(6 of 7)
Harkin knew only the Captain could make the call. The problem was flagging Clinton on a holiday weekend. Harkin tracked down Terry McAuliffe, the President's moneyman and confidant, at his health club to run interference. Ten minutes later, McAuliffe got back to Harkin: "The President said it was a great idea, and he'll get right on it." Clinton put in the call from an AmeriCorps event on Monday.
"Dale, I need you on this," pleaded the President. Bumpers was the guy who could make all his arguments for him, channel him, excoriate him for his private shame, and then defend him for the public good. He could both embody and invoke the World War II generation in all its commonplace heroism and then gaze on its prodigal son, the generation it created that has messed things up and has to be forgiven anyway. His oration was the only part of the trial that the White House admitted Clinton watched in real time.
It took an old guy to force the audience to face the future, to remember the Speaker of the House who had voted to impeach Andrew Johnson--James G. Blaine--and later regretted how close he had brought the nation to chaos. The more Bumpers talked, from his self-mocking warm-up jokes to his seductive reminders that being a Senator is the greatest honor in the whole world, the more you could hear Clinton speaking through him, finally making the arguments he had not been able to make for himself.
This wasn't perjury and obstruction, Bumpers said; this was about concealing something Clinton was ashamed of. Nobody's perfect. Bumpers attacked the lack of proportion between crime and punishment, mocked the very notion that the President's conduct had cost him prestige around the world, rooted around the Constitution to remind them that impeachable crimes are supposed to be distinctly "political offenses against the state." The overreaching was, he scolded the House managers, the product of "wanting to win too badly."
Clinton was worried that the Senators would dismiss anything Bumpers said as the gesture of an old Arkansas crony. Bumpers took care of that by impaling him: Clinton's conduct was "indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless." He went where none of the lawyers could: into Hillary's heart, and Chelsea's, when he described a "decimated" family. And he went straight to the Senators' pride, as the body that extols reason over passion. This is the most important vote you'll ever cast, he said. "If you have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that's understandable, rise above it. He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won't."
Unless, of course, they fail to heed his advice. Earlier in the day, lawyer David Kendall had warned that extending the trial and calling witnesses would promise many more months of discovery and depositions. Bumpers held out both carrot and stick. If the Senators vote to acquit, he said, "you go immediately to the people's agenda. If you vote to convict...you're going to be creating far more havoc than he could ever possibly create. After all, he's only got two years left."