Hyde Regrets the Strategy, Not the Fight

WASHINGTON —  Surrounded by the grim faces of his House managers, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) said Friday that he had “no regrets” about pursuing his six-month crusade against President Clinton. But impeachment’s unflagging pilot conceded he may have undermined his case by failing to call witnesses during House hearings and rushing to end the committee’s probe last year.

“I think we could have got more attention for what we were doing--which was important--by having witnesses,” Hyde said. “We didn’t, and I regret that.”

Despite Hyde’s unshaken conviction that he and his Republican impeachment managers were “real heroes,” the Judiciary Committee chairman now muses that he should have pressed for depositions of witnesses last fall, when his committee conducted its three-month hearing. Instead, Hyde and the panel’s majority Republicans relied chiefly on independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report, a step that some senators have described as critical in their own reluctance to summon Monica S. Lewinsky and other witnesses to give live testimony during the Senate trial.

The decision to wrap up the Judiciary investigation before the end of last year also may have wounded his inquiry, Hyde acknowledged in an interview with The Times and other news organizations. That notion was seconded Friday by Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, impeachment’s original sponsor, who lamented that “we artificially limited ourselves in terms of substance and . . . time.”

Several Republicans who voted Friday for Clinton’s acquittal said that the House managers’ case against the president had not amassed enough damning evidence. Although he insisted there were no “soft spots,” Hyde conceded that a longer, more thorough investigation--inevitably stretching into this year’s House session--might have strengthened the prosecution’s hand.

“I regret setting a time” limit, the Illinois Republican said, adding: “Perhaps we should have deferred all of this until the 106th Congress [the current House] began, so we wouldn’t have been under the gun in terms of hurrying up and finishing.”

At least one of Hyde’s fellow managers, Rep. Charles T. Canady of Florida, disagreed, arguing that “I’m not convinced the outcome would have been altered if we had more time in the House.” And Julian Epstein, a top Democratic Judiciary Committee aide, said neither time nor an earlier deposition of witnesses would have bolstered the Republicans’ case.

“I think the facts just weren’t on their side,” Epstein said, adding that the recent deposition of Lewinsky proved the last “nail in the coffin” because “she showed her own motivations in many of her actions.”

Despite his misgivings, Hyde insisted, the quickening momentum of events that unfolded after Starr delivered his referral to the House last September made the decisions confronting the Judiciary chairman almost inevitable.

“I was naive in attempting to finish by the end of the year,” Hyde said, allowing only that “the [105th] Congress was ending and we would have had to reconstitute everything we had done in the new Congress unless we finished. We also would have run out of funds. So there was an urgency to finish if we possibly could.”

All last year, Hyde was impeachment’s helmsman, bucking up anxious Republican Judiciary colleagues after the GOP’s disastrous election results in November. During the Senate trial, Hyde set the pace as the most relentless of the House managers, excoriating Clinton’s character and acidly upbraiding senators as he urged them to convict the president for flouting “the rule of law.”

Yet Hyde now acknowledges that, like White House officials and House Democrats, he too had privately nursed hopes for an exit strategy--a way to cut the impeachment process short.

“I never discussed this with anybody,” Hyde said. “I was interested in it, but I became convinced it wasn’t practicable.”

Hyde said that the growing inevitability of impeachment and the hardening stances of Americans--a majority arrayed against the process and a determined minority in approval--made it impossible for him to devise a way out.

“It just wasn’t feasible,” Hyde said, “given the circumstances, the fast pace we were moving under, the polarization that was developing in the country.”

His private hope for an alternative, Hyde said, arose from inner fears that were ultimately realized in Friday’s vote: a stalemated Senate, a resolution that satisfied no one. Early on, he said, “I became convinced we didn’t have the votes to remove the president, and therefore we were going to go through a very arduous, strenuous and gut-wrenching process without an appropriate end.”

With senators divided over Clinton’s fate, the president still remains a focus of Starr’s continuing investigation. But Hyde doubts that Clinton will be indicted by Starr and, surprisingly, prefers to let the president be.

“I think for the good of the country, forget it,” Hyde said. “It’s like [former President] Nixon. Should Nixon [who resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment over the Watergate affair] have gone to jail? I think that would not have been good for the country to have the president locked up in jail. And I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an ex-president locked up in jail.”

Alternately showing signs of bemusement and the bitterness that occasionally seeped into his ornate, acerbic Senate tirades against Clinton, Hyde said he had been overcome by weariness at having to tilt against the president’s counsel day after day. Death threats beset him to the point where he needed a bevy of guards to protect him.

Yet Hyde defiantly declared himself ready to run again for Congress after hearing reports--denied by the White House--that a seething Clinton aims at toppling House managers to avenge their grueling Lewinsky investigation.

“I wouldn’t ever want it thought,” Hyde said, smiling wickedly, “that because the president is going to come after the managers that I suddenly lost my zest for the job.”