Washington Burning

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In the end the House impeachment vote finally did feel historic. But only if you kept in mind just how soiled and cartwheeling real events can be. "History...is indeed little more than a chronicle of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind," wrote Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a man who died 200 years before Monica Lewinsky met Bill Clinton.

Or William Jefferson Clinton, to use his ceremonious full name, which is the only one that will do for this. On Saturday, Dec. 19, William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, became the second President in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

Which was, by that time, a viper's nest, and a place sent reeling by the events it had been called upon to absorb in a few short days. All the same, as the voting proceeded on the four articles of impeachment, the mood that this whole strange year was always supposed to invoke but almost never did--sober-minded, even a little abashed--finally settled across the capital and maybe across the country. Every imaginable motive was still at work in "the process," every kind of ugly reckoning is probably still to come, but for once all the players seemed truly struck by the seriousness of the game. In a passionate floor speech before the vote, minority leader Richard Gephardt cried, "May God have mercy on this Congress." It was maybe the one sentiment that could have got a bipartisan vote of approval.

A few minutes later, by a vote of 228 to 206, the House adopted the first article of impeachment, accusing the President of lying under oath to Kenneth Starr's grand jury about his affair with Lewinsky. Five members of each party defected. A second article, which accused Clinton of committing perjury in the Paula Jones suit, was rejected by a vote of 229 to 205. The House approved a third article, which accused Clinton of obstructing justice by coaching his secretary, Betty Currie, to lie about his relationship with Lewinsky, by a vote of 221 to 212. But a fourth and final article, which accused him of abuse of power for giving dismissive or evasive answers to some of the 81 questions put to him by the House Judiciary Committee, was rejected by a vote of 285 to 148. That was the climax of an incomparably tumultuous and unnerving week. Surreal was the word of the moment for a three-day period in which the President was impeached over lies about sex, the incoming Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, resigned on the House floor because of his own adulteries, and the air over Baghdad exploded. So did the air over Washington, where the constant outcry over sex, lies, desperation and hypocrisy had created an atmosphere of venom and mayhem. All around the city there was a feeling that brutal, lasting damage had been done to an already threadbare culture of political accommodation, that impeachment would be not the end of something but the beginning. And that it would be something bad.