(4 of 8)
That afternoon, the mood went from bad to worse. In trying to show that the Lewinsky affair was no Watergate, the White House exhumed some of the most partisan veterans of the 1974 Judiciary Committee. Wayne Owens, a former Democratic member from Utah, said it was the current committee's fault that "they gave to America, to the seven- and eight-year-olds, the knowledge or raised the question of what oral sex is, what telephone sex is and what you can do with a cigar sexually." And Father Robert Drinan, the ultraliberal former member from Massachusetts, predicted that the committee would "go down in the history books as one that was dominated by vindictiveness and by vengeance and by partisanship." Representative Howard Coble of North Carolina, who sometimes sounds like he's still got a place on Mayberry R.F.D., reacted by challenging Drinan, still in clerical garb, to a rumble. "We're going about our business," Coble croaked. "And if anybody thinks that vengeance is involved, I'll meet them in the parking lot later on tonight."
On the second day the grownups returned. A team of former criminal justice officials argued that few in their profession would consider taking Clinton to court for lying about sex, and none would win a conviction. By the time the White House aides finally let America meet the President's counsel, the reclusive Charles Ruff, they were making concessions they had refused to make for months. Ruff walked right up to the line of admitting that Clinton lied, stopping just short of the red zone. Clinton's testimony in the Jones case, said Ruff, was misleading. "Reasonable people, and you maybe have reached that conclusion, could determine that he crossed over that line and that what for him was truthful but misleading or nonresponsive and misleading or evasive was, in fact, false. But in his mind--and that is the heart and soul of perjury--he thought and he believed that what he was doing was being evasive but truthful."
Then Ruff made his plea: "Let each member assume that Ms. Lewinsky's version of the events is correct, and then ask, 'Am I prepared to impeach the President because after having admitted having engaged in egregiously wrongful conduct, he falsely described the particulars of that conduct?'" It was a lawyer's last stand, a final appeal to save a client from the congressional equivalent of indictment. In effect, Ruff was saying, "You know he lied and we know he lied. The only disagreement is what we ought to do about it."
If the defense was arguing that Bill Clinton should not be held to a higher standard than any other criminal defendant, the Republicans were arguing that a President must be. If the nation's chief law-enforcement officer can get away with lying under oath, whatever the subject, then the rule of law collapses, and everyone else walks. "We've got to do it for the children," Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio said later.