[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

                                 ______
                                 

                        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.

                          ____________________