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Chapter 16: A Year after the Acquittal in the Impeachment Trial
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Chapter 16 A Year after the Acquittal in the Impeachment Trial Lawrence Joseph The President’s more reflective side emerges late in the day. For example recently, at a fund-raiser at the Waldorf-Astoria, while Luther Vandross was singing Evergreen for him, the President whispered loudly to those at his table that this was, he thought, the greatest love song of the last twenty-five years. Yes, members of a remote country Pentecostal church in Alexandria, Louisiana, were told after a performance of Handel’s Messiah (a portrayal of the life and death of Jesus, during which, Mr. Clinton said, he cried continuously), yes there was, there was a period of time, a day or two at least, when there was some question whether he would finish his second term. It was close to midnight. The President was standing beside the church’s pastor, the Reverend Anthony Mangun, and a group of former drug addicts and convicts who’d put their lives back together through religion. During the heat of impeachment, Reverend Mangun and his wife dropped off a recording of an uplifting song and some biblical readings at the White House, gifts that helped the President get through the tough times. “He said,” said the President, “‘I know you. You are my friend. We have raised our children together. I love you. I was there when you were going up. If the ship starts to sink and other people start to bail out, you call me. I want to go down with you.’” The President then gave Reverend Mangun what was described as a bearhug. At an appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors—clearly irritated by the line of questioning—“I’m not ashamed of the fact that they impeached me,” the President said of the vote of the House of Representatives to send charges against him to the Senate. “That was their decision , not mine. And it was wrong. As a matter of law, Constitution and 226 history, it was wrong. And I’m glad we fought it. That has nothing to do with the fact that I made a terrible mistake”—no specific mention was made of his affair with Monica Lewinsky—“of which I am deeply regretful . I’ve struggled very hard to save my relationship with my wife and my daughter, I have paid quite a lot. I think that an average, ordinary person reviewing the wreckage left in that would say that I paid for that. And I should have paid for it. We all must pay for our mistakes.” The settlement of the sexual harassment suit filed against him by Paula Corbin Jones had cost him half his life savings, even though, he emphasized, he’d won the case. The questions put to him by Paula Jones’s lawyers, he said, were asked in bad faith. Jones’s lawyers knew the answers and knew—“something hardly anybody ever points out”—the questions they were asking had nothing to do with the lawsuit. Asked about the possibility of a presidential pardon if Robert W. Ray, who has succeeded Kenneth W. Starr as the Independent Counsel investigating the President, chooses to indict him on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice after he leaves office, the President, in slow measured tones, pounded the lectern with his fist. “NO. NO. I don’t have any interest in that. I have no need to be pardoned. And I am prepared to stand before any bar of justice I have to stand before . But”—his voice rose in anger—“just once I’d like to see someone acknowledge the fact that this Whitewater thing was a lie and a fraud from the beginning, and that most people with any responsibility over it have known that for years.” In the March 13, 2000, issue of the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead, in the “Talk of the Town,” noting the President’s appetites “for cream puffs as well as for comestibles,” mentioned that Julian Niccolini , managing partner of the Four Seasons restaurant, was surprised to read in the New York Times about an elaborate dinner—lobster salad with caviar-cream dressing, a duo of stuffed saddle and roasted rack of lamb with tomato-spinach compote and rosemary-lemon polenta, apple tartetatin —prepared for President Clinton by another restaurant, Daniel, on a recent Thursday evening. Mr. Niccolini was surprised because later that evening the Four Seasons prepared a dinner for the President of tuna tartare with beluga caviar, roast...