After meetings with the new monarch, Hussein’s son Abdullah, as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Assad, President Mubarak, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Boris Yeltsin, and President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey, I flew home to await the Senate vote on my future. Though the outcome wasn’t in doubt, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering had been interesting. Several Republican senators were upset with the House Republicans for putting them through the trial, but whenever the right wing turned the pressure up, most of them backed down and went along with dragging the whole thing out. When Senator Robert Byrd moved to have the charges dismissed as having no merit, David Kendall’s partner, Nicole Seligman, made an argument on the law and the facts that most senators knew was undebatable. Nevertheless, Byrd’s motion was defeated. When Senator Strom Thurmond told his Republican colleagues early on that the votes weren’t there to remove me and the process should be stopped, he was overruled in the Republican caucus.
One Republican senator who was opposed to impeachment kept us informed of what was going on among his colleagues. Several days before the vote, he said there were only thirty Republican votes for the perjury count and forty to forty-five for the obstruction of justice count. They were nowhere near the two-thirds majority the Constitution requires for removal. A few days before the vote, the senator told us that the House Republicans had said they would be humiliated if neither count got at least a token majority of the votes, and their Senate colleagues had better not humiliate them if they wanted the House to stay in Republican hands after the next election. The senator reported that they would have to whittle the number of Republican “no” votes down.
On February 12 the impeachment motions failed. The vote on the perjury count failed by 22 votes, 45–55, and the vote on the obstruction of justice count failed by 17 votes, 50–50, with all the Democrats and Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and John Chafee of Rhode Island voting no on both counts. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama, Slade Gorton of Washington, Ted Stevens of Alaska, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and John Warner of Virginia voted no on the perjury count.
The vote itself was anticlimactic, coming three weeks after the close of my defense. Only the margin of defeat was in doubt. I was just glad the ordeal was over for my family and my country. After the vote I said that I was profoundly sorry for what I had done to trigger the events and the great burden they imposed on the American people, and that I was rededicating myself to “a time of reconciliation and renewal for America.” I took one question: “In your heart, sir, can you forgive and forget?” I replied, “I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.”
After the impeachment ordeal, people often asked me how I got through it without losing my mind, or at least the ability to keep doing the job. I couldn’t have done it if the White House staff and cabinet, including those who were angry and disappointed over my conduct, hadn’t stayed with me. It would have been much harder if the American people hadn’t made an early judgment that I should remain President and stuck with it. If more congressional Democrats had bailed out when it looked like the safe thing to do in January, after the story broke, or in August, after I testified to the grand jury, it would have been tough; instead, they rose to the challenge. Having the support of world leaders like Mandela, Blair, King Hussein, Havel, Crown Prince Abdullah, Kim Dae Jung, Chirac, Cardoso, Zedillo, and others whom I admired helped to keep my spirits up. When I compared them with my enemies, as disgusted as I still was with myself, I figured I couldn’t be all bad.
The love and support of friends and strangers made a big difference; those who wrote to me or said a kind word in a crowd meant more than they will ever know. The religious leaders who counseled me, visited me at the White House, or called to pray with me reminded me that, notwithstanding the condemnations I had received from some quarters, God is love.
But the biggest factors in my ability to survive and function were personal. Hillary’s brothers and my brother were wonderfully supportive. Roger joked to me that it was nice to finally be the brother who wasn’t in trouble. Hugh came up from Miami every week to play UpWords, talk sports, and make me laugh. Tony came over for our family pinochle matches. My mother-in-law and Dick Kelley were great to me.
Despite everything, our daughter still loved me and wanted me to stand my ground. And, most important, Hillary stood with me and loved me through it all. From the time we first met, I had loved her laugh. In the midst of all the absurdity, we were laughing again, brought back together by our weekly counseling and our shared determination to fight off the right-wing coup. I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors: they were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again. I even got off the couch.
During the long year between the deposition in the Jones case and my acquittal in the Senate, on most of the nights when I was home in the White House I spent two to three hours alone in my office, reading the Bible and books on faith and forgiveness, and rereading The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and several of the most thoughtful letters I had received, including a series of mini-sermons from Rabbi Menachem Genack of Englewood, New Jersey. I was particularly affected by Seventy Times Seven, a book about forgiveness by Johann Christoph Arnold, the elder of Bruderhof, a Christian community with members in the northeastern United States and in England.
I still have poems, prayers, and quotations that people sent me or put into my hand at public events. And I have two stones with the New Testament verse John 8:7 inscribed on them. In what many people believe was Jesus’ last encounter with his critics, the Pharisees, they brought to him a woman caught in the act of adultery and said the law of Moses commanded them to stone her to death. They taunted Jesus: “What sayest thou?” Instead of answering, Jesus leaned over and wrote on the ground with his finger, as if he had not heard them. When they continued to ask, he stood and said: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Those who heard him, “being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last.” When Jesus was alone with the woman, he asked her, “Where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” She answered, “No man, Lord,” and Jesus replied, “Neither do I condemn thee.”
I had had a lot of stones cast at me, and through my own self-inflicted wounds I had been exposed to the whole world. In some ways it was liberating; I had nothing more to hide. And as I tried to understand why I had made my own mistakes, I also attempted to figure out why my adversaries were so consumed with hatred, and so willing to say and do things inconsistent with their professed moral convictions. I had always looked with a jaundiced eye at other people’s attempts to psychoanalyze me, but it did seem to me that many of my bitterest critics among the Far Right political and religious groups and the most judgmental members of the press had sought safety and security in positions where they could judge and not be judged, hurt and not be hurt.
My sense of my own mortality and human frailty and the unconditional love I’d had as a child had spared me the compulsion to judge and condemn others. And I believed my personal flaws, no matter how deep, were far less threatening to our democratic government than the power lust of my accusers. In late January, I had received a moving letter from Bill Ziff of New York, a businessman I’d never met but whose son was a friend of mine. He said that he was sorry for the pain Hillary and I had endured but that much good had come of it, because the Americans people had shown maturity and judgment in seeing through “the demonizing mullahs in our midst. Though it was never your intention, you have done more to expose their underlying agenda than any President in history, including Roosevelt.”