Another Side of Henry Hyde.

• Author: WORTH, ROBERT

Will he do to Clinton what he did to Peter Galbraith?

To hear the press tell it, Bill Clinton should be getting down on his knees every morning and thanking God he has Henry Hyde as his judge. Ever since impeachment hearings began to loom last winter, journalists have been gathering verbal bouquets for Hyde, the aging Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. They speak in awed tones of his legendary fairness, his "bipartisan credibility," his "white mane" of hair and his towering physical presence. They coo over his boyhood apprenticeship with the works of Thomas Aquinas, and they cite approvingly his admonition that "politics must be checked at the door" of any impeachment discussion. The Washington Post's Mary McGrory declared in August that Hyde is "the nearest thing to a patriarch that Congress can provide."

Even those who acknowledge the extremism of his politics--he is, after all, the author of the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funds for abortions--have tended to brush it off by citing tributes to Hyde's personal charm from such leftish opponents as Rep. Barney Frank and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. When Salon magazine revealed Hyde's five-year adulterous affair and Hyde dismissed it as "youthful indiscretion," few pundits made much of the fact that Hyde was in his forties at the time and that the affair destroyed a marriage. Even after Hyde's committee unceremoniously dumped Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony onto the public in September, much of the media continued to blame Newt Gingrich.

Some of this media fawning was forgiveable--after all, everybody yearns to anoint a Wise Man in times of crisis, and Hyde certainly looks the part. But his bipartisan demeanor masks some truths that should make us worry about Clinton's chances for a fair hearing. Just consider the way Hyde behaved two years ago as chairman of a House investigation into U.S. policy toward Bosnia during the Balkan war. The charges were the same as in the Clinton mess--perjury and a coverup. In that case they proved groundless. And instead of giving the accused officials a chance to clear their names, Hyde's committee used its power to smear the administration's foreign policy and to seriously damage the reputations of eight public servants who had done no apparent wrong.

A Democratic Iran-Contra?

Hyde's investigation began in 1996, shortly after the Los Angeles Times broke what seemed like a momentous story: The U.S. ambassador in Croatia, Peter Galbraith, had given a secret "green light" in 1994 to allow arms shipments from Iran to the Bosnian Muslims. Although the Bosnians had long since gained the world's sympathy in their desperate struggle against the brutal and better-armed Serbs, the idea that the U.S. had allowed anyone to receive arms from a terrorist state like Iran, and in direct violation of the U.N. arms embargo on Bosnia, seemed shocking. Some Republican congressmen suggested that the truth was even worse--that U.S. officials might have actually run a covert operation to procure arms from Iran. To Bob Dole and other Republicans running for office later that year, the prospect of a "Democratic Iran-contra" scandal, with Peter Galbraith (son of the liberal establishment's saint, John Kenneth) as its Ollie North, was almost too good to be true. Dole ordered an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House--after fierce debate and a close vote--appropriated $1 million for its own probe. Henry Hyde, selected by Gingrich to chair the investigation, told reporters that it had been "incredible folly" for the administration to allow Iran, "the most radical nation in the world," to become involved in Bosnia.

These charges, which were disingenuous from the beginning, collapsed under scrutiny. As Hyde and Dole knew very well, the Iranian military presence in Bosnia dated back to 1992, during the Bush administration. And although the green...