Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

returned to the White House, there were several challenges on my mind, personal and political. Bill and I had agreed to participate in regular marital counseling to determine whether or not we were going to salvage our marriage. On one level, I was emotionally shell-shocked and trying to deal with the raw wound I had suffered. On another level, I believed Bill was a good person and a great President. I viewed the independent counsel’s assault on the Presidency as an ever escalating political war, and I was on Bill’s side.

When people ask me how I kept going during such a wrenching time, I tell them that there is nothing remarkable about getting up and going to work every day, even when there is a family crisis at home. Every one of us has had to do it at some time in our lives, and the skills required to cope are the same for a First Lady or a forklift operator. I just had to do it all in the public eye.

Even if I was undecided about my personal future, I was absolutely convinced that Bill’s private behavior and his misguided effort to conceal it did not constitute a legal or historical basis for impeachment under the Constitution. I believed he ought to be held accountable for his behavior―by me and by Chelsea―not by a misuse of the impeachment process. But I also knew that the opposition could use the press to create an atmosphere in which political pressure would grow for impeachment or resignation, regardless of the law. I worried about the Democrats who might be stampeded into calling for Bill’s resignation, and tried to concentrate on what I could do to help get them reelected in November.

In spite of polls showing large majorities against impeachment, many Democrats up for reelection believed that, unless they were tough on the President, they would lose their seats. It was a legitimate concern in some districts. In much of the country, however, impeachment and Starr’s investigation could tarnish Republican candidates who sought to exploit the process.

In early September, David Kendall discovered that the OIC was ready to send a referral on impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee, which would then decide whether the matter should go to the full House of Representatives for a vote. I had studied this area of the law in 1974, when my duties for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment staff had included writing a memo outlining the procedures for impeaching a President and another on the standards of evidence required to trigger an impeachment. According to the Constitution, the House must approve by majority vote the articles of impeachment, which are similar to a criminal indictment of a federal official. The articles are then sent to the Senate for trial. Although a jury in a criminal trial must be unanimous for a guilty verdict, only a two-thirds majority of the Senate is required for conviction and removal from office. The Constitution reserves impeachment as a remedy for only the most serious of offenses: “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution designed impeachment to be a slow, painstaking process because they believed that it should not be easy to remove a federal official, particularly the President, from office.

In 1868, the House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson for defying Congress’s wish that a harsh post-Civil War reconstruction policy be imposed on the South. I thought the House was wrong, but at least they acted against Johnson on grounds of his official actions as President. Johnson was tried and acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Richard Nixon was the second American President to face impeachment proceedings, and I knew firsthand how carefully that process safeguarded the use of grand jury evidence, following the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. That investigation was carried out under tight security and confidentiality for eight months before articles of impeachment having to do with President Nixon’s actions as President were presented to the Judiciary Committee. Chairman Peter Rodino and Special Counsel John Doar set examples of discreet nonpartisan professionalism.

David Kendall asked for an advance copy of the OIC’s referral to the House Judiciary Committee so that he could draft a response―a request grounded in simple fairness and precedent from the Nixon impeachment. Starr refused. On September 9, Starr’s deputies drove two vans to the Capitol steps and delivered copies of the over 119,000-oard “Starr report,” complete with thirty-six boxes of supporting documents, to the sergeant-at-arms.

Starr’s piece of grandstanding was appalling; the quick decision by the House Rules Committee to make the entire report available on the Internet, even more so.

Federal law requires that grand jury evidence be kept confidential so that testimony elicited by a prosecutor from a witness without the clarifying effect of crossexamination cannot prejudice a case or harm an innocent person. This is one of the basic tenets of our judicial system. The Starr report was a compilation of raw grand jury testimony obtained from witnesses who were never crossexamined, and it was released to the public without regard to fairness or balance.

I have not read the Starr report, but I’ve been told that the word sex (or some variation of it) appears 581 times in the 445-page report. Whitewater, the putative subject of Starr’s probe, reportedly appears four times, to identify a figure, like the “Whitewater Independent Counsel.” Starr’s distribution of his report was gratuitously graphic and degrading to the Presidency and the Constitution. Its public release was a low moment in American history.

Starr recommended that the House Judiciary Committee consider eleven possible grounds of impeachment. I was convinced that he had overstepped his legal authority.

The Constitution requires the legislative branch of government―not the independent counsel, which is a creation of the executive and judicial branches―to investigate evidence of impeachable offenses. Starr’s duty was to deliver an unbiased summary of the known facts to the committee, which would then deploy its own staff to assemble evidence.

But Starr appointed himself