The Moth by Unknown Page A

meeting that we didn’t have the votes, and we were going to lose.
    Now, up in the front of the plane, where the President had his office, there was a meeting going on with the national security team, going through war plans for launching an attack on Iraq.
    I was the only one going between the two meetings, and I do remember, in both meetings, sort of looking up at one pointand saying, “Think things are going bad in
this
meeting? You should see what’s going on in the
other
meeting.”
    But when we landed that night at Andrews Air Force Base, I realized three things. One was the President was going to be impeached, and soon. Two was we were going to start a war with Iraq, and soon. And three, I was the one who was going to have to convince the public that one and two had nothing to do with each other.
    About ten days later the President of the United States was facing an impeachment vote. Now, we had a pretty simple strategy for dealing with this. We said that this was all about politics—it’s partisan, the President’s gonna stay focused on the people’s business. It was simple, and people believed it—our ratings were up.
    But at about eleven-thirty, the speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, went to the floor and said something to the effect of “Larry Flynt caught me, I had an affair, and the only honorable thing to do is to resign.” And he resigned on the floor, during the impeachment debate.
    Now, we had a simple message, but all of a sudden, they had one that was even simpler: do something wrong, get caught, resign.
    I figured we had about fifteen minutes before everyone figured that out, and a drumbeat of TV pundits would start saying the President should resign.
    So I ran down to the Oval Office. The President was there with the chief of staff, John Podesta. We were waiting for a couple of people to arrive to figure out what to do.
    I said to the President, “What do you think? How do you feel about this?”
    And he started talking, and I realized that what he wassaying was making a lot of sense, so I started scribbling it down, and when the rest of the team arrived, I said, “We don’t need to have a meeting. This is what we’re going to say.” And as some of you may remember, the President said that it was a real shame that the congressman was resigning. That the cycle of the politics of personal destruction had to end and should end today. And that he was going to call Livingston and say, “Don’t resign.”
    And, oddly, the fever that I was worried about, about the President being forced to resign, broke in that very moment. Which was good for me, because I was late for another meeting.
    I had to go to a meeting where we were working on writing the State of the Union speech, and I do remember sitting in that meeting and thinking,
You know, we’re sitting here discussing health care and education—this is why we’re going to survive this. We’re actually doing the people’s business.
    Unfortunately, at that moment, someone came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “We need you out here.”
    It was my deputy, and I remember looking at her and saying, “You know, if one more thing happens today, my head’s going to explode.”
    And she said, “Well then, you don’t want to go into your office right now.”
    In my office were some members of the President’s national security team. They had been meeting, unbeknownst to me, talking about the military action that had been going on now for about ten days.
    And I went in, and they said, “We’ve completed this military action, we’ve hit everything we can, and we’re about to go to the President to recommend he make a statement calling off the military action and claiming victory.”
    And I looked at them and said, “You’ve gotta be fuckingkidding me. A week ago, you had me go out and say, ‘We found out today we’re gonna be impeached, and we’re launching a war,’ and today you want me to go out and say, ‘Yeah, we got