Waiting for the Inevitable

...She did not join her husband and daughter in church one Sunday...

...Watergate produced a bumper crop of villains, starting with President Richard M. Nixon...

...That Republican icon, President Ronald Reagan, managed to pursue a conservative agenda with a smile on his face, proclaiming "Morning in America...

...Once they ran into confirmation difficulties, Clinton dropped nominees like Zoe Band and Kimba Wood for Attorney General, Lam Guinier for head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and ex-Governor William Weld of Massachusetts for Ambassador to Mexico...

...One gesture was to grant the prosecutors the last word in the argument—three hours of rebuttal that are not provided for in the trial rules...

...In a sense, the drive to impeach President C lint on may have been the high-water mark of the moralistic conservatives...

...After the Republican setbacks in 1998, incoming Speaker Dennis Hastert set as his most important goal restoring Americans' confidence that the government works...

...But for all the impeachment ardor of the House Republicans, the last bastion of moralistic zeal in Congress, this enthusiasm was not shared in the Senate...

...Former Judge Robert H. Bork expressed concern that Clinton personifies a society "unable to tell right from wrong...

...He distanced himself from aides who got into trouble serving him, like Webster Hubbell, who has talked of rolling over "one more time" for the President, and Harold Ickes, who was eased out of the White House after being passed over for Chief of Staff...

...Many Presidents have tended to regard associates, and even longtime friends, as expendable in the interest of the lofty goals they see themselves pursuing...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Waiting for the Inevitable Barring an unanticipated bombshell, neither the impressive performance by quarterback defense counsel Charles F. C. Ruff and his team of colleagues, nor the doggedness of chief prosecutor Henry J. Hyde of Illinois andhis group of House managers will have much impact on the final outcome of the Senate impeachment trial...

...Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, veteran of the Vietnam and Nicaraguan wars, emerged as a villain to many but a hero to some...

...Nowhere in Hastert's agenda will you find any mention of the social conservatives' desire for constitutional amendments to ban abortion and flag-burning, and to legitimize school prayer...

...She was seen brushing away her husband's hand during their recent visit to Jerusalem...

...In the Clinton scandal the public has said a plague on all your houses, starting with the House of Representatives...

...What the Grand Old Party will have to practice, if it is to retain a leading role, is a little less hellfire and damnation, a little more live and let live...

...Time magazine had them on its cover as joint men of the year, explaining that the criterion was not sterling qualities but newsworthiness and impact on our lives...

...Iran-contra is a more difficult case...

...What about the man finally chosen for Speaker, and therefore now second in the line of Presidential succession, J. Dennis Hasten of Illinois...

...The Smiling Stalwart Why is it, I wonder, that of all the wrenching government controversies during the past half century, the Clinton impeachment struggle has produced so many villains and hardly any heroes...

...Dennis who...

...But through all of the current turmoil she has stood valiantly, sometimes stoically, by her spouse's side...

...There Republicans and Democrats have attempted to fashion an escape hatch from a protracted trial that a majority of Americans seemed not to want...

...All plausible explanations, but I think there is something else going on here...

...She recalled that she had been in the White House Roosevelt Room the previous January, when the President categorically denied any such involvement...

...My definition of "hero" is admittedly arbitrary, but in the Red-hunt era of the '50s the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Republican Joseph R. McCarthy, emerged as an almost undisputed villain along with his aggressive young investigators, Roy Conn and David Schine...

...Yet not one of the aides who call themselves betrayed has turned on him.' Safire speculates about a "Kulturkampf," a cultural war, in which the baby boomers of the '60s are sticking together against the conservatives of the '90s...

...She is the only one I can think of who comes out of this mess looking enhanced rather than diminished...

...But by far the greatest obstacle has been how the Senate Republicans could save face for the House Republicans, who are totally dedicated to the course on which former Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia embarked them last November...

...The House managers will have the opportunity to make clear that they are going down with their flag flying...

...It is when Presidents confuse national interest with personal interest that the trouble starts...

...To Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, the impeachment engine in the House, the struggle over impeachment was "a debate about relativism versus absolute truth...

...Nobody on the bumbling Senate-House investigating committee took many honors...

...He was referring to the mystery of the President's ability to retain the loyalty of Democratic legislators, the public and his own aides, some of whom have not experienced much loyalty from him...

...and Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who started the drive for McCarthy's censure...

...Nevertheless, this January amid the impeachment proceedings Senator Feinstein was at a White House state dinner...

...Live and Let Live The Republican Party is not emerging unscathed from the impeachment crisis...

...Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde...

...Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana, who suddenly withdrew as Gingrich's successor because of marital infidelity—or, more exactly, infidelity about to become known—got a lot of sympathy, but that didn't make him a hero...

...The Senate's leaders, Republican and Democratic, know where they are going, they have just found it devilishly hard to get there...

...One can practically hear the gentle hiss of air escaping from the prosecution's case...

...What the Republican elders seem further to have discovered is that Americans, generally sanguine entering 1999, want a little less fierceness in the ranks of the majority party...

...She said she was "deeply saddened...

...Outgoing Speaker Newt Gingrich...

...What ever happened to "culture war" and "moral relativism...

...Conservative lobbyist Ralph Reed, on the Lehrer Newshour, said the answer to the mystery was the President's being linked with economic good times...

...Yet deeply determined as he is to oust a President who has lied under oath...

...They undoubtedly will emphasize, as they so often have, that rejecting impeachment is a terrible example to set for history, that generations unborn will look back on a President who succeeded in getting away with lying...

...In the Senate and on television she has been a vigorous Clinton defender...

...Some of the obstacles have been procedural, reflecting Senatorial egos at work to make points about whether to deliberate in public or in private, whether to vote on dismissal in one or two votes...

...As a Republican Senator has observed, Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi has basically been involved in a triangular negotiation—with the Democrats on how this drama would reach its denouement, and with the House managers on what could be done to save them from humiliation...

...Notice, too, the new hyphenated conservatism adopted by leading lights among the Republicans: Texas Governor George W Bush's "compassionate conservatism," outgoing Governor of California Pete Wilson's "mainstream conservatism," and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "commonsense conservatism...

...my trust in his credibility has been shattered...

...Their problem has been devising an elegant way to wind up a process that they were aware from the very beginning would fail for lack of the two-thirds vote necessary to convict and remove President William Jefferson Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice...

...House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde must realize that the jig is up...

...That came to mind as I read a New York Times column by my friend Bill Safire, titled "The Loyalty Mystery...

...President Clinton and his persecutor, Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr, were both rated as villains...

...He fired officials like Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was criticized for an offhand remark about masturbation...

...When President Clinton, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like President Nixon, turns his back on someone who has served him, I am sure he is convinced it is a sacrifice being made in the national interest...

...Surprising Loyalty Last August 17, when President Clinton went on television after his grand jury appearance to confess a "not appropriate" relationship with Monica Lewinsky, I happened to be attending an Aspen seminar with Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California...

...Instead, his early goals are tax relief, education aid defense increases, and a bipartisan fix for Social Security...

...That leaves, by my lights, only one generally accepted hero, or rather heroine— Hillary Rodham Clinton, the smiling stalwart...

...Former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta attributes the phenomenon to people who don't believe in the President as a person still believing in what he is hying to do for America...

...The heroes were lawyer Joseph Welch, who confronted McCarthy in his own hearing room with the challenge, "Have you no sense of decency...

...Yet it also produced an almost equally large crop of heroes, including the homespun Democratic Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Judge John J. Sirica, to name a few, plus two journalists memorialized in film...

...A bemused Safire wrote of Clinton: "There he stands in the dock, impeached as a perjurer, certain of censure, roundly denounced even by his political allies for weaknesses that dishonored the office...

...But that will not be enough to sway Senators more concerned with this generation—not twothirds of them anyway...

...After the 1994 Republican election sweep, Speaker Newt Gingrich proclaimed a Contract with America to shrink the size of government...

...No great hero...

...Most of it sounds like an agenda for centrist New Democrats...

...Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein...

...Favorite villain...