As the battle for history begins, here’s a dissent from the prevailing view that the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, unlike the great and glorious Watergate adventure, is devoid of heroes.
     
Actually, there may be more heroes now than there were then. While The Washington Post’s early Watergate work took guts, the bandwagon-jumping in 1973 and 1974 by legions of other reporters, prosecutors, and legislators was hardly the stuff of heroism, in the Nixon-hating climate of establishment Washington.

Some of my heroes share my view that President Clinton should be removed from office; some do not. But all have had the guts to take facts and law seriously.

I’ll dwell first on Democratic heroes, those who stood against their party’s descent into hypocrisy and dishonesty.

As of this writing, just three of the more than 250 Democrats in Congress have shown real courage in this affair: former Rep. Paul McHale of Pennsylvania (who did not seek re- election in November and went home to Bethlehem) and Sens. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin.

McHale stands out from the four other House Democrats who voted to impeach Clinton, both for his thoughtfulness and for his place in the moderate mainstream of the ideological spectrum. His strong prior support of Clinton made his defection especially embarrassing — and especially offensive — to his fellow Democrats.

Last Aug. 18, the day after Clinton had sort-of-admitted lying to the public and incredibly denied lying under oath, McHale became the first Democrat in Congress to call for Clinton’s resignation. For declaring presidential perjury unacceptable, McHale was smeared a few days later by Clinton clone Geraldo Rivera of NBC News, who claimed that "my source very close to President Clinton" had called to accuse McHale of falsely claiming to have won a medal for valor during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That accusation, of course, was a lie.

McHale is no fan of the House Republicans’ handling of impeachment. "The process was unfair," he told me. "The outcome was not." As for his fellow Democrats, McHale, said this: "I discovered, to my dismay, that as soon as we had a defendant who was one of our own, all of the policies and ideals we had embraced for the past 20 years were discardable."

Sen. Byrd is another hero, for the painful honesty of his Feb. 6 interview with Cokie Roberts of ABC News. While he did not want to remove the President, Byrd said, he had "no doubt" that Clinton had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, given the proof "that he has given false testimony under oath" and the "indications that he did indeed obstruct justice."

This, coming from a former Senate Democratic Majority Leader, should have resounded like a thunderclap. But the Clintonized media downplayed and deprecated it. It’s true that Byrd’s conclusion that Clinton has committed impeachable "high crimes" is not easy to square with Byrd’s reluctance to remove him. But Byrd was admirably candid in explaining the dilemma facing anyone who looks the evidence and the law in the face:

"The Constitution requires that if he is convicted, he is automatically removed…. To remove, or not to remove? That is the question…. What’s in the best interest of the nation? We have — there has been such a polarization, such a division among the American people — and to remove him, does it help that? Or does it make the wound deeper?… He has less than two years to serve, he has done a lot of good things, and the American people don’t want him removed." Exactly.

Sen. Feingold has been quieter. But on Jan. 27, he cast two votes worth a thousand words: He was the lone Democrat to join in giving the House managers at least a semblance of a real trial, by rejecting Byrd’s motion to dismiss and by allowing the managers to question three witnesses.

For this, Feingold was dismissed by many Democrats as a traitor or a flake. How else to deal with a man of principle? The day after his vote, Feingold was also slyly slimed (although not named) as "sanctimonious." That was the President talking.

Another hero: Henry Ruth, a moderate-to-liberal Democrat who succeeded Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski as Watergate special prosecutor after having served as top deputy to both. Amid a raft of other former Watergate figures who have swarmed around the Lewinsky scandal, Ruth alone has enhanced his stature.

Now retired and living in Tucson, Ariz., the 67-year-old Ruth told me that he leans against removing Clinton, for reasons akin to Byrd’s. But in three trenchant commentaries in The Wall Street Journal, Ruth has pounded out the message that the Democrats’ efforts to falsify facts and deny the law will reap a terrible whirlwind.

In a May 15 column, Ruth stressed the "significant parallels between Watergate and Mr. Clinton’s scandals," including the use of executive privilege to hide evidence, the focus on "possible obstruction of justice by the President and others close to him," and White House smearing and intimidation of witnesses.

In a coruscating Dec. 8 column, Ruth exhorted his fellow Democrats to "start dealing seriously, forthrightly, and morally with the consequences of presidential lying and obstruction." He said that Democratic leaders had "built upon Mr. Clinton’s lies with new obfuscations, distractions, and simple falsification of history," including the history of Watergate.

And on Jan. 18, Ruth methodically shredded the tissue- thin rationales of five former federal prosecutors who had testified for Clinton that the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer’s lies under oath were too trivial to warrant criminal prosecution.

"I am perturbed in a profound way," Ruth says, "to see the Watergaters on television saying things like, ‘Perjury’s a low crime,’ and ‘Everybody does it,’ and ‘Nobody would ever prosecute a President for this.’ "

A few journalists have also been heroes. They include three from The Washington Post: Reporter Susan Schmidt has been so tenacious in reporting on various Clinton scandals that first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton targeted her in 1996 to be discredited by White House lawyers — allegedly on the suggestion of then-New Yorker writer Sidney Blumenthal.

Meanwhile, Meg Greenfield’s editorial page has been a cool, consistent voice of candor and reason — dispassionately distilling the facts and law, recognizing that Clinton has disgraced his office and may well have committed impeachable offenses, but coming down in the end — with some ambivalence — against impeachment and removal. Op-ed columnist David S. Broder joins Greenfield on the hero list, for refusing, in a series of strong, lucid, sober columns, to give the perjuring President a pass.

Also on the honor roll of reporters who have dug out facts that the Clintonites sought to suppress are Michael Isikoff of Newsweek magazine, Jackie Judd of ABC News, and Lisa Myers of NBC News. The first two have been trashed by the White House and by media cheap-shotters.

Now, a few Republican heroes: Among the sometimes-hapless House managers, at least two shone brightly: Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas displayed exceptional flair as a trial lawyer, and was polite and decent to boot. James E. Rogan of California stood tall with his bulldog tenacity, refusing to bow to the political heat in his Democratic-leaning district.

Others rank as flawed heroes. Henry J. Hyde chugged into the unfriendly Senate like a battered, slowly sinking battleship, with guns proudly blazing. He was a bit too florid in his efforts to enlist the nation’s war dead in his cause, and a bit too facile in rejecting comparisons to the lies of Iran-Contra. But in his determination to fight to the finish for the rule of law, Hyde exuded a burning sincerity.

Then there is Kenneth Starr. He was the wrong man for the job: too politically ambitious a Republican, too ignorant of the ways of good prosecutors, too attached to his million-dollar-a- year, tobacco-stained law practice, too blind to appearances. His tenure has, in my view, been marred by a pattern of seriously bad judgments. Almost all of them — like his disastrously dumb inclusion of probative but distracting sexual details in the main narrative of his Sept. 9 report to the House — have redounded to Clinton’s benefit. But I’ve seen no real evidence so far — for all the innuendoes — that Starr has done anything dishonest.

And in the end, this remains: Faced with unrelenting obstructionism, stunning levels of dishonesty, and vicious personal attacks, Starr and his prosecutors and investigators did their jobs. They amassed irrefutable — and still unrefuted — proof of Clinton’s crimes. They brought a President to justice.