Impeachment for Clinton? - 11 September 1998

Only a day before I was to record this talk, I'd sworn that there was one topic I would not talk about, namely topic A. I would not even pronounce the name of Miss L.

I swore, after we'd meditated and philosophised on Mr Clinton's inadequate confession of August 17, I swore then to break loose from the journalists, politicians, pundits, public figures who'd been speculating and guessing and prophesying what the president had done, what the special prosecutor said he'd done, when the Congress might receive the prosecutor's report after a four-year investigation.

And on and on through millions of guess words to the nausea of everyone who can listen or read. So I sorted through the random deposits of Americana in my memory bank.

I snapped up the next morning's paper and went at once to the obituary page in the hope that some fascinatingly famous person, some interesting weirdo, some lovely character was worth a memoir. Then I recalled a tiny incident that happened only last weekend, when a young man, seeing a guest of ours, a very old English lady sitting out in the blazing noonday 110F sun, something only mad dogs and Englishmen will do, winkingly said to her, "I guess you don't have many chances of doing this in your country." I had my topic.

Familiar old preconceptions that one nation holds about another that outlast even the most blinding contrary evidence in your face. I made notes. Americans' – New Yorkers', anyway – assumption that London is a city of rain. Fact – New York has an average 32 inches a year. London, exactly the same. New York has it in a dozen cataclysms throughout any one of which it looks like the end of the world. London gets what only an Englishman could have called "the gentle rain from heaven", but gets it a lot of the time.

Belief. The English drink tea for breakfast, almost as a religious ritual. Whereas Frenchmen, from midday on, drink wine all the time. Fact – just under 40% of all Brits drink coffee for breakfast. Fact – four Frenchmen in 10 never touch wine. How their comicalities struck me. By Wednesday afternoon I could imagine what another old lady would have called "a fun talk in the making". And one, of course, highly instructive.

Throughout all the eight-month roar of the rumour mill and the babble of guesswork, there was one influential man who spoke very little. He is Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois. A tall, graceful, patient, silver-haired congressman who was in on the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

He's the present chairman of the House judiciary committee, which is the one that has to decide if evidence brought before the House is weighty enough to warrant an impeachment hearing, out of which could come a vote to file articles of impeachment. He has appeared once, possibly twice, in public and said we should make no judgement until the prosecutor's report is in. Wait for the report.

So early this week I decided I would never talk about this thing again until that happened. And last Tuesday, the best information was that Special Counsel Judge Starr would probably get the document to Congressman Hyde next week or perhaps not until the congressional election is over in November.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon – flash, boom, bang. With no warning, or notice given to Congress, not even a phone call to the Speaker of the House, Mr Starr sent off 18 boxloads of documents to the House, where they were put under armed guard in the custody of the sergeant-of-arms.

Within the hour, the Speaker of the House, Mr Gingrich – who in the American system, remember, is not a neutral referee but the political leader of the majority party, today, the Republicans – the speaker said the House had to take a deep breath, and take its time, and face its gravest act next to a declaration of war.

Through Wednesday evening, a new wave of speculation began to rise. How much gross detail was in the Lewinsky report? Did it contain much of the old Arkansas land deal? The White House's secret confiscation of those confidential FBI files on the Republicans?

But chiefly the early hue and cry was "When will the report be made public?" Every journalist worth his investigative salt was already drilling holes all over town to be sure he'd be first and best and most lurid with the leaks.

Chairman Hyde, anticipating the coming flood of leaks at once petitioned the House rules committee to release the bulging summary of the report to the public on Friday. And from then on, while the House judiciary committee would presumably be reading and digesting the 4,445 pages and the loads of Grand Jury evidence and the 20-odd hours of Miss Lewinsky's confessional talk, as secretly recorded by Miss Tripp, meanwhile the public could lap up the gory details of an affair it says it's sick and tired of but is, aren't we all, aching to hear more of. No need for us to get in on that scavenger hunt. By the time many of you hear these words you'll know more gory details than I know now.

Meanwhile, while Mr Starr was making up his mind, in a hurry, the president yielded to what many senators and congressmen of both parties had urged him to do, especially the ones who want him to survive. Bury the legal quibble of inappropriate sexual relations, quite possibly the biggest blunder of his presidency.

To come clean and true before every audience he faces, and repent, beg for forgiveness. And so the president did. First, and most simply, before a Democrats' fund-raising dinner in Florida. "I let you down. I let my family down. And I let this country down. And I'm trying to make it right".

If he'd said that two weeks ago, or better, last January, he'd most likely have stifled all the fire power out of the Starr report. But within 24 hours of Mr Starr's move, the president had met privately to beg forgiveness of the House leaders of both parties, the Senate leaders, even of his whole Cabinet. It's a reflection of how little the Cabinet matters in the American system that this was the first Cabinet meeting since January.

However much of the huge report is released, however much or little you know, this, I believe, is the time to look at impeachment, how it's defined, how it works, how it has worked.

The Constitution has two relevant clauses. One, the House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment. And, two, the president, vice president and all civil offices of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours.

What are high crimes and misdemeanours? Ah, well! There was a tremendous and inflammatory debate when that clause was being debated during the convention that wrote the Constitution. James Madison feared a president might hold office merely at the pleasure of a Congress. If it disliked him, it could manufacture misdemeanours.

Alexander Hamilton thought the grounds for impeachment so vague and dangerous to prove he wanted to throw out the whole practice of impeachment, as the British had done. But the convention kept it. Mainly, it was intended to be a protection against corrupt judges and in the 12 cases of impeachment that have gone forward, nine of them have been of judges. Of presidents, only one, one trial.

President Nixon saw the handwriting – "Guilty" – on the wall long before he was to come to trial to the Senate. He didn't even wait for the whole House to vote for his impeachment. When the House judiciary committee voted unanimously three articles of impeachment, that was enough. He resigned.

The process is theoretically simple. The House judiciary committee meets, studies evidence that charges impeachable offences which might come from a committee of Congress, from a Grand Jury hearing. From now, the special prosecutor, whose power to send up his own report was incorporated in the act of 1978 that set up the emergency office of a special prosecutor, the committee then decides if the evidence is strong enough to warrant a hearing, an investigative hearing of the whole committee.

They can then take their time on that, review documents, call witnesses. At the end they vote on each suggested article. If they vote any single article, it must go to the floor of the House which then votes by a majority to send the accused to trial by the Senate, sitting as a jury, the presiding judge to be the Chief Justice of the United States. A two-thirds majority will convict. The only time a president was impeached, Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, the guilty verdict fell one short. He was acquitted.

The whole process will not obey the urgent, wishful thinking of the tabloids. It could take two or three weeks for Mr Hyde's committee even to decide on a hearing. And if that happens, Mr Hyde could choose to wait for a new Congress in January, to stage the hearing, and then make its grave decision, one way or another.

Well, I hope the impeachment procedure is now made plain. What is not plain and what could summon up a howling Tower of Babel is the earlier question to which I gave no answer – what are high crimes and misdemeanours?

In an actual majority of the cases that have come before the House, in the 200-year life of the American system, most have been acquitted because either the judiciary committee or the whole House couldn't agree on what was either a high crime or a misdemeanour, or neither. Long ago, after an agonising, self-searching session of the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice said, "The Constitution is what the judges say it is".

Well, true or not, there's no doubt that before the final verdict can be reached, high crimes and misdemeanours will be what the House judiciary committee, or a majority of the House, say they are.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.