In between, the president was impeached, the speaker-designate of the House of Representatives resigned, and a war ended. Here, in the last weeks of a dizzying year, was the dizziest day of them all. It was a day of memorable speeches and vacuous ones, of gestures grand and petty, of shock, confusion, the momentous and the banal, of sudden shifts in mood and shattered logic, of wrong notes and portentous chords, a day of heroes and opportunists in such a frenzy of maneuvering that they could be one and the same person from one hour to the next. So this is what history feels like before the historians get hold of it. Before they choose, interpret, compress, highlight and elide.
History feels awfully confusing.
In the paneled chamber of the House of Representatives, beneath the bas relief profiles of great lawgivers Solon, Hammurabi, Grotius, various popes Democrats fought ferociously through the morning for a measure that would censure the president in scalding terms. Clinton, they argued, had abused the trust of the American people and degraded the presidency. Then, as the afternoon gloom came on, they climbed aboard buses and rode to the White House, where they stood behind Clinton as Vice President Gore extolled him. Bob Livingston has come and gone so quickly. Another weird day, last week, he was forced to confess to marital infidelity by an investigation funded by America's most notorious pornographer.