to acquit or convict," perhaps with witnesses. He would settle for no "brushing aside of the charges" by dismissal, he said. Senators of both parties have said that this gung-ho declaration by the Senate's senior moderate helped to hold the Republican Party line through the trial's most difficult votes. Less-noticed at the time was the pressure that Chafee began to apply against "an army" of witnesses, "endless" deliberations and "wanderings" into new evidence. In effect, a short, tightly defined witness list and a crisp conclusion to the trial became the moderates' price for their votes. Hyde said that this hurt his case against Mr. Clinton. But on the home front, Chafee opened his left flank to a broadside of angry criticism when he made those statements - and cast his Jan. 27 votes against dismissal and for the deposition of Lewinsky, Vernon Jordan and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. Some constituents wrote to pledge themselves to Chafee's defeat should he run in 2000. Rep. Kennedy called Chafee's position "outrageous" and accused the senator of "masquerading as a Republican moderate." Similar midtrial attacks stung the Senate's other New England GOP moderates, Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and James M. Jeffords of Vermont. Three of them - Chafee, Jeffords and Snowe - are up for reelection next year. All of them found different routes to the votes of "not guilty" on Friday. The most liberal, Jeffords, was the first to come out against the two charges, reasoning that they did not reach the constitutional threshhold of "high crimes and misdemeanors." But Jeffords said he believed that Mr. Clinton did obstruct justice. Chafee said he thought the evidence failed on both counts. Snowe and Collins echoed variations on the two themes. As he announced his vote last week, Chafee described how he had tried to put aside his anger at Mr. Clinton in order to clarify his judgment. That recalled something that Kennedy said on the afternoon of Mr. Clinton's impeachment. Kennedy joined the busload of House Democrats who stood in the Rose Garden that day to hear Mr. Clinton call for an end to "the politics of personal destruction." As he left the White House grounds, Kennedy quoted former Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell to the effect that the Senate was a saucer for the cooling of the heated cup of passions brewed in the House. The Senate seems to have fulfilled that role - as much through the politics that the Framers imbued in the impeachment process as through its legal-judicial component. Kennedy misplaced the source of his quotation. It was not Pell who coined the cup-and-saucer analogy but the president whose birthday is celebrated tomorrow, George Washington. In any event, for the impeachment trial of the 42nd president, the Senate did the job that the first president had in mind. |
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