My second Impeachment experience came in 1998 when I was a father of two young women, both nearly as old as I had been when Nixon was impeached and the husband of a delightful woman who had become my partner in life for over twenty years at the time. President Bill Clinton, one of the brightest men to hold the office in recent decades, found himself unwilling or unable to tell the truth in a deposition regarding his dalliance with an office staffer. That lie, which he parsed and split and trimmed forever and a day was sufficient, that one lie. Was that the only lie Clinton ever told, hardly. He had a history, unsavory at best, with a line of women and apparently was besotted with a personal charm which overcame his faults in the eyes of many who met him. My daughter caught him live in a speech once at a college and she said you could feel his charm across the large hall. That said, he lied under oath and was properly impeached for his mistake, though not removed from office.
The lurid nature of Clinton's encounters with Monica Lewinsky gave this impeachment a soap operatic twist not found in the earlier Nixon matters. This was about personality almost exclusively and less about law, and in fact his misdeed had been discovered in search of other crimes and misdemeanors. Nixon fell because he couldn't trust the voters to do what he was convinced was the right thing, return him to office and the power he clearly craved. Clinton fell because his personal desires became the fodder for those all too eager to see him brought low, but no one really ever felt or argued that his failings endangered the nation. Nixon threatened the integrity of the election booth but Clinton only threatened the sanctity of the marriage bed, not matters for public discourse, at least not so much.
Another diary entry tomorrow.
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