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It fell to Gregory Craig on Wednesday to highlight the prosecution's overreaching. A perjury conviction, he argued, couldn't come down to whether Clinton lied when he said he and Monica had telephone conversations that included sexual banter "on occasion" when it was at least 17 times. He argued that the managers were coloring outside the lines when they tried to roll everything Clinton said in his January deposition into the perjury charge--even though the House specifically rejected the impeachment article charging Clinton with perjury in that deposition.
If Ruff was compelling and Craig meticulous, Cheryl Mills was a left hook. In Buffalo on Wednesday, Clinton asked top aide Doug Sosnik whether Mills had begun her presentation on the Senate floor. "Any minute," Sosnik replied. The President smiled as if he had a secret. "She's going to do great, and I think she's going to take a lot of people by surprise."
Her very presence there brought some electricity into the gaslit setting. All lemony charm and discipline, at times condescending, at times lethal in her sarcasm and breathtaking in her daring, she argued that the Senators need not fear that acquitting Clinton will harm women or civil rights; she would vouch for him. After Mills was through, Strom Thurmond, the old segregationist, came over to congratulate her. Mills' White House office quickly filled up with so many flowers from well wishers that aides joked it looked like a wedding chapel.
Like all good defense lawyers, Clinton's team sought to sow enough confusion into the House managers' case to grow a little reasonable doubt in the Senators' heads. But they could not completely smooth over some troubling parts of the case. It was hard to cast Clinton's conversations with Betty Currie as innocent refreshment of his memory rather than insidious coaching of a potential witness. As Senator Arlen Specter and others asked on Friday, how exactly would it help his memory to ask Currie questions that were all false--"I never touched her, right? We were never alone, right?"
And the conflict over what body parts he touched was not a trivial distinction: in that difference lay whether Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition, since under that tortured definition of sex, it did indeed matter which parts he had touched, and the President was very careful to keep his eye on the line. If the legal defense was strong enough to corral any restless Democrats, it was not enough to guarantee the six Republican votes the White House needs to adjourn the whole thing.
That job fell to Dale Bumpers, the four-term, just-retired Arkansas Senator who would come to the chamber to play the coda. The idea for his appearance, in fact, sprang from the Senate floor. Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin was troubled by how the Republican managers were like next-door neighbors who knew how to talk across the fence--even to Democrats. At the defense table, however, sat a bunch of strangers.
So Harkin spent last Sunday reaching out to old members of the club to recruit someone for the President's team. Bumpers seemed to be the perfect fit: he knows the Senators' moves and speaks their language, could give them the cover they needed to end the trial. Trouble was, Bumpers was not familiar with the minutiae of the charges. "He was very reluctant," says Harkin.