4 Times Journalists Tell Their Story of Impeachment (the One in the ’90s)

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The House is expected to vote on Wednesday on two articles of impeachment against President Trump, most likely making him the third president in the nation’s history to be impeached. Four of the current New York Times journalists who covered President Bill Clinton’s impeachment reminisce about that time and how it echoes in today’s coverage.

PETER BAKER, currently the chief White House correspondent: We thought it was the most partisan, most divisive era we could ever imagine. Today, that seems almost quaint.

After his re-election, President Bill Clinton had talked in his inaugural address about using his second term to become the “repairer of the breach,” quoting Isaiah, and he had told John Harris (my partner on the White House beat) and me a couple of days earlier that he wanted to “flush the poison from the atmosphere.” Instead, the breach became wider than ever before and the poisons more toxic. Little did we realize how much more so it could become.

ALISON MITCHELL, currently an assistant managing editor for The New York Times: I also remember being shocked by the intense partisanship — that Clinton’s sex life had been investigated in such detail. Then so many Republicans found their sex lives investigated by the press and opposition researchers. It felt like the two parties were practicing mutually assured destruction. It was brutal and so far from governing.

There was a breathtaking moment when, right in the middle of the House impeachment debate, the incoming speaker, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who had also been revealed to have had an affair, called on Clinton to resign. Some Democrats on the House floor started shouting, “You resign.” And then he did. And the debate went on.

ERIC SCHMITT, currently a terrorism and national security correspondent: It accelerated what was already clearly becoming a much more partisan environment on the Hill.

MITCHELL: I was the lead congressional correspondent during impeachment. We worked in the Senate press gallery, where you sit virtually on top of each other and in earshot of competitors. It was loud and there was little privacy.

CARL HULSE, currently the chief Washington correspondent: I was the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, a collection of three dozen medium-size and smaller newspapers scattered around the South, plus two in California — all of which The Times eventually sold to focus on its core business.

I was headquartered in The Times’s Washington bureau, but I spent almost all my time on Capitol Hill. My job was to report on the issues and members of Congress important to readers of those papers, and to find broader stories that could appeal to a very diverse readership.

SCHMITT: I was one of three congressional reporters for The Times — along with Alison Mitchell and Lizette Alvarez — responsible for covering the Clinton impeachment hearings in the House and then the Senate trial. Alison took the lead, but we would divvy things up so everyone got a chance to write the big story of the day or week at some point, as well as chase down story leads.

It was the early days of 24/7 cable news, so there was competitive pressure from that, in addition to the fierce competition from traditional rivals like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and the main networks.

BAKER: I was a White House correspondent for The Washington Post. My colleagues Susan Schmidt, Toni Locy and I wrote the story that first broke the news that Ken Starr was investigating Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in covering up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. For the next 13 months, I covered the Starr investigation and was the lead writer on the House impeachment and Senate trial.

The days were endless. They started early, and many nights we did not finish until around midnight. We became experts in which restaurants still served until 1 a.m.

SCHMITT: During the House hearings phase, our schedule followed the hearing schedule. That meant getting into our congressional office around 8:30 or 9 a.m. and staying until 6 or 7 p.m. Once the Senate trial started, the hours were even longer, starting as early as 7 a.m. and sometimes ending around 9 p.m. — after we spent a couple of hours chasing down senators in their Capitol hideaway offices for any tips or strategy updates.

It was still very much an old-fashioned print cycle, in which we geared up for the evening print editions, went home and then started all over again in the morning. There was no social media. We barely had cellphones, which were in their infancy. I remember carrying a pager so the desk could reach me.

MITCHELL: The House vote on impeaching President Clinton took place on a Saturday, which I remember because the first deadline for our Sunday papers was at noon. This was before most news organizations were thinking about minute-by-minute digital competition. So that deadline seemed difficult.

HULSE: I recall writing multiple versions of the impeachment story on the Saturday of the House vote to highlight how a certain state delegation voted and what lawmakers were saying.

BAKER: I vividly remember the night we were about to break the first story. We were sitting in Bill Hamilton’s office (Mr. Hamilton is now The Times’s Washington editor), about a dozen reporters and editors, and what struck me was that there was no question we were going to run the story. No one blinked, even though we were about to publish allegations that the president of the United States had sex with a former White House intern and was under criminal investigation. It boggled the mind.

I remember walking home at 2 in the morning through empty, dark streets wondering what had just been unleashed. “It doesn’t seem real,” I wrote in a journal when I got home. By the next morning, “the I-word,” as people were calling impeachment, was being bandied about, starting, oddly enough, with George Stephanopoulos, who had been Clinton’s senior adviser and had since moved to ABC News. Today we run so many sensational stories with hard-to-believe facts in them that it’s difficult to convey just how extraordinary it was back then.

MITCHELL: At the time it all felt so distasteful to me. It was a different era, though. I lately have thought it would all have played extremely differently in the #MeToo era.

The Starr report was almost pornographic in its sordid detail. I actually think the detail ended up backfiring on the G.O.P. since it seemed so designed to humiliate. It also posed a challenge for The New York Times and our standards. We did refer to the semen-stained dress.

I remember the consternation caused by the Starr report. We were printing and posting it in full.

BAKER: Writing about the president’s lies and sexual adventurism did not make one popular with the Clinton White House, that’s for sure. I remember one day having a White House aide yell at me over a story he thought was wrong. He got so angry that he finally shouted, “If you don’t get that, we have nothing to talk about!” And then he stormed out of the room. The problem was we were in his office. (The story later turned out to be 100 percent accurate, by the way, but in fairness to the aide, the president was deceiving all of them too.)

But we had White House briefings every working day. As heated and hostile as it got, it would never have occurred to the White House in that era to shut down news briefings. It would have looked weak and gone against the notion that there was still an obligation to answer questions, or at least allow questions to be asked, no matter how uncomfortable it was.

HULSE: There is much more hostility now toward the media on the part of some lawmakers. And I don’t think lawmakers and journalists have the same deep relationships that we were able to have in the past.

BAKER: The competition was ferocious. Beyond The Times and The Post and the networks, this was the first time that Fox was really a major player, and MSNBC was trying to be one. It was the beginning of the internet era, with unconventional outlets like the Drudge Report playing a profound role in driving the story. All kinds of information was out in the public space that had never been vetted by the professional editors who used to be the filters for the American media, and we had to decide what to trust and what not to trust.

I remember once driving several hours outside Washington to meet a secret source and not being able to tell even my editors where I was going or when I would be back. Everything was super sensitive. A lot of us feared that our phones might be tapped, that we might be followed, that private investigators might be looking into us. In the end, that was probably exaggerated, but at the time it didn’t feel that way.

HULSE: I had decent access and could keep up with what was happening with impeachment while keeping local readers apprised of what their members of Congress were doing.

It was endlessly fascinating since I covered everyone from congressional leaders such as Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, a key player in impeachment and a big name from a state where we had newspapers, to lowly backbenchers most people had never heard of. And because I was focused so closely on key individuals, I got to know many of them quite well.

This paid dividends when people like Charles Canady, a relatively junior House member from central Florida, became one of the impeachment managers, along with Bill McCollum, another Republican House member from Florida.

MITCHELL: So many figures from then come to mind. Lindsey Graham was a new House member who came to prominence as one of the impeachment managers and an aggressive proponent of impeaching President Clinton. It was well before he became a senator who is omnipresent on cable television, and he seemed at the time to be almost surprised at all the attention.

BAKER: He talked a lot about the importance of the rule of law and about accountability for a president who crossed the line.

MITCHELL: Representative Henry J. Hyde, the Illinois Republican who headed the Judiciary Committee, was the lead prosecutor. He was erudite, quotable and known as an anti-abortion warrior. He saw his own reputation tarnished when it emerged that he had had an affair three decades earlier. He acknowledged it, saying, “The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions.”

SCHMITT: He was a big man with a huge shock of white hair. He had a commanding presence.

MITCHELL: Representative Richard Gephardt and Senator Tom Daschle were the Democratic minority leaders who were setting strategy for defending President Clinton. Yet each seemed deeply uncomfortable with the president’s behavior and recklessness. Gephardt made a plea on the House floor: “We need to stop destroying imperfect people at the altar of an unobtainable morality.” I remember watching Daschle slumped in his chair during the Senate trial looking disgusted by it all.

HULSE: I still laugh at the late Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican and a very wily politician, invoking “Scottish law” and saying the charges against President Clinton were “not proven.” A moderate Republican who needed Democratic votes around Philadelphia to survive, Mr. Specter didn’t want to vote either guilty or not guilty for political reasons. His vote, however, was recorded as not guilty.

BAKER: The Watergate case hovered over that moment the way the Clinton impeachment hovers over this one. The House Republicans used the word “RODINO” as the password on their computer system, after the congressman who led the House impeachment effort in 1974, Peter Rodino. At that time, a number of people who had been involved in the Nixon impeachment were still on the scene and involved in this one — including Hillary Clinton, who had been on the House Democratic staff at the time.

HULSE: I still have my impeachment ticket from the day of the vote to acquit the president. Standing room, and I was lucky to get that.

MITCHELL: I didn’t have any keepsakes of impeachment until years later when our beloved colleague Robert Pear sent me the four-volume bound set of the proceedings of the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton. It was a very Robert-like gift, if you knew Robert’s fondness for the Congressional Record. I must admit I’ve never cracked the plastic wrapping. But I cherish it.

BAKER: My direct editor was a remarkable young woman named Susan Glasser, who now happens to be my wife. We met during the investigation, and date nights consisted of poring over the Starr report. I still have my original dog-eared copy of the report. We always say that our marriage is the one good thing that came out of that whole episode.


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