“The president says, ‘I don’t care.’ He’s not accountable anymore,” Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables almost by the letter. “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don’t know. It depends how this goes.”
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word — impeachment — spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe Senate seat in a reddish state. It’s barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country, and now there was a war going bad because of it.
“Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility,” he says. “The press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly.”
He is developing, almost on the fly and without perceptible calculation, a vocabulary and a syntax through which to express the catastrophe of what followed after. Rough, and the furthest thing from glib, he’s developing a voice that seems to be coming from somewhere else, distant and immediate all at once.
Listen to him calling out his fellow senators in committee.
“If you wanted a safe job,” Hagel said memorably, “go sell shoes.”
…
“Some of us,” Hagel says, “remember 1970, Madam Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn’t cross the border into Cambodia. In fact, we did. I happen to know something about that.
“I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam — if it’s carried out.
“I will resist it.”
…
[Esquire]
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