Jerry Zeifman — February 5, 2008
I have just seen Hillary Clinton and her former Yale law professor both in tears at a campaign rally here in my home state of Connecticut. Her tearful professor said how proud he was that his former student was likely to become our next President. Hillary responded in tears.
My own reaction was of regret that, when I terminated her
employment on the Nixon impeachment staff, I had not reported her
unethical practices to the appropriate bar associations.
Hillary as I knew her in 1974
At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over
the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry staff
that included Hillary Rodham-who was later to become First Lady
in the Clinton White House.
During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the
scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of
the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment
provided the basis for my prior book Without Honor and are now
available for inspection in the George Washington University
Library.
Published in 1996 - Still available from Amazon.com
After President Nixon’s resignation a young lawyer, who
shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was
dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny
Nixon representation by counsel-as well as an unwillingness to
investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the
following:
John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he
and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory
tactics.] Labovitz said, “That came from Yale.” I said,
“You mean Burke Marshall [Senator Ted Kennedy's chief
political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in
violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, “Yes.” His
apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation
but because of his contrition.
At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a
position on our committee staff through the political patronage
of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and
Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her
unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for
any subsequent position of public or private trust.
Her patron, Burke Marshal, had previously been Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights under Robert Kennedy. During the Kennedy
administration Washington insiders jokingly characterized him as
the Chief counsel to the Irish Mafia. After becoming a Yale
professor he also became Senator Ted Kennedy’s lawyer at the
time of Chappaquidick-as well as Kennedy’s chief political
strategist. As a result, some of his colleagues often described
him as the Attorney General in waiting of the Camelot government
in exile.
In addition to getting Hillary a job on the Nixon impeachment
inquiry staff, Kennedy and Marshall had also persuaded Rodino to
place two other close friends of Marshall in top positions on our
staff. One was John Doar; who had been Marshall’s deputy in
the Justice Department-whom Rodino appointed to head the
impeachment inquiry staff. The other was Bernard Nussbaum, who
had served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York-who was placed
in charge of conducting the actual investigation of Nixon’s
malfeasance.
Marshall, Doar, Nussbaum, and Rodham had two hidden objectives
regarding the conduct of the impeachment proceedings. First, in
order to enhance the prospect of Senator Kennedy or another
liberal Democrat being elected president in 1976 they hoped to
keep Nixon in office “twisting in the wind” for as long
as possible. This would prevent then-Vice President Jerry Ford
from becoming President and restoring moral authority to the
Republican Party.
As was later quoted in the biography of Tip O’Neill (by John
Farrell), a liberal Democrat would have become a “shoe-in
for the presidency in 1976 if Nixon had been kept in office until
the end of his term. However, both Tip O’Neill and I-as well
as most Democrats-regarded it to be in the national interest to
replace Nixon with Ford as soon as possible. As a result, as
described by O’Neill, we coordinated our efforts to
“keep Rodino’s feet to the fire.”
A second objective of the strategy of delay was to avoid a Senate
impeachment trial, in which as a defense Nixon might assert that
Kennedy had authorized far worse abuses of power than
Nixon’s effort to “cover up” the Watergate
burglary (which Nixon had not authorized or known about in
advance). In short, the crimes of Kennedy included the use of the
Mafia to attempt to assassinate Castro, as well as the successful
assassinations of Diem in Vietnam and Lumumba in the Congo.
After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me
regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my
first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee
Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader
Tip O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had
previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then
existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted
Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change
the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like
trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World
Series.”
Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not
advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my
personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already
drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written
legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon
representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the
fact that in the committee’s then-most-recent prior
impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to
counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files
were available for public inspection in the committee offices.
She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and
carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry
staff-where they were no longer accessible to the public.
Hillary had also made other ethically flawed procedural
recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not
hold any hearings with-or take depositions of-any live witnesses;
not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax
evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President
Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by
other committees and by the Justice Department’s special
Watergate prosecutor.
Only a few far-left Democrats supported Hillary’s
recommendations. A majority of the committee agreed to allow
President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings
with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated that the official
rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee
the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted
down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal
that we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her
and her fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers.
It was not until two months after Nixon’s resignation that I
first learned of still another questionable role of Hillary. On
Sept. 26, 1974, Rep. Charles Wiggins, a Republican member of the
committee, wrote to ask Chairman Rodino to look into “a
troubling set of events.” That spring, Wiggins and other
committee members had asked “that research should be
undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the
alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.” And, while
“no such staff study was made available to the members at
any time for their use,” Wiggins had just learned that such
a study had been conducted-at committee expense-by a team of
professors who completed and filed their reports with the
impeachment-inquiry staff well in advance of our public hearings.
The report was kept secret from members of Congress. But after
the impeachment-inquiry staff was disbanded, it was published
commercially and sold in book stores. Wiggins wrote: “I am
especially troubled by the possibility that information deemed
essential by some of the members in their discharge of their
responsibilities may have been intentionally suppressed by the
staff during the course our investigation.” He was also
concerned that staff members may have unlawfully received
royalties from the book’s publisher.
On Oct. 3, Rodino wrote back: “Hillary Rodham of the
impeachment-inquiry staff coordinated the work. The staff did not
think the manuscript was useful in its present form.” No
effort was ever made to ascertain whether or not Hillary or any
other person on the committee staff received royalties.
Two decades later Bill Clinton became President. As was later to
be described in the Wall Street Journal by Henry Ruth, the lead
Watergate courtroom prosecutor, “The Clintons corrupted the
soul of the Democratic Party.”
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