Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

As always, I was too nervous to watch the returns. So I invited Maggie and Cheryl Mills, an accomplished lawyer in the counsel’s office, to join me in the movie theater for a screening of Oprah Winfrey’s new film of the Toni Morrison novel Beloved. When we emerged later that night there was good news: The vote was historic. Democrats gained 5 seats in the House and narrowed the Republican margin: It was now 223 to 211. The Senate held steady at 55 Republicans to 45 Democrats. Barbara Boxer won reelection to the Senate, and the best news of the night was that Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato in New York. Republicans and the media pundits thought Democrats would lose up to 30 House seats and 4 to 6 Senate seats.

Instead, Democrats won seats in the House, the first time since 1822 that a President’s party had done so in his second term.

Another surprise soon followed. Three days later, Friday, November 6, Senator Moynihan taped an interview with New York television legend Gabe Pressman announcing that he would not run for a fifth term. The interview was to be aired on Sunday morning, but the news leaked early.

Late on Friday night, the White House operator patched through a call from Representative Charlie Rangel, the veteran Congressman from Harlem and a good friend.

“I just heard that Senator Moynihan announced he is going to retire. I sure hope you’ll consider running because I think you could win,” he said.

“Oh, Charlie,” I said. “I’m honored you would think of me, but I’m not interested, and besides, we have a few other outstanding matters to resolve right now.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m really serious. I want you to think about it.”

He may have been serious, but I thought the idea of running for Senator Moynihan’s seat was absurd, although this wasn’t the first time it had come up. A year earlier, at a Christmas reception at the White House, my friend Judith Hope, the chair of the New York Democratic Party, mentioned that she didn’t think Moynihan would run again. “If he doesn’t,” she said, “I wish you would run.” I had thought Judith’s comment was farfetched then and I still thought so.

I had other things on my mind.

WAITING FOR GRACE

The 1998 midterm election produced yet another surprise when Newt Gingrich stepped down as Speaker of the House and announced that he would resign from Congress. At first, this seemed like a victory for our side and the likely derailment of impeachment.

Bob Livingston of Louisiana was set to succeed Gingrich as Speaker, but Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip and the real power in the Republican Caucus, pressured the Republicans into opposing any reasonable compromise such as a censure vote. When Erskine Bowles asked Gingrich why the Republicans would pursue a course that was neither right nor constitutional, Gingrich replied, “Because we can.”

The Whitewater inquiry and the Paula Jones lawsuit that had touched off this constitutional showdown were all but forgotten. Jones’s lawyers had appealed Judge Wright’s dismissal of the case and for the past month had been sending out signals that she was ready to settle for $1 million. The law was clearly in Bill’s favor, but the three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was dominated by two of the same conservative Republicans who had issued the legally indefensible ruling that earlier had removed judge Henry Woods from a Whitewater-related case on the basis of newspaper articles. Given that history, Bill worried that there was a good chance that partisan politics again would trump law and precedent, and the judges would rule that the case could proceed to trial. On November 13, Bill’s attorney, Bob Bennett, told Bill that Jones had agreed to drop her suit for a payment of $850,000. Although he hated to settle a case he’d already won and that judge Wright had found to be without legal or factual merit, Bill decided that there was no other sure way to put this episode to rest. He did not apologize and made no concessions of wrongdoing. Bennett simply said, “The President has decided he is not prepared to spend one more hour on this matter.” And then it was over.

For weeks I had been expecting the House Judiciary Committee to issue a raft of subpoenas, which is what was done during the 1974 Nixon impeachment inquiry. The committee’s responsibility is to con duct its own investigation, not rubber-stamp the independent counsel’s allegations. I was disgusted when Hyde announced that the committee would be calling Kenneth Starr as its main witness. Starr spoke uninterrupted for two hours and then answered questions from committee members for the rest of the afternoon. It was almost nine o’clock at night when David Kendall finally was given a chance to cross-examine Starr. Working under a ridiculously unrealistic time limit imposed by the committee’s Republican majority, David began his remarks with a summary of the process.

“My task is to respond to the two hours of uninterrupted testimony from the independent counsel, as well as to his four-year, $45 million investigation, which has included at least twenty-eight attorneys, seventy-eight FBI agents and an undisclosed number of private investigators; an investigation which has generated by computer count 114,532 news stories in print and 2,513 minutes of network television time, not to mention twentyfour-hour scandal coverage on cable; a 445-page referral; 50,000 pages of documents from secret grand jury testimony; four hours of videotape testimony; twentytwo hours of audiotape, some of which was gathered in violation of state law, and the testimony of scores of witnesses, not one of whom has been crossexamined.

“And I have thirty minutes to do this.”

During the Soviet-style show trial procedure, Starr had to admit that he had not himself examined a single witness before the grand jury. He had nothing to add to his referral.

But he did announce that the OIC finally had cleared the President of any impeachable offenses in the socalled Travelgate and Filegate investigations.

Barney Frank, the sharp and