History is expert at presenting unsolvable mysteries, and it will undoubtedly someday work its murky magic on the record of the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
The more time that passes, the deeper the questions become.
Even now, the “Why is this happening?” question so central to the action has so many answers it is impossible to settle on one that actually addresses the question.
Perjury? Politics? Puritanical attitudes toward sex? Payback for driving a Republican president from office during Watergate? Hatred? They are all on the table, and all carry equal weight at this stage.
Perhaps it is not that complicated.
Maybe what this impeachment is all about is momentum, that powerful force that seems to sit somewhere behind every significant political action.
Railroad engineers know all about momentum. It is why they start putting on the brakes of a train that is running down a grade and apply them gradually long before the train is supposed to stop. Get a couple of hundred thousand tons of iron rolling and it is impossible to stop once the engineer loses control.
Momentum helps explain the vexing question “Why?,” providing a simplistic answer that doesn’t quite satisfy but fits the historical formula so well.
Once the impeachment train got rolling, no one was able to stop it.
Clinton provided the mass with his mendacity and juvenile behavior, and the steam was provided by a $40 million investigation and the House Republicans’ long track record of trying to pin anything they could find on a president they clearly despise.
Republicans’ long track record of trying to pin anything they could find on a president they clearly despise.
The key players who are so certain and so passionate about the subject eventually will pass from the scene, leaving a fat record and a sense that, for a while, this single subject, this single event, consumed public attention beyond any other political issue.
There are thousands of pages of documents, enough rhetoric to create an encyclopedia of political discourse on the meaning of perjury and a clearly established track record showing what happened and when it happened in the impeachment process.
Then there is that nagging component of public opinion, which clearly rests on Clinton’s side and will most likely provide decades of confusion about how this could have happened at all to such a popular president.
The impeachment process carries with it a strange sense of isolation, a feeling that, in these particular troubled waters, Congress has decided to plug its ears against the siren call of public opinion, which it usually finds completely irresistible.
For once, it doesn’t seem to be interested in being jerked from position to position by polling results.
That may be one of the important earmarks of events that have created their own momentum. They don’t need much external help to keep moving. In fact, if they have enough weight, they don’t need external help at all. They actually resist external influences.
Blind rushes into war are large-scale examples of momentum that have their own life.
Marriages that disintegrate are the smaller examples. An objective outsider would see the signs of breakdown in each argument, in all the hostile body language, in every unyielding stand.
The combatants can see only the terrain they share as they move ahead, unaware of how it all looks from a distance.
How will the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton read in a century’s time?
Good political history is a great pastime, full of vexation, controversy and lack of resolution. No one is always good. No one is always bad. Pedestals crumble, and pigeons come to roost and relieve themselves on the bronze castings of the once great.
Characters who seemed completely evil at the time sometimes mellow.
That mysterious momentum that hid itself so well as the event played out becomes more apparent, as though time and distance delivered a gift of clarity. A careful reader finds out nothing was as cleanly cut as it seemed.
Grover Cleveland appeared to be in big political trouble a century ago because he had fathered a child out of wedlock. His morality, his behavior were issues in the presidential campaign of 1884.
Then he won, and it all seemed to go away, along with the echoes of that classic victory chant: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”
That is what remains from a century-old political battle. The reality is that Cleveland might not have been the father of the child in question, even though he provided for the child and Maria Halpin, its mother.
Allan Nevins noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Cleveland in 1933 that the president wore the paternity shirt because he was the only single man involved with Halpin, who had abandoned her children and had become intimate with a number of prominent figures in Buffalo.
She claimed Cleveland was the father, and he said, “Yes, I am.”
Of all the men who had intercourse with Halpin, the then-bachelor Cleveland alone had no family to wreck by admitting paternity.
That makes a far better story, and Cleveland, such a strong reformer he was known as “Grover the Good,” a much more noble character than anyone might have guessed.
It is impossible to resist the conclusion that he, too, lied about sex.
The “why” that eventually emerged was much more interesting than the explanation offered at the time, which was a function of the momentum and heat of a presidential campaign.
That is a small, distant example of the power of momentum.
History is full of them.
On the world scale, Vietnam is a big one.
Everyone who is so certain today on all sides of the argument about exactly what happened and why it happened in Vietnam will pass away. The ideologies that played such a strong role in the conflict, the functional history of it–what happened when and where–will be forgotten.
Patriotic arguments about saving the world for democracy will be lost.
There will be nothing left but a series of questions:
“Why did the French get bogged down in such a miserable war? Why did the Americans, who knew all about civil war and the forces that fuel it, follow the French into that mire? If communism was such a big threat to democracy that it justified such a long, brutal war, then why did it collapse as an economic and political structure so shortly after the war was fought?”
It will be difficult to fight the conclusion that, once it got started, the war was all but impossible to stop until both sides were exhausted. Momentum carried them not to the brink but to a distance somewhere beyond it, at great cost.
At some point, only the question “why” will remain.
And it will take its place alongside all of the other perplexing “whys.”
Why wasn’t the United States able to find a compromise to avert its civil war when it was so apparent that the momentum of the debate was leading to disaster?
Why was the 20th Century, a time of progress and intellectual and scientific advancement, blind to the momentum that led to the most devastating wars in world history?
Why were the Germans able to slaughter so many Jews for so many years after the world knew about the death camps? Why was Josef Stalin able to execute so many of his people?
The impeachment of a politician, even a president, cannot stand alongside those great cataclysms of history.
Nevertheless, it presents its own questions about the historic role of momentum.
Why did the population of the most successful nation on earth disconnect from politics to such a degree that small, passionate minorities were able to gather the momentum to dictate the nation’s political agenda?
Why was one of the brightest presidents in the modern era so foolish that he could not see where the momentum of his misbehavior was leading?
Why was the political structure of such a great nation able to behave as though it were completely disconnected from the opinions of the people it was designed to serve?
