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

prosecutor, judge and jury in his zeal to impeach Bill Clinton. And the more I believed Starr was abusing his power, the more I sympathized with Bill―at least politically.

Starr’s list of impeachable offenses included charges that the President lied under oath about his personal behavior, obstructed justice and abused his office. Bill never obstructed justice or abused his office. He maintained that he did not lie under oath. Whether or not he did, a lie under oath about a private matter in a civil suit was not grounds for impeachment, according to the vast majority of constitutional experts and historians.

The day after Starr delivered his report to Congress, Bill and I attended a Democratic Business Council reception, where I introduced him as “my husband and our President.”

Privately, I was still working on forgiving Bill, but my fury at those who had deliberately sabotaged him helped me on that score. My schedule was loaded with events, and I showed up for every one of them. That day, there was a speechwriting meeting, a colon cancer prevention event, an AmeriCorps reception and several other appearances. If the White House staff saw me carrying on as usual, I hoped it would encourage them to do the same. If I could get through the day, they could, too.

For weeks Bill had apologized to me, to Chelsea and to the friends, Cabinet members, staffers and colleagues he had misled and disappointed. At a White House prayer breakfast with religious leaders in early September, Bill offered an emotional admission of his sins and a plea for forgiveness from the American people. But he would not give up his office. “I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense using all available appropriate arguments,” he said. “But legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong. If my repentance is genuine and sustained … then good can come of this for our country as well as for me and my family. The children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong, but God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.”

Bill cast his political fate with the American people. He asked for their compassion and then went back to work for them with the same commitment that he had brought to his Presidency from his first day in the White House. And we continued with our regular counseling sessions, which forced us to ask and answer hard questions that years of nonstop campaigning had allowed us to postpone. By now, I wanted to save our marriage, if we could.

The public response to Bill’s forthright apologies raised my spirits. The President’s job approval was holding steady through the crisis. A solid majority of about 60 percent of Americans also said that Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings, that Bill should not resign and that the explicit details in the Starr report were “inappropriate.”

My own approval rating was nearing an alltime high and would eventually peak somewhere around 70 percent, proving that the American people are fundamentally fair and sympathetic.

Although the case for impeachment was both unpopular and unjustified under the constitutional standard, I assumed that the House Republicans would pursue it if they thought they could. The only way to avoid impeachment was through a strong showing in the November elections. But the party in the White House traditionally loses congressional seats in midterm elections, as we had in 1994, and especially in a President’s second term. Democratic candidates everywhere were feeling justifiably nervous about the President’s political health.

On September 15, a delegation of about two dozen Democratic Congresswomen met with me in the Yellow Oval Room. The representatives sat on couches and chairs, while butlers served coffee and pastries. The women had come to urge me to take a public role in the upcoming election, but I think they also wanted to see and hear for themselves how I was holding up and what I was planning to do next. Once they realized that I was serious about standing up for the Constitution, the President and the Democratic Party, they asked me to get out and campaign for them.

We talked about how to direct the voters’ attention away from impeachment and back to the issues that mattered to voters―federal help to reduce class size and to help with school construction, Social Security and health insurance reforms, better foster care and adoption practices and protection of the environment.

“I’ll help you in any way I can,” I said. “But I also need you to help hold the party together, and to keep the Democratic Caucus members where they belong―behind the Constitution and the President.”

“We are not here to talk about the President’s behavior,” Representative Lynn Woolsey told reporters after the meeting. “We are here to talk about what’s important, more important to the people of this country.” Woolsey later explained: “We told her that as women, we know that women can do more than one thing at a time in an emergency… So we asked her to get on a plane and stop at places where her voice so desperately needs to be heard.”

And so I did. Campaigning in dozens of congressional races, my frenetic schedule kept me occupied all day. But the nights were difficult, especially after Chelsea returned to Stanford. Bill and I had only ourselves, and it was still awkward. I didn’t avoid him as I had before, but there was still tension between us and not as many shared laughs as I was used to on a daily basis with my husband.

I am not the sort of person who routinely pours out her deepest feelings, even to my closest friends. My mother is the same way. We have a tendency to keep our own counsel and that trait only deepened when I began living my life in the public eye. It was a welcome distraction when my good friends Diane Blair and Betsy Ebeling came to stay with me