Summary:

In the previous eight episodes of this series we looked at the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War; the first engagements of the war itself; the early effects of the war on China’s relationship to the combatant nations; the bold Indian gambit to expedite the war’s end by capturing the Pakistani capital Islamabad; the Indian armed forces’ post-Operation Amritsar struggles to crush the Kargil insurgency; the war’s impact on the 1996 U.S. presidential elections; the mass protest rallies held in Pakistan’s major cities after the collapse of the Pakistani army’s August 1997 Punjab offensive; the escalation of hostilities into regional nuclear war; the global diplomatic effort to prevent the regional holocaust from mushrooming into global nuclear conflict; the Melbourne peace accords that finally ended the war in early 1998; the first stages of the postwar recovery efforts in India and Pakistan; and the political troubles which started to overtake the Clinton Administration following the war’s end. In this installment we’ll recall President Clinton’s impeachment trial and the Indian Punjabi cholera epidemic of 2000.

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Christmas 1998 was anything but merry for the Clinton White House; not only was the administration still under fire for not having done more to avert the Indo-Pakistani nuclear exchange in the closing stages of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War, but Clinton was facing the bleak and increasingly likely prospect of becoming only the third president in American history to face impeachment proceedings. His attempts to keep the truth about Whitewater and Interngate under wraps had blown up in his face like a live grenade, and now there was at least a 50-50 chance his political career would be torn to pieces by the shrapnel. A Washington Post survey published two days earlier illustrated how grim things had gotten-- at least 71 percent of those surveyed indicated to the pollsters they would favor seeing him removed from the Oval Office either voluntarily through his own resignation or forcibly through an impeachment trial. And that was just among self-identified liberals; the number leaped to 94 percent when the same question was broached to moderates or conservatives.

New Year’s Day 1999 was an even gloomier affair; the White House mail room was filled almost to overflowing with letters and telegrams from people telling the commander-in-chief they would never support him again or that they’d never liked him in the first place and felt vindicated by the scandals now plaguing his administration. One of the letters blasting Clinton was, oddly enough, from the White House communications director, who had resigned the previous day in a two-page farewell letter that was the culmination of months of budding frustration over Clinton’s inability to come clean with the American people about his personal indiscretions or his geopolitical blunders. The Clinton Administration was a sinking ship and people were heading for the lifeboats in ever-increasing numbers.

The other shoe in the Whitewater/Interngate affair finally dropped in the spring of 1999 when the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted to convene impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Those with a sense of both irony and history were quick to take note of the fact that the vote came thirty years to the day after special prosecutor Leon Jaworski subpoenaed Richard Nixon for the Watergate tapes. Indeed, some of the most notorious figures from Watergate were tapped by the news media to act as special guest commentators on the Clinton impeachment. Nixon himself couldn’t be part of the media circus-- he’d passed away while Clinton was still in his first term as President --but the rest of the Nixon White House was liberally represented on TV screens and newspaper editorial pages. Nixon’s former chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, made no less than fifty-one TV appearances during the first week of President Clinton’s impeachment trial and penned a commentary about the trial which was printed in at least 120 U.S. newspapers.

In hopes of saving the President’s political neck, the Clinton team tried to discredit his accusers, a tactic that had worked in the past when sordid revelations about his affair with Gennifer Flowers threatened to derail his quest for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. This time, however, the attempt to smear the litigant came back to bite Clinton hard; a number of Democrats who had previously supported him and under different circumstances might have voted to acquit him were disgusted by this ploy and began to steadily lean more and more in favor of conviction.

And Clinton didn’t help his own cause much with the evasive statements he made in his videotaped deposition for the impeachment jury. He seemed to trip over his own tongue(and everyone else’s) in his efforts to respond to the prosecution’s questions in a way that would make it seem like he was answering them while at the same time not actually confessing to anything. When the impeachment panel saw the deposition video, many of the panel members shook their heads in disbelief and disgust; one actually came close to vomiting.

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By the time the final impeachment vote came in June of 1999, Clinton’s political career was effectively dead. As another disgraced politician from the Deep South, John Edwards, would note one day in a different context there were now two Americas: one wanting to publicly hang Clinton, the other trying to forget they’d ever heard of him in the first place. He couldn’t even get the time of day from anyone on Capitol Hill, much less get any of his bills passed. And the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented rebuke of the soon-to-be former president, had staged an en masse boycott of his 1999 State of the Union address. The only thing that kept the vote to convict him on the articles of impeachment against him from being unanimous was the fear some of his few remaining Congressional allies had that removing him from office would greatly weaken the Democratic Party going into the 2000 election cycle-- a suggestion to which their peers cynically retorted that the President himself had seriously weakened the party already. (Every one of the senators who voted for acquittal in the impeachment trial would later be turned out of office in the next round of U.S. Senate races.)

Under U.S. federal law, at least 67 votes are required for a conviction in a presidential impeachment trial. When the verdict in the case of United States v. William Jefferson Clinton was read, there were a whopping 92 “guilty” votes recorded in the Senate chamber. Even Clinton’s most bitter political enemies hadn’t expected a tally that decisive; one prominent Washington, D.C. political columnist quipped after the vote that “the strange scent you’re picking up in the air is the smell of Bill Clinton’s last bridge being burned”. It could just easily have been the corpse of Clinton’s legacy being cremated on the funeral pyre of the Senate judiciary chamber.

On June 8th, 1999 Al Gore, looking like he’d rather have his teeth pulled than assume the Oval Office under such controversial circumstances, was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States. His year and a half-long tenure as commander-in-chief, much of which was dominated by scandals of his own involving questionable campaign contributions to his 1992 and 1996 VP runs, was doomed to failure from the minute he took the oath of office; indeed, some political analysts have said it was only a desire on the part of the American people to avoid yet another White House upheaval which kept Gore from becoming the second chief executive in U.S. history to resign from office. At home his social and economic initiatives were invariably shot down in flames, and abroad both allies and foes of the United States regarded him as a complete joke as a head of state. When cease-fire talks to end the Kosovo war collapsed in October of 1999, political commentary on both sides of the Atlantic overwhelmingly pinned the blame on the Gore Administration.

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Gore’s last hope for getting a full four-year term in the White House was dashed by the 2000 Super Tuesday primaries. In virtually every state which participated that day, Gore finished dead last; his worst humiliation came in the traditional liberal bastion states of Massachusetts and New York, where he hardly even got 500 votes in the two states’ primaries combined. By sharp contrast, fringe candidate Lyndon LaRouche was able to garner 1,275 votes in the Massachusetts town of Amherst alone. And there was no hope of convincing election officials in any of the contested states to even consider authorizing a recount-- the rejection of Gore at the polls had been so public and emphatic that there was no question the primary results were a genuine reflection of how voters felt about the Clinton-Gore administration. A New York Times political columnist aptly observed shortly after Gore’s Super Tuesday beatdown: “He is now the lamest of lame ducks.” And the White House’s inept response to the al-Qaeda bombing of a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf in April of 2000 only heightened this perception. Gore’s political star had fallen so low he was even asked to stay away from the 2000 Democratic National Convention-- the first time ever for such a request to be made of a sitting U.S. president from one of the major parties. It was as if he were infected with some contagious kind of psychic leprosy.

But a medical crisis in the Punjab region of India would shortly take the world’s eyes off Gore, if only for a moment....

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 Cholera is a disease usually associated more commonly with 19th- century London than late 20th century southeast Asia. But with India’s health care system in ruins as a consequence of the 4th Indo-Pakistani War, and much of the environment in the Indian Punjab region polluted by the breakdown in local and regional sanitation systems, conditions were ripe for an epidemic of this lethal disease to break out during the summer of 2000. The precise time of the beginning of the epidemic is hard to pin down, but it is generally agreed that the first victims must have contracted the disease during the last week of June, given that they were hospitalized on July 2nd and symptoms of cholera usually begin manifesting within five days or less after the victim swallows the bacteria which causes the disease.

    By July 4th there were already 60 confirmed deaths from cholera in the Indian Punjab area and at least 226 more people infected-- and the news would only get worse from there. The body count kept growing by leaps and bounds, and within a week after the epidemic’s first victims were admitted to area hospitals the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign Secretary’s offices had both issued advisories warning foreign tourists to avoid going to the Punjab region lest they too should get infected. The Russian ambassador to India, in a dispatch to president Vladimir Putin, warned that the epidemic potentially constituted what he described as “a humanitarian crisis of the first degree” ; future British prime minister David Cameron testified before Parliament that the epidemic could, unless it were swiftly checked, pose a threat to the stability of the entire Southeast Asia region. An editorial in the world-renowned medical journal Lancet described the cholera epidemic as “possessing the potential to become another Black Plague”. And that was one of the more optimistic assessments of the situation-- a well- known American televangelist darkly warned his parishioners the Punjab cholera epidemic represented nothing less than a warning sign of the Apocalypse. More than a few Indian Punjabi apparently shared his views on that score; suicide rates among Indian males in that region doubled during the first six weeks of the epidemic, and there was a 30 percent increase in suicides among Indian women during that same period.

With White House prestige at an all-time low thanks to Clinton’s impeachment and Gore’s political blunders, American aid to the victims of the epidemic came largely from the private sector. A fund was set up to accept financial donations from individuals and groups wanting to help those afflicted by the cholera epidemic; three of America’s biggest pharmaceutical companies signed an agreement with the Indian government to distribute anti-cholera medications to Punjabi regional hospitals at a fraction of their normal cost. Columbia University’s medical school dispatched groups of student volunteers to the Punjab region to shore up the area’s beleaguered hospital system and thereby take some of the burden off local doctors. And as one might expect in an age of 24/7 pop culture media coverage, there were the inevitable Hollywood telethons to raise still more money for the cholera relief effort.

The international medical charity Doctors Without Borders played a critical role not only in bringing an end to the cholera epidemic but also in preventing the epidemic from crossing the border into the Pakistani section of the Punjab. Working hand in glove with the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders administered anti-cholera vaccines to thousands of Indian Punjabis to prevent further outbreaks; the group also worked to cure those already infected with the disease and to clean up areas where the cholera virus was suspected to be breeding. These efforts would secure the group a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and earn its director India’s highest civilian medal.

They would also throw into sharp relief the abysmal lack of judgment the Gore Administration had shown on just about every major foreign policy problem which had confronted since Gore was sworn into office. The 2000 U.S. Republican presidential candidate, former Texas governor George Walker Bush, took advantage of voter disgust with the Gore White House to undercut his Democratic Party opponent, ex-Vermont governor Howard Dean, with a series of attack ads tying Dean to the Gore Administration’s failed agenda in spite of the fact that Dean was by then keeping Gore at arm’s length as much as possible.

In November of 2000 the final nail was hammered in the Gore Administration’s casket as George W. Bush took 47 of 50 states from Howard Dean to regain the White House for the GOP. It was the biggest electoral blowout a losing candidate in a presidential election had endured since George McGovern’s 49-state drubbing at Richard Nixon’s hands back in 1972. It was the ultimate repudiation of the Clinton-era Democratic ideology; it also marked the end of Hillary Clinton’s long- cherished dream that she might one day occupy the White House herself. Since the First Lady had long been thought of by many people both in and out of the Beltway as a “co-president”, and since she had worked hand in glove with Bill to help him fulfill his political ambitions long before the idea of running for the presidency was even a gleam in his eye, much of the fallout from the various scandals that had been erupting around him during his time in the Oval Office would sooner or later settle on Hillary too. In just four years the Clintons had gone from being the most powerful people in America to being exiles within their own party...

To Be Continued