Presidential infidelities impeachment - 9 October 1998

I'm afraid I must break an oath and then take it again and hope to stay with it. I promised not to talk about Topic A for some time, but I must because of a spreading popular attitude I believe to be misinformed and because of wide ignorance of the impeachment process.

About a fortnight ago, shortly after the videotape of Mr Clinton testifying before the watching Grand Jury was played on television, I had a letter from a very old lady in the farthest reaches of Scotland. It was a very short letter, a sort of extended plea. "Won't they stop hounding the man," she wrote. "Since time began, men were deceivers ever." She signed herself, "An 87-year-old".

It's a very stark philosophical view. I was immediately reminded of the immortal, austere, forever awesome figure of William Ewart Gladstone, who for newcomers I should say, was the greatest Parliamentary figure of 18th Century England. Four times Prime Minister, a Scotsman, the very model of a Victorian Christian statesman. He was in office in his 80s, died to a ravishment of national mourning by the great and the humble and the good, in his 90th year.

He once said – and the whole point of my telling you this story is that Gladstone said it not to a journalist, but to a close friend, who in those days would never have dreamed of passing on the remark. We readers and historians came to know about it only many decades later from published memoirs and letters of men long dead – what Mr Gladstone said was this: "I have known nine Prime Ministers, seven of whom were adulterers".

There is an accompanying legend, which if it's not true ought to be, to the effect of Mr Gladstone's adding "they had the good fortune not to violate the 11th commandment". Which every Victorian and, for that matter, three generations beyond, into my time, knew that it read "Thou shalt not be found out".

The statesmen then who were found out were, with or without trials, thrown into disgrace, from Dilke to Profumo and, in this country, to the western Senator Gary Hart, who only recently ran for president and defied the media to prove his underground reputation for womanising, so they took him up on it and found him in Florida with a toothsome miss, no friend of his wife's, grinning, she on his lap, aboard a yacht bearing the visible cruel name of Monkey Business.

What I'm going to talk about is simply the necessary constitutional procedure that the House of Representatives has just voted on. Because I've seen, in European newspapers, ludicrously misleading headlines, "Congress to impeach Clinton", "Impeachment confronts Clinton". Not for three more constitutional stages, does it. Let me just finish off the adultery aspect, if only to answer the smarty-pants college boy argument, surprisingly popular among the young middle-aged, who've picked up their history of presidential peccadilloes from recent newspapers.

First, the general chic dismissal of the whole affair by saying everybody did it. Well everybody didn't do it and only two presidents, we now know (we didn't at the time), only two presidents did it in the White House. The amiable, upstanding, fine-looking president and intellectual flyweight, Warren Gamaliel Harding and, six presidents later, John F. Kennedy.

The most glaring example of this toss-off generalisation is the case of Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1917 was 35 and as America went into the First World War, became assistant secretary of the Navy. He'd been married to Eleanor Roosevelt for 12 years. He met one Lucy Mercer, a beautiful young Washington woman. They had an affair, which perhaps a half-a-dozen families and a handful of Congressmen knew about. Not a breath about it ever got out. Mrs Roosevelt confronted her husband with the obvious choice. He chose to break off the affair and stay with Eleanor, which he did for life.

Now I'm not yearning to drop a name but in this context I can't help it. I followed Roosevelt as president for five years before I started to cover him as a foreign correspondent from 1937 till his death in '45. The first I ever heard of Lucy Mercer was 22 years after he died. I'd picked up a national magazine in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and was shocked by an article written by an old friend of mine, who'd been Roosevelt's press secretary. He was the son of Roosevelt's wartime (First World War-time) boss, Secretary of the Navy Daniels, so the son, Jonathan Daniels, must of course have been privy to the Mercer affair most of his life, but he'd never printed a word about it or mentioned it till then, then being the fall of 1967.

I was, frankly, shocked, not at the fact but at it's being put into print. So was the man I was spending a few days with, ex-President, General, as he still preferred to be called, Eisenhower, and it was the first he'd heard of Lucy Mercer, too. We'd been talking about something to do with a soldier's code of honour and I said to him that reporters too had a code about a public man's private life. The code was unwritten, unspoken, unadmitted. We all just assumed if we ever heard of some affair we paid no attention, we wouldn't have thought of printing such stuff.

But some time in the past ten, 20 years, that code, that taboo has been broken once for all and we'll never go back and the consequence will be a choice, I suppose, between having only monks and certifiable faithful husbands and wives running for the presidency or – what seems to me more likely – is we'll fall into accepting the attitude described by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when the people became either indifferent or insensitive to the debauches of the emperor, provided he paved the roads and remitted taxes.

The main thing is that through all the quoted examples of presidents with mistresses or affairs, nobody but a tiny surrounding circle knew at the time. So it's stupidly uninformed to say everybody did it and they got elected anyway. If the voters, even of Massachusetts, had known a quarter of the compulsive private habits of John F Kennedy, he could not have been selected dogcatcher for the city of Boston.

Now about the nonsensical or, if you prefer, presumptive, headlines. What happened on Thursday followed the constitutional procedure. The Judiciary Committee had met, considered the 13 charges put before it by the special prosecutor, which he thinks warrant the filing later by the House of articles of impeachment. On what grounds? The Constitution says treason or bribery, not surely involved and then high crimes and misdemeanours. What are they? Ah, that, to cut through all the rhetoric and wishful thinking and wishful denials, that is what has never been made clear. It's up to the Judiciary Committee to decide.

But the impeachment process is simple and unchangeable. The House has voted for an inquiry only. It will soon hold hearings, it will call witnesses, hear the whole story, then look at the offered 13 articles. If it finds one that's an impeachable offence, it sends it to the whole House. A majority vote there would send it on to the Senate which then sits as a trial court. The Senators, the jury, the Chief Justice of the United States as judge. A two-thirds majority vote to impeach and remove the man from office is required. It has never happened.

This historic and high-minded procedure has, I'm afraid, been more than less pre-empted by the strong partisanship that seems to drive the members of the House Judiciary Committee. The Republicans are saying already that the House must vote for an inquiry and probably ought to find cause for impeachment. The Democrats are bemoaning the partisanship of the Republicans, while they themselves say that following the impeachment process is nothing more than a Republican campaign to bring down the president at all costs.

Just now, I must say, we're looking around for honest men who will put party aside and vote their conscience. On the side or in the wings, the White House is fiercely trying to lobby the Democrats to interrupt or skip the constitutional process by voting for a resolution to censure or somehow rebuke the president and forget impeachment.

Whatever happens after this week, the nub of the problem of voting your conscience is the brutal truth that the House which takes over in January will be a new one. All 435 members of the House are either new or will have been re-elected. How they wish this constitutional step had come a month later when they would know if the polls of approval for Mr Clinton as president coincided or not with what their constituents told them because 3 November is election day.

One quintessential poll says that only 20-odd% of the people approve of Mr Clinton's character but 68% want him to stay. Now, a marked majority think prosecutor Starr has over-played his hand and concentrated too much on the lie about Monica Lewinsky. Twelve of 13 Starr charges are about her, nothing about the Whitewater land scandal and the White House illegal possession of FBI confidential files about Republicans. It was because of these scandals that Mr Starr was appointed. He spent three years on those things. Then he heard about Miss Lewinsky.

The late, awesome William Ewart Gladstone also said and published this: "The Constitution of the United States is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man". If the historical procedure does not go forward, or if it's circumvented, between them, Mr Clinton, Mr Starr and the House could mock or shred the working of that most wonderful work.

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