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.

On Tuesday, as impeachment became a sure thing, Bill Clinton was literally in the air. After his four-day official trip to Israel, he was flying home on Air Force One. While in Israel and the Gaza Strip, where he had become the first U.S. President to set foot on Palestinian-controlled soil, Clinton still hoped that once he got back home there would be time to sit down with House g.o.p. centrists and bid for their support. But now aides were telling him that impeachment, which everyone believed was impossible just a few weeks earlier, was inevitable. Undecided Republicans were falling into the party line.

ONE REASON WAS THE LEADERSHIP vacuum in the House G.O.P. With Newt Gingrich out of the picture, control of the process had fallen to House whip Tom DeLay, the hardest of anti-Clinton hard-liners, who had ensured that moderates favoring censure had no place to go.

It was aboard Air Force One that Clinton confronted what had become his simultaneous preoccupation: Iraq. Later that afternoon, he took part in an hour-long onboard conference call with Vice President Gore and a group of foreign policy advisers. In the call, discussion focused first on the report that would be delivered later that day by Richard Butler, chairman of unscom, the U.N. special commission that oversees weapons inspections in Iraq. In scathing terms, Butler would say that the "full cooperation" that Saddam had promised on Nov. 15, in the face of an earlier military buildup against him, had turned out to be a sham.

The group quickly agreed that air strikes were the right option. Before the call ended, there was a second discussion, this time about what Berger carefully described as "any other factors that should lead us to do anything differently." What he meant was the certainty of a political storm in Washington about the timing of the attacks. According to one participant in the call, the President concluded that if it was necessary to go forward with the assaults for national security reasons, then it would be impossible to explain how he could refuse to order the attacks because of potential political fallout.

On Wednesday afternoon, the President started making calls to Senate friends such as Ted Kennedy and Connecticut's Chris Dodd. Clinton accepted that he was going to be impeached but insisted he wouldn't resign or even admit to perjury because he did not believe he had lied. What he wanted now was assurance that there were enough secure votes to fend off conviction in a Senate in which ouster would require a dozen Democrats to join all the Republicans.

In his televised address to the nation Wednesday night, the President argued that a delay of even a couple of days would have given Saddam time to prepare for the attack by dispersing his forces and hiding his weapons. As expected, Republicans were suspicious that the entire campaign was an attempt by Clinton to postpone the impeachment vote and buy time to find some way out.

In many ways, last week's drama was about revenge. Clinton's impeachment is the latest episode in the intensification of congressional partisanship that dates back at least to the Democrat-controlled Senate's 1987 rejection of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. It includes the scuttling of George Bush's nomination of John Tower to become Defense Secretary amid rumors about his drinking and behavior toward women, as well as the fight over Clarence Thomas, the ouster of House Speaker Jim Wright on ethics charges and the fight that Newt Gingrich led over the misuse of the House bank. Congress is now involved in an endless cycle of payback that makes the warring House of Atreus seem like just one more placid Greek family.

Questions

1. What accusations against Bill Clinton were contained in the four articles of impeachment? Of these, which were approved by the House?

2. What makes the House's impeachment of President Clinton historic?

Answers

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