It was too much for me to stomach. Shortly after the formal charges were made, the Capitol Hill reporters began swarming, searching for soundbites. As one of the better known Congressmen, and one of the more moderate, they began to beat down my door looking for my thoughts. I called Marty, Mindy, and my other senior people together to formulate my response. Cheryl drove down from Westminster. We met over at the house in Massachusetts Avenue Heights. Marilyn and I made dinner for everybody, and then after dinner we all retreated to my office. “I want everybody here to give me your unvarnished opinions. Most of you know my thoughts already, but I want yours. Do you think this is going to be a winner for us? Not if you think it’s right, but if you think Clinton can be impeached. Junior person goes first.” I pointed at Mindy. As my Executive Assistant — my secretary — she was technically the most junior among us. “Mindy, what do you think?”
Mindy shook her head. “From everything I am seeing from the letters and emails from people in the district, people are sick to death of this! Not to be rude, but the guy got a hummer. That might be tacky, but it’s not something to be tried for.”
I turned to Cheryl, my senior person back at the Field Office in Westminster. “Is that right? Do the people back home want this over, or do they want an impeachment?”
Cheryl sighed. “This is not helping you, Congressman. From everything I am seeing, and the rest of the office is reporting, as disgusting as most people think Clinton is, they really would prefer that Gingrich be impeached rather than Clinton. Your stance so far is helping in this regard, but only with the people who know about it.”
“Explain that,” asked Bill Ferguson, my Press Assistant. He was actually part of my ‘permanent’ re-election committee, paid for by the campaign, and thus not counting against the limits on my Congressional staff.
“A lot of people figure that Congressman Buckman is a Republican, and is therefore part of the anti-Clinton conspiracy. The ones who have paid some attention, however, know that the Congressman is not in favor of the impeachment, and aren’t holding it against him. I would put the anti-impeachment letters and emails at two to one, or three to one, versus those in favor of it.”
“Bill, what are you hearing? More important, what do you think?” I asked.
Ferguson shrugged. “I think Cheryl and Mindy are right. The Maryland Ninth is not planning on burning Bill Clinton in effigy. Newt Gingrich is another matter, however. He is widely considered to be a huge blocking force in Congress. He was at the heart of the shutdown and now is at the heart of the impeachment.”
“What do you think, though? What are your personal feelings?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t have any personal feelings. For me it’s more tactics, and the tactics here are not helping us. You have a fairly clean reputation. You are both pro-women’s rights and pro-family, which is a tough act to cobble together. As long as you and Mrs. Buckman don’t get divorced before the Clintons, you’re safe.”
I glanced over at Marilyn, who had a dry look on her face. “You don’t tell about my girlfriends and I won’t tell about your boyfriends.”
“Very funny!”
I continued around the room. Nothing about this was going to affect anything we were working on legislative wise. The big effect was going to be whether this would backfire during the elections. If Gingrich won and Clinton was impeached, it would probably hurt the Democrats badly — maybe! It might also unleash a sympathy vote in their favor. If the Republicans lost, it hurt us, no matter what. In many ways, the best possible thing to happen would be for the House to fail to vote for impeachment. The only way this was going to happen was for somebody to take a stand against Gingrich.
Everybody in the room was looking at me. “You guys want me to go publicly on the record against Newt Gingrich and the impeachment?” I asked.
Marty looked around the room and answered for everybody. “Yes. For one thing, this is good for you, the politician. It will let everybody back in the district know you are against it, which matches their feelings. More importantly, it tells everybody here in Washington that this is a bad idea for the nation as a whole. This is not why we have impeachments. This is not a high crime or misdemeanor. If you can shut this down, you are taking the high road.”
“If I shut this down, Newt Gingrich is going to come after me with an axe. We are going to find ourselves on the fifth floor of Cannon and you guys are all going to be in the Cages.”
“So what!?” he countered. “You’re rich! You can build us a sixth floor, with an atrium and a garden and a spa!”
“Oh, Christ!” I muttered. I glanced over at my wife, who simply smiled and took my hand.
I looked around the room at the others. Like me, most of them had come to Washington in the hope of doing something good, and like me, they realized that an impeachment over lying about getting a blowjob was not something good. I could see it in their faces. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way! So went the old saying. After about thirty seconds, I nodded at Marty. “Okay, I will come out publicly against it. How do we manage this for the greatest effect?” There was a sense of relief around the room, and some smiles as well. I rolled my eyes at them. “And when this fails, you are all invited to my political funeral. Now, what do we do?”
Marilyn kissed me on the cheek, and then stood up and began refreshing everybody’s coffee. She wasn’t much of a political strategist. She did know right from wrong, though, so my stand was fine with her. “I’m going to make some fresh coffee. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You don’t need me to write a speech,” she announced.
Mindy popped up to help her, and the rest of us got down to the tactics of doing this and making it happen quickly. It was already out of the Judiciary Committee. In two weeks we would be having the vote in front of the entire House. We had two weeks for a four term Congressman to wage war on the Speaker of the House. Win or lose, this was going to radically change things.
Two days later, I had a press conference scheduled on the Capitol steps. Since the preparations for this couldn’t be hidden, I had a visit from Bob Livingston, the head of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and one of Newt’s main henchmen. He was politer than Newt, in that the day before the press conference, he appeared at my office and asked to see me. Newt would have simply barged in.
After admitting him to my office, I ushered him over to an armchair. I sat down across from him. “How can I help you, Bob?” I asked.
“Carl, I’ll come to the point. Newt knows you are having a press conference tomorrow, over on the steps to the Capitol. He’d like to know what you plan to say.”
“The Speaker couldn’t ask himself? I know he’s a busy man, but he couldn’t even pick up a phone and call?” I countered.
Bob didn’t have much of a response to that. What was he going to say, that Newt only called his friends and allies, and I was now neither? “Well, Newt was busy, so he asked me to look into it. What do you plan to say during the press conference.”
No way was I answering that. The one thing we had all agreed on the other night was that this was going to be closely held, very closely held. We had written the speech that night, and Mindy had typed it up. There weren’t going to be copies handed out ahead of time, no digital versions would go to a teleprompter, nothing leaked to sympathetic reporters. If Newt caught wind of this, the press conference would be cancelled for some reason. If nothing else, Gingrich would personally phone in a bomb scare to the Capitol Police! I waved it all off. “Oh, nothing big. Just some personal thoughts about my future in the Maryland Ninth. I’ve been wondering about whether it’s worth it. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”