Twenty years ago Wednesday, former Rep. Bob Livingston provided the single most dramatically unexpected congressional moment of our lifetimes.
Now Livingston has released a memoir that for the first time fully details that moment as he lived it, while also providing a winningly candid, engaging, and authentically personal look back over a remarkable career. The voice and writing style are clearly his own (no ghostwriters here!) and the unfiltered nature of his reminiscences is fascinating, at times even charming.
Livingston, already chosen by his Republican colleagues as the incoming speaker of the House, was launching the final debate on the motions to impeach President Bill Clinton on Saturday morning, Dec. 19, 1998. Rocked just 40 hours earlier by reports emerging about long-ago hiccups in his marriage, Livingston made a compelling plea for Clinton to resign because of lies and obstruction of justice related to the president’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Livingston portrayed resignation as necessary for honor and national healing.
With Democrats yelling at Livingston that his own past sins made him a hypocrite, Livingston stunned everybody by following up with this message to Clinton:
“I can only challenge you in such fashion if I am willing to heed my own words.”
With that, he announced he would not assume the speakership, and would soon resign from Congress entirely.
Livingston was widely liked in the Capitol. Affable, approachable, unpretentious, and respectful of colleagues, he was seen as an old-school legislator’s legislator, one who would fight hard for his solidly conservative principles but not make it personal. Even his political adversaries esteemed him. As he left the House chamber to stunned silence, observers witnessed the incongruous sight of young liberal Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. hurrying behind him into the corridor outside the chamber, tearfully begging him to reconsider.
It was the rather tragically climactic public end to what had been a career of stellar achievement. Yet as the memoir makes clear, and as I can attest from first-hand experience (I worked for Livingston three different times and have known him for nearly 40 years), his rise to the verge of our elected government’s third-highest position came not by dint of the bloodlessly cold manipulations common to many politicians. Instead, he applied indefatigable energy and high spirits to whatever tasks crossed his path, rising by virtue of hard work and goodwill rather than by grand design.
Livingston’s newly published The Windmill Chaser: Triumphs and Less in American Politics, tells the tale, including a fascinating and moving “tick-tock” account of the dramatic impeachment week from 20 years ago — with verve and good humor.
When Livingston was six, his alcoholic father abandoned his family. His mother worked as an administrative assistant at Avondale Shipyards near New Orleans; Livingston worked summers cleaning animals’ cages at the Audubon Zoo, or as a shipyard laborer, or as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman. Too fond of fraternity high jinks in his early years at Tulane University, he dropped out to join the Navy — and found himself on an aircraft carrier blockading Cuba during the famous Missile Crisis.
Somewhat more self-disciplined after his service, he made his way back through Tulane and into law school, from which he emerged with no real interest in selling services to corporate clients but a real zeal for fighting bad guys. He served variously as a prosecutor at all three levels of government where he prosecuted street toughs, corrupt politicians, infamous Klansmen, and a nationally known mafia boss.
He didn’t plan to enter politics. In 1976, when the anticipated Republican candidate for a historically Democratic congressional seat dropped out of the race for personal reasons, local GOP leaders hurriedly recruited Livingston as somewhat of a sacrificial lamb. Inexperienced politically but full of energy, he somehow made a real race of it. He lost, but the winner landed in jail for massive vote fraud committed during the Democratic primaries. Livingston, given a second chance in a 1977 special election to replace the malefactor, bucked the usual expectations for a conservative Republican: He campaigned hard not just in GOP-friendly strongholds but among union workers and in black neighborhoods, too. This time he won and then began a congressional career even more eventful and colorful than his prosecutorial pursuits had been.
Livingston’s accounts of his congressional service aren’t dry and guarded, but full of personality and insight. His aim obviously isn’t self-justification (much less self-aggrandizement), but elucidation. The real focus of this memoir’s second half isn’t Livingston himself, but his heartfelt beliefs about the nature of Congress’ responsibilities and the best ways to carry them out.
Anyone who loves our constitutional system may find it heart-breaking, therefore, to read Livingston’s thorough but briskly paced account of his brief month as speaker-designate. He describes in detail the organizational and procedural reforms he was pursuing, including greater openness to back-bencher concerns, longer legislative work weeks, and a revitalization of the committee process. One wonders what benefits might have accrued to the country if a strong leader 20 years ago had made real legislative work, rather than political back-scratching, the House’s main focus.
Of course, it all went for naught. By 1998, Livingston had long since put his marriage back together after whatever problems he and the wonderful, vivacious Bonnie had endured. He had good reason (but, as it turned out, not good enough) to think that even in the cauldron of a presidential sex scandal, his own transgressions would remain a matter that stayed within his family.
Twenty years after his exit from politics, 53 years after tying the knot, he and Bonnie remain married, and he movingly pays tribute to her in The Windmill Chaser. “I’ve made the living,” he writes at one point, “and she’s made the living worthwhile.”
In sum, Livingston’s book is no attempt to garner vindication. Instead, it is a sincere tribute to his family and his country. Two decades after a horribly contentious presidential impeachment, Livingston has provided a desperately needed grace note.
Editor’s note: Quin Hillyer encouraged Livingston nine years ago to write this book, but had no other role in writing it. When Livingston finished it, Hillyer provided Livingston a list of close media contacts to help with self-promotion. Hillyer does not make any royalties or money off sales of the book.
