[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 53 (Tuesday, April 29, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E776-E777]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
READ IT AND HEED IT
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HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON
of new york
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, April 29, 1997
Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, the parallels between Watergate and
Whitewater are ominous.
As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial warns us, the words
``obstruction of justice'' are now looming on the Whitewater horizon.
It was that offense, that abuse of the power of the Presidency, that
brought down Richard Nixon.
The same editorial notes that the Whitewater scandal is now much more
advanced than Watergate was when President Nixon was re-elected in the
1972 landslide. And so it is.
When the words ``obstruction of justice'' are used, can the word
``impeachment'' be far behind? I take no pleasure in contemplating such
a step, Mr. Speaker, but feel dutybound to place the Wall Street
Journal editorial in the Record, and urge all Members to read it and
heed it.
Whitewater and Watergate
``Obstruction of justice,'' the term Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr invoked in extending the Whitewater grand jury
in Little Rock, resonates with themes from the Watergate epic
a generation ago. When the House Judiciary Committee voted up
the bill of impeachment that led to Richard Nixon's
resignation, count one was obstruction.
Watergate was not about a two-bit burglary, that is, but
about the abuse of the powers of the Presidency. The
committee charged that the President, ``in violation of his
constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully
executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the
administration of justice.'' Seeking to cover up the initial
misdeed, President Nixon and his highest aides dug themselves
ever deeper into a legal morass that led the President to
disgrace and the aides to jail. The final ``smoking gun''
tape recorded the President issuing instructions to induce
the CIA to get the FBI to call off its investigation of the
burglary by claiming bogus national security concerns. With
this revelation, the President's last support vanished and he
left office.
Mr. Starr's filings this week ring similar chords, talking
of ``extensive evidence of possible obstruction of the
administration of justice,'' of resistance to subpoenas, of
``grand jury litigation under seal'' over privileges and
documents, of in camera citations to the court. It called for
further investigation of ``perjury, obstruction of the
administration of justice, concealment and destruction of
evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.''
These parallels are all the more ironic because Hillary
Rodham Clinton served on the legal staff of the Watergate
Committee. Former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum also
worked for the House Watergate Committee, while on the
minority counsel to the Senate investigation was Senator Fred
Thompson, now heading the Senate inquiry into the Clinton
campaign contributions scandal.
Rep. Bob Barr makes some sport at Mrs. Clinton's expense
alongside by citing the 1974
[[Page E777]]
staff memo on grounds for impeachment. The Georgia Republican
has written Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde to officially
request the start of an impeachment inquiry. Rep. Hyde has
said he's started staff studies ``just staying ahead of the
curve'' and not for serious action ``unless we have what
really amounts to a smoking gun.''
Rep. Barr, a former U.S. Attorney, makes the legal case
that in Whitewater and the campaign funds scandal we are
dealing with potential impeachment material. Even as a legal
case, or course, there remains no small matter of proof. Were
the payments to Webb Hubble really hush money, for example,
and were the Rose Law Firm billing records intentionally
withheld while under subpoena? And to what extent was Bill
Clinton personally involved--in Watergate phraseology, ``what
did the President know and when did he know it?''
While Mr. Starr is obviously digging in these fields, we
have no reason to believe he's reached the mother lode. The
Watergate impeachment case, after all, was built on the
testimony of John Dean, Mr. Nixon's White House Counsel. Even
then, it had to be cinched by tape recordings. Mr. Starr
can't even get the cooperation of Susan McDougal. The
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, recently on an anti-Clinton roll,
cites Webb Hubbell's Camp David visit while editorializing,
``If only Richard Nixon had been less stiff, he might still
be jollying John Dean into silence--and Watergate would have
stayed the name of another Washington apartment complex.''
Writing recently in The New York Times, Watergate survivor
Leonard Garment also remarked that President Clinton ``seems
infinitely elastic, positive and resilient.'' By contrast
President Nixon's morose defensiveness was shaped by his
``prize collection of emotional scars'' from the Alger Hiss
case. Even more important ``Mr. Clinton has not been a
central participant and target in a debate as polarizing as
the conflict over the Vietnam War.'' President Nixon's
resignation, and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson,
came at already impassioned turns in the nation's history.
Today's mixture of contentment and cynicism insulates a
President from scandal.
In a recent Watergate symposium, Mr. Garment also made the
point that we should not expect Presidents to have normal
personalities. ``The presidential gene,'' he said, ``is
filled with sociopathic qualities--brilliant, erratic, lying,
cheating, expert at mendacity, generous, loony, driven by a
sense of mission. A very unusual person. Nixon was one of the
strangest of this strange group.''
No President is likely to meet the clinical definition of a
sociopath; what psychiatrists call an ``anti-social
personality,'' a complete obliviousness to the normal rules
of society, is evident in early adolescence and will lead to
jail rather than high office. Sociopaths, the textbooks tell
us, are seemingly intelligent and typically charming, though
not good at sustaining personal or sexual relationships. They
lie remarkably well, feel no guilt or remorse, and are
skillful at blaming their problems on others. A most striking
feature is, as one text puts it, ``He often demonstrates a
lack of anxiety or tension that can be grossly incongruous
with the situation.''
Childhood symptoms are essential to this clinical
diagnosis, and Bill Clinton's experience in Hope and Hot
Springs, while troubled, supports no such speculation. Yet
clearly he has ``the presidential gene,'' perhaps even more
so than Richard Nixon. And this catalog of traits is ideally
suited to, say, finding some way to overcome seemingly
impossible election odds, or withstanding the onslaught of
scandal. As Mr. Garment summarizes the present outlook, ``The
country is in for a year or more of dizzy, distracting prime-
time scandal politics. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting
for the ultimate political cataclysm.''
While we take this as the most likely outcome, our judgment
is that in fact Mr. Clinton is guilty of essentially the same
things over which Mr. Nixon was hounded from office--abusing
his office to cover up criminal activity by himself and his
accomplices, and misleading the public with a campaign of
lies about it. From the first days of his Administration,
with the firing of all sitting U.S. Attorneys and Webb
Hubbell's intervention in a corruption trial, we have seen a
succession of efforts to subvert the administration of
justice. The head of the FBI was fired, and days afterward a
high official died of a gunshot wound, and the investigation
ended without crime scene photos or autopsy X-rays. Honorable
Democrats like Phillip Heymann have fled the Justice
Department, leaving it today nearly vacant; White House
Counsel have committed serial resignation. Yet Mr. Clinton
remains President and still commands respect in the polls.
Handled with enough audacity, it seems, the Presidency is a
powerful office after all.
There is even a school of thought, implicit in talk about
``more important'' work for the nation, that the coverup
should succeed. Yet as we look back on Watergate, the nation
went through a highly beneficial, even necessary learning
experience. Whitewater carries a similar stake, simply put:
learning how our government operates, whether laws are being
faithfully executed. With sunshine, citizens can make their
own judgments, and have plenty of opportunity to express
them, starting with the 1998 mid-term elections. But it is
essential that the investigators--Mr. Starr, the FBI, Senator
Thompson, Rep. Dan Burton and newly vigilant members of the
press--get moral support against the deterrent attacks to
which they've uniformly been subjected.
Whitewater did not prevent Mr. Clinton's re-election,
though the scandal was much more advanced than Watergate was
during Mr. Nixon's 1972 landslide. When President Nixon left
we wrote that he had so severely damaged his own credibility
he could no longer govern. We do not know how Whitewater will
finally end, but we are starting to wonder whether we
ultimately understood Watergate.
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