Waiting for the Bell

The Feeling in the Senate Chamber Last Week Was Utterly transformed from the early days of the trial. Back then the Senators, like students on their first day of school, had lined up their favorite pens and pencils in the silver trays atop their desks, pressed down the stiff pages of their fresh notebooks and twisted open brand-new highlighters so that the squeaks from removing their tops echoed throughout the hushed gallery. And they took seriously the daily admonition from the sergeant at arms to remain quiet "on pain of imprisonment."

But that was last month--a million news cycles ago. The pencils aren't so sharp anymore, and the jurors are passing notes and acting up. While they voted last week to reject Monica Lewinsky as a live witness and wrap up the trial by this Friday, Senators were twitching in their seats. Democrats teased their colleague Russ Feingold for voting with the Republicans, and the President's lawyer Greg Craig traded laughs with staunch Republican Don Nickles. During a break, the G.O.P.'s Strom Thurmond, 96, drew clementines from his pockets and, with a flirtatious grin, passed them to Cheryl Mills and Nicole Seligman, two of the President's lawyers. Suddenly the chamber resembled nothing so much as a classroom full of kids waiting for the bell to ring. "It's like final exams are just about over," says Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon. "We're all anxious to head for the exits."

The only people not sharing the good vibes were the 13 House trial managers, many of whom sat at their table with bloodshot eyes and puffy faces, looking like members of some unwanted and unforgiven tribe of outcasts. Their White House counterparts move easily among the Senators, clutching elbows and exchanging meaningful looks, while the House managers have become pariahs--"two-year-olds," as a G.O.P. Senator disdainfully described them in a private meeting with his colleagues. "And everyone knows you shouldn't give two-year-olds everything they want."

Dissed by even their Republican comrades, the House prosecutors still fought bitterly to make their case. But as their hopeless measure for calling Lewinsky to the floor moved to a resounding bipartisan defeat, their desperation became palpable. Georgia's Bob Barr furiously scribbled notes, as if getting it all down could somehow change the outcome. Bill McCollum's voice cracked as the Floridian seized on what he said were new inconsistencies in the defense, though he knew no one much cared anymore. With odd intensity, McCollum and Wisconsin's Jim Sensenbrenner carefully wrote down the names of each and every one of the 25 Republican Senators who voted against them, as if they might fold up the list and press it in their wallets for safekeeping, then wait for some chance to avenge the snub.

The only concession the Senate made was to allow managers to use the videotaped depositions of Lewinsky, Clinton pal Vernon Jordan and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal in a special session last Saturday. Arkansas Representative Asa Hutchinson took the strands of videotape and contrasted them with excerpts from the President's Paula Jones deposition, splicing up a compelling case that Clinton both lied and obstructed justice. But it was the same case the managers had been making for weeks, and it wasn't going to change the outcome. In the end the only real drama was how Monica would do.

She did fine. She was sophisticated, good at the game. Wearing pearls and a dark pantsuit, sipping Evian over ice through a straw, Lewinsky not only didn't help her interrogator, the hapless Ed Bryant of Tennessee, but also left him with less of a case against the President than he had when the deposition began. She stood by her insistence that no one asked her to lie or offered her a job in exchange for her false affidavit, and refused to agree that the President was lying when his testimony contradicted hers, conceding only that her memory or interpretation differed from his. And she was blunt about why she was such an unhelpful witness. She said she still has "mixed feelings" about Clinton. When Bryant asked, "Do you still, uh, respect the President, still admire the President?" Lewinsky's answer was simple--"Yes." Prosecutors didn't fare much better with Jordan or Blumenthal.

For months, this scandal has defied conclusions, exit strategies and expectations; now it looks as though it might burn out and fade away with nothing more than an acquittal, because the two parties can't come to terms on an appropriate punishment for Clinton. At week's end, with a funeral for Jordan's King Hussein the only thing that could delay a final vote, Republican and Democratic Senators were still trying to craft a coda to the trial--a penalty that would leave pro-impeachment lawmakers with some dignity and prevent what Utah's Orrin Hatch described as "a rush to the champagne bottles at the White House." The impulse was particularly intense among Hatch's fellow Republicans, for whom impeachment has become about as popular and successful an adventure as the war in Vietnam. "We need a way out of this that doesn't look as if we've got our tails between our legs," said a Republican leadership aide.