The New Yorker Radio Hour - This Is William Cohen’s Third Impeachment

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

The current impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump are only the fourth in American history, and William Cohen has been near the center of power for three of them. First, he was a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, when his vote in favor of articles of impeachment helped end the Presidency of Richard Nixon. Twenty years later, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, he had to navigate American military policy around the Lewinsky scandal. Cohen is now a Washington power-broker, and he tells The New Yorker’s Michael Luo the story of both sagas and their relation to today’s news. During Watergate, Cohen received death threats for what was perceived as his betrayal of Nixon, and he says that his chances for a Republican leadership position were “finished.” But Cohen implores his G.O.P. successors in Congress to put Constitution above party; otherwise, “this is not going to be a democracy that will be recognizable a few years from now.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

It's David Remnick here, and I've got a question for you. You might have noticed some extra episodes of the New Yorker Radio Hour lately in your feed. We had Dexter Filkins and Rana Ayub talking about India, Robin Wright about the crisis in Iran, and four of our writers debriefing on the end of Kamala Harris' once very, very promising campaign. And there's more to come today. Let us know what you think. Do you like what you're hearing?

Do you like getting the radio hour delivered a little more often? I'd appreciate any feedback. So send us an email at New Yorker Radio at WNYC.org. That's New Yorker Radio, all one word, at WNYC.org. We'll reach out on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Thanks so much. Now to this week. In the course of today's events, it becomes necessary for us to address, among other grievances,

the president's failure to faithfully execute the law. sadly, but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders, and a heart full of love for America. Today, I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment. Here we are. Remember the date. Today, the House Judiciary Committee begins drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Four American presidents have faced impeachment. and we're going to hear from someone who's had a bird's-eye seat for, well, three of them. William Cohen was a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974

when he helped seal Richard Nixon's fate with his vote for impeachment. He suffered death threats and other attacks. Let me say it's not a happy occasion for me or for any of us here. That must not prevent us from meeting up to our responsibilities to pass judgment upon the conduct of our elected leaders. Then in 1998 from inside the White House, Cohen saw the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Cohen was serving as Secretary of Defense, and he had to navigate those impeachment hearings while ordering missile strikes on Iraq.

And we are achieving good coverage of our targets. And as a result, we are advancing our goal of containing Saddam Hussein. And finally, in 2019, as a Republican power broker in Washington, Cohen has been trying to convince his party of a very unpopular position that Donald Trump's misdeeds are the worst of those three presidents and fully merit his impeachment. Michael Luo is the editor of New Yorker.com, and he's been writing about impeachment these past weeks.

Here's Mike talking with William Cohen. I'm here. Hey, Michael. How are you? I'm good, thank you. Hold on one second, Michael. I want to make sure my watches shut off because if it rings, it'll interrupt it. Hold on.

Okay. Secretary Cohn, can you take us back to what it was like in your office in early 1974? What was it like to be on the committee in those early days when the investigation just got started? Well, the Judiciary Committee was not a plum assignment. I had a very small staff at that point. After all, I was just a freshman congressman in the Longworth building. A office was about two or three rooms, as I recall, so pretty intimate. But it began with a Saturday night massacre.

And that was the first time, I think, that the committee really felt that it was going to be involved in hearings and an investigation. Did you talk about this with Republican colleagues in private? No. I hadn't spoken to any of the other members personally. I felt this was so personal. Each of us had our own constituents to represent. Each of us had our own conscience to adhere to. And then I got that call from Tom Railsback

when we were about to go to the public hearings to debate the issue whether article should be brought. And Tom said, I'm having a little meeting in my office at 8 o'clock in the morning. Would you care to come by for coffee and donuts or bagels to words of that effect. And I said, yeah, but who's going to be there? He said, I have no idea.

Can you tell me about Tom Railsback for the folks who are listening who don't know who he is? Yeah, Tom Railsback was a moderate Republican from Illinois, and he was well liked by all of the Republicans and many of the Democrats. He was just a good person to be around and had built friendships in the Congress, and was quite a good athlete, and that's where I met him. on a regular basis down on the gym. I used to play a lot of basketball. He played basketball, and so we would shoot hoops together

or play paddleball together. And he became sort of a mentor to me. And yet, I'd still never talk to him about what I was going to do or what I was thinking of. So Railsback calls you, this is just before the hearings begin, and he says, come by my office in the morning. And then you didn't know, you didn't know who. was going to be there and what happened?

Well, I showed up and I was surprised to see Caldwell Butler. Caldwell, very conservative from Virginia. It seemed to me that he was far more supportive of the Republican position. And so I was surprised to see him. I was surprised to see Ray Thornton, conservative from Arkansas. A Democrat. Yes. Four Republicans and three Democrats.

Democrats. Right. And that was the so-called fragile coalition. I think we were all kind of pleased to see each other, but surprised to see each other. And then we, I remember Walter Fowler said, let's see what we can agree upon. And as a result of that discussion, we said, well, abuse of power and obstruction of justice. And we more or less informally agreed that we would support those two articles when we went public. Did you go around the room? And what did you say? Well, I just expressed my own opinion. I was pretty much over at that point. I felt that the president, through his words and deeds, had committed impeachable offenses, suborning perjury, paying hush money to keep witnesses quiet, having an enemies list and asking the IRS to start targeting those enemies. the tipping points truly came when he asked the CIA to intervene and stop the FBI investigation. All of those were clearly an abuse of process and an obstruction of justice. So I was pretty much made up my mind on those issues. Did you feel the history, the sense of import, that you had the fate of the presidency in your hands? It was a sense of overwhelming gravity and responsibility.

the graveness of it all. Not one of us were eager to vote for impeachment, given the fact that, you know, it is the ultimate power that Congress has to reverse the last election based upon misconduct. None of us were eager to vote for that. I had voted for President Nixon. I thought he had done a tremendous job in foreign policy.

Ironically enough, even after I had voted to impeach him, years later, he continued to write to me. and exchange views on foreign policy. Oh, wow. And I ended up giving you a copy of a novel I had written over in Bob Dole's office. So it was nothing personal about it. It really was a question of the President of the United States had failed to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. He had abused his power.

He had obstructed justice. This is conduct that was simply antithetical to the United States. the position of the President of the United States. And so at this point, you had made up your mind and was it known publicly? Because you mentioned the hate mail. So at some point, it became clear that this is where you were leaning. And when was that? And I'm guessing that's when you really started to hear it from constituents.

The Republican Party had sent delegates down to meet with me in May and June. They asked me to pledge to support the president. And all I would say is, look, I'm going to listen to the facts. And I'll apply the facts of the law. What was that? Who were those people who sent them? They were party regulars. People who were part of the Republican Party in Maine.

People who had supported me. And then the mail started to come in saying they were mailing pennies and dimes and nickels, silver for my betrayal as such. And I think the polls in my own state were running two to one against impeachment or higher than that, actually. So I started getting a lot of that. I had some death threats. My wife was getting phone calls at home and things like that. And they got protection for a very short period of time. There was a bomb threat.

What was the protection of your family? Yes, there were threats against them and me. It was pretty intense. And this is pre-Twitter. There was no president tweeting about you. Oh, no. There was no Twitter at that point, and there was no Fox. You had the three networks, and you had the New York Times and Washington Post.

It was a very different error. I did not expect to be returning because the party said, we'll never support you again. You betrayed our trust. The money was drying up in terms of campaign contributions. And so it looked pretty grim for me, but I had just decided that, you know, I had to vote what I thought the evidence established, and that's what I did. And you actually won re-election easily, right? I did.

But until Nixon resigned, until that tape came forward, I don't think I would have been back. It was too difficult a challenge at that point. Yeah. I also knew that as a result of that vote, that my prospects in the Republican Party were going to be limited. I had angered a lot of people and in the party itself with my colleagues. And I knew that any aspirations I might have had for holding leadership positions was finished. But in a way, it was very liberating that I wouldn't have to try to calculate how, I could ingratiate myself with colleagues, that I would just be a congressman, I would just be a

senator, and try to do the best job. But I knew that the prospects of me ever gaining a leadership position were over. I've always been okay with that, that I don't need to be in a leadership position if it's going to cost me what I believe to be right. Yeah. And tell me about the hearings themselves. Well, there were two sets of conversations going. on. There were the conversations going on with the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, and that sentiment was, we need to rally around the president. We were called down to the White House at one point, and President Nixon was giving a rally speech in front of the Republican members from the House. And the words I remember most vividly was, he said, I may be a son of a bitch,

but I'm your son of a bitch. And applause erupted at that point. That was not my sentiment at all, but that sentiment was still there. The other Republican members were still trying to hold the line, so to speak, that we all stand together with the president. Hamfish, Sr. brought Rabbi Corf to sit in the meetings and just stare at us, as if to say, don't you dare move away from the president. And so that was difficult to break with that. You want to be part of the party.

Walter Flowers developed a bleeding ulcer during the course of the, the hearings, Tom Railsback lost his voice. I know that I came down with severe head colds and whatever just because I was getting by on two to three hours a night just because I was preparing over and over and over again what the evidence was. It sounds like the most dramatic moment was when the vote happened on the first article of impeachment. What do you remember of that evening? Well, I think I spent most of the time just trying to decide what was I going to say. When I first announced how I was going to vote, there was a public discussion. Each member had roughly 12 to 15 minutes to express his or her views.

And I spent a lot of time on that speech trying to tell my own state, people of Maine, why I was going to vote to impeach Richard Nixon. And so having said that, when it came time for the vote and when they called the role, it was kind of relief. It's over in terms of our role. We've done our job. Do you remember at all what you did afterwards, after the vote? I just went home.

Did you, had you been talking, I'm very curious when you got home and what your wife said to you, and if you had been talking to your wife throughout, this of what was going on in your head? Well, sure. We talked about it, and she knew the pressure I was under. She didn't give me any advice. My sons, I think, had already made up their mind before I did. And then I had my dad back in Bangor one time I was going home, and I was at a place called Miller's Restaurant. And CBS was following me at that point. As I walked out of the restaurant, my dad, was behind me and one of the reporters said, what is Bill going to do? And he said, oh, I think he's

going to find him guilty. And I walked back. I said, Dad, hey, wait a minute. I haven't made any decision yet. It's interesting because you were part of this group of seven moderate lawmakers who really were the tipping point. And when we think about tipping points today, we're mostly probably thinking about what might happen in the Senate. Do you think a tipping point? could ever come? At this point, I think not. Republicans in the Senate, in the House, they have to take into account the power of President Trump over the party.

It has become the Trump Party. It's not the Republican Party. It's the Trump Party. They either act utter fear or with complicity. It must be so interesting to see your vantage point on how the Republican Party has changed because you were inside the Clinton. administration, Democratic administration and the Secretary of Defense when he was impeached by the Republican Congress. And that really was, I think, the beginning of the path of weaponizing

impeachment. And you can trace a path from that point to today. What was it like for you inside the Clinton administration seeing that process? I found that the Republicans at that point, I'll give you, let me back up for a second, give you an example. We had just ordered the bombing of Saddam Hussein. And the mission was underway, and I got a call from the Republicans, Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, saying that the top is blowing off the capital because of what Clinton is doing, waging war. And I said, well, why?

And they said, well, because there's an impeachment resolution up here, even though there's a bombing campaign underway and we're at war, they reported out the resolution. So it rings a little hollow now when the president complains he's over in London while the hearings are going on. They certainly didn't accord Clinton any grace period. Darren Watergate, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger had wanted any emergency order coming from President Nixon be routed to him. Do you believe members of the Trump cabinet are thinking along similar lines today? I don't think there's anyone there now that would exercise that kind of judgment, saying that the president can't be trusted.

I think there were people initially who were worried about some of the things he was saying behind closed doors. I don't think that story has really been fully told yet. But I don't think there's anybody there that would say that we've got to prevent the president from having access to the football. Final questions. One on John McCain. I was his best man. Best man in his wedding.

What would he do on impeachment today, do you think? I think he would have thumbs up instead of the thumbs down when he voted to reject the attempt to take away Obamacare. I think John McCain would be the one to say, this is not American, this is unpatriotic. This is incredible to do what we did to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the, Kurds and putting their lives at risk and seeing the Americans run out of town, so to speak. John McCain would never have tolerated that. You had said in 74 the impeachment of Richard Dixon was, in the end, a positive for the country as far as the Constitution and what it stood for.

I think it was a positive force in 1974 because to have not impeached Richard Nixon would have put us on a very dangerous course because the Justice. Department has said that the president can't be indicted. The president himself has said, I can't even be investigated. So what does that mean as far as the role of Congress to oversee and make sure you check abuses? If you don't have the impeachment power, then what you're saying is we don't care about the rule of law. We don't care anymore because we like him. We like what he says and how he says it. And if they say that, then we're, well, then we're giving up on the rule of law. And This is not going to be a democracy that will be recognizable a few years from now.

Thank you, Secretary Cohen. This is fantastic. Okay. Well, I hope I didn't exhaust you or your audience. Thank you. That was former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, talking with the New Yorker's Michael Luo. Cohen is retired from public office, and he's the author of a number of novels.