Former Sen. James Jeffords (I-VT) has died

He woke up screaming in the middle of the night, yelling to his wife: "Watch out! The machine guns are firing!" Jim Jeffords's nightmare then was about impeachment. As a friend of Bill Clinton's, he was tormented by his duty to sit in judgment of the president, voting first with his GOP colleagues to move ahead with the trial, then with Democrats against Clinton's conviction and removal from office.

Two years later the senator's sleepless nights were back. In anguish, he informed a group of longtime Republican colleagues last week that his differences with his party on fundamentals were so great that he was leaning toward leaving the GOP. "It was the most moving meeting I've ever had with anyone," Jeffords told NEWSWEEK. "There were tears from me and tears from them because we'd worked so hard on so many things together. And to know they had dreamed of chairmanships and now they wouldn't keep them..." Here his already-soft, docile and unsenatorial voice trails off further.

Yet despite those personal bonds--and a lineage in the GOP that stretched back nearly 150 years to the party's founding--the 67-year-old senator believed he must bolt into the breach. Even if he hadn't tilted the balance of power, he told aides, it was time to go. Peering across the aisle at Democrats talking about using the surplus for children's health and early education while Republicans like Phil Gramm sought even deeper tax cuts, he felt hopelessly out of place. "I was not elected to this office to be something I am not," he said after making his momentous announcement in Burlington, Vt., last week. "This comes as no surprise to Vermonters, because independence is the Vermont way."

http://www.newsweek.com/odyssey-jeezum-jim-153277