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“READ IT AND HEED IT” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E776-E777 on April 29, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
READ IT AND HEED IT
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HON. GERALD B.H. SOLOMON
of new york
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, April 29, 1997
Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, the parallels between Watergate and Whitewater are ominous.
As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial warns us, the words
``obstruction of justice'' are now looming on the Whitewater horizon. It was that offense, that abuse of the power of the Presidency, that brought down Richard Nixon.
The same editorial notes that the Whitewater scandal is now much more advanced than Watergate was when President Nixon was re-elected in the 1972 landslide. And so it is.
When the words ``obstruction of justice'' are used, can the word
``impeachment'' be far behind? I take no pleasure in contemplating such a step, Mr. Speaker, but feel dutybound to place the Wall Street Journal editorial in the Record, and urge all Members to read it and heed it.
Whitewater and Watergate
``Obstruction of justice,'' the term Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr invoked in extending the Whitewater grand jury in Little Rock, resonates with themes from the Watergate epic a generation ago. When the House Judiciary Committee voted up the bill of impeachment that led to Richard Nixon's resignation, count one was obstruction.
Watergate was not about a two-bit burglary, that is, but about the abuse of the powers of the Presidency. The committee charged that the President, ``in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice.'' Seeking to cover up the initial misdeed, President Nixon and his highest aides dug themselves ever deeper into a legal morass that led the President to disgrace and the aides to jail. The final ``smoking gun'' tape recorded the President issuing instructions to induce the CIA to get the FBI to call off its investigation of the burglary by claiming bogus national security concerns. With this revelation, the President's last support vanished and he left office.
Mr. Starr's filings this week ring similar chords, talking of ``extensive evidence of possible obstruction of the administration of justice,'' of resistance to subpoenas, of
``grand jury litigation under seal'' over privileges and documents, of in camera citations to the court. It called for further investigation of ``perjury, obstruction of the administration of justice, concealment and destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.''
These parallels are all the more ironic because Hillary Rodham Clinton served on the legal staff of the Watergate Committee. Former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum also worked for the House Watergate Committee, while on the minority counsel to the Senate investigation was Senator Fred Thompson, now heading the Senate inquiry into the Clinton campaign contributions scandal.
Rep. Bob Barr makes some sport at Mrs. Clinton's expense alongside by citing the 1974 staff memo on grounds for impeachment. The Georgia Republican has written Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde to officially request the start of an impeachment inquiry. Rep. Hyde has said he's started staff studies ``just staying ahead of the curve'' and not for serious action ``unless we have what really amounts to a smoking gun.''
Rep. Barr, a former U.S. Attorney, makes the legal case that in Whitewater and the campaign funds scandal we are dealing with potential impeachment material. Even as a legal case, or course, there remains no small matter of proof. Were the payments to Webb Hubble really hush money, for example, and were the Rose Law Firm billing records intentionally withheld while under subpoena? And to what extent was Bill Clinton personally involved--in Watergate phraseology, ``what did the President know and when did he know it?''
While Mr. Starr is obviously digging in these fields, we have no reason to believe he's reached the mother lode. The Watergate impeachment case, after all, was built on the testimony of John Dean, Mr. Nixon's White House Counsel. Even then, it had to be cinched by tape recordings. Mr. Starr can't even get the cooperation of Susan McDougal. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, recently on an anti-Clinton roll, cites Webb Hubbell's Camp David visit while editorializing,
``If only Richard Nixon had been less stiff, he might still be jollying John Dean into silence--and Watergate would have stayed the name of another Washington apartment complex.''
Writing recently in The New York Times, Watergate survivor Leonard Garment also remarked that President Clinton ``seems infinitely elastic, positive and resilient.'' By contrast President Nixon's morose defensiveness was shaped by his
``prize collection of emotional scars'' from the Alger Hiss case. Even more important ``Mr. Clinton has not been a central participant and target in a debate as polarizing as the conflict over the Vietnam War.'' President Nixon's resignation, and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, came at already impassioned turns in the nation's history. Today's mixture of contentment and cynicism insulates a President from scandal.
In a recent Watergate symposium, Mr. Garment also made the point that we should not expect Presidents to have normal personalities. ``The presidential gene,'' he said, ``is filled with sociopathic qualities--brilliant, erratic, lying, cheating, expert at mendacity, generous, loony, driven by a sense of mission. A very unusual person. Nixon was one of the strangest of this strange group.''
No President is likely to meet the clinical definition of a sociopath; what psychiatrists call an ``anti-social personality,'' a complete obliviousness to the normal rules of society, is evident in early adolescence and will lead to jail rather than high office. Sociopaths, the textbooks tell us, are seemingly intelligent and typically charming, though not good at sustaining personal or sexual relationships. They lie remarkably well, feel no guilt or remorse, and are skillful at blaming their problems on others. A most striking feature is, as one text puts it, ``He often demonstrates a lack of anxiety or tension that can be grossly incongruous with the situation.''
Childhood symptoms are essential to this clinical diagnosis, and Bill Clinton's experience in Hope and Hot Springs, while troubled, supports no such speculation. Yet clearly he has ``the presidential gene,'' perhaps even more so than Richard Nixon. And this catalog of traits is ideally suited to, say, finding some way to overcome seemingly impossible election odds, or withstanding the onslaught of scandal. As Mr. Garment summarizes the present outlook, ``The country is in for a year or more of dizzy, distracting prime-time scandal politics. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the ultimate political cataclysm.''
While we take this as the most likely outcome, our judgment is that in fact Mr. Clinton is guilty of essentially the same things over which Mr. Nixon was hounded from office--abusing his office to cover up criminal activity by himself and his accomplices, and misleading the public with a campaign of lies about it. From the first days of his Administration, with the firing of all sitting U.S. Attorneys and Webb Hubbell's intervention in a corruption trial, we have seen a succession of efforts to subvert the administration of justice. The head of the FBI was fired, and days afterward a high official died of a gunshot wound, and the investigation ended without crime scene photos or autopsy X-rays. Honorable Democrats like Phillip Heymann have fled the Justice Department, leaving it today nearly vacant; White House Counsel have committed serial resignation. Yet Mr. Clinton remains President and still commands respect in the polls. Handled with enough audacity, it seems, the Presidency is a powerful office after all.
There is even a school of thought, implicit in talk about
``more important'' work for the nation, that the coverup should succeed. Yet as we look back on Watergate, the nation went through a highly beneficial, even necessary learning experience. Whitewater carries a similar stake, simply put: learning how our government operates, whether laws are being faithfully executed. With sunshine, citizens can make their own judgments, and have plenty of opportunity to express them, starting with the 1998 mid-term elections. But it is essential that the investigators--Mr. Starr, the FBI, Senator Thompson, Rep. Dan Burton and newly vigilant members of the press--get moral support against the deterrent attacks to which they've uniformly been subjected.
Whitewater did not prevent Mr. Clinton's re-election, though the scandal was much more advanced than Watergate was during Mr. Nixon's 1972 landslide. When President Nixon left we wrote that he had so severely damaged his own credibility he could no longer govern. We do not know how Whitewater will finally end, but we are starting to wonder whether we ultimately understood Watergate.
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