A Vast Conspiracy (17 page)

After Clinton was elected in 1992, Starr became a partner in the Washington office of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he earned more than $1 million a year. In the fall of 1993, just as the Whitewater stories were starting to break, Starr was summoned from his profitable exile for a different, sensitive assignment. The Senate Ethics Committee was investigating Robert Packwood for sexual and other misconduct, and the presiding Democrats asked Starr to review Packwood’s diaries for material relevant to the case. In announcing Starr’s assignment,
The Washington Post
observed, “Even those who regularly crossed swords with him credited him with being fair. He was not seen as ideologically driven.” In the days before Monica Lewinsky, the Packwood case passed for pretty salacious stuff, yet there was never a leak from Starr or a complaint about him in the course of his work.

Far from limiting himself to his law practice and the short stint with the Ethics Committee, Starr showed an almost compulsive desire to join organizations, give speeches, and stay in the mix. He lived, it seemed, to fulfill the old saying that if you want to get anything done, ask the busiest man in
town. Starr served as an active member of a breathtaking number of professional associations, including the American Bar Association, the American Law Institute, the American Bar Foundation, and the American Judicature Society. In light of his experience as a former judge, he agreed to serve as president of the Institute for Judicial Administration. He taught a class on constitutional law one day a week at New York University School of Law. He even found time to direct an obscure organization called the Council for Court Excellence. In light of this record of compulsivity, it was no surprise that Starr would simultaneously negotiate for a position with Fiske—and for Fiske’s job.

Yet all of Starr’s frantic volunteerism could not obscure a fundamental fact about him. He was a committed political conservative who stood outspokenly opposed to Clinton on virtually every controversial issue of the day. Before 1994, he had served in prominent jobs, but never in any that included close scrutiny by the press. Because of this, his personal style may have caused almost everyone to misjudge him. By nature, he deferred to others. Lips pursed, almost leaning backward during most conversations, Starr was polite to the point of obsequiousness. In a city full of (literally) snarling partisans, Starr’s manner set him apart. There was a time in Washington when lawyers could move up in the profession—to judgeships, high administration positions, and the like—in a largely nonpartisan way. But Starr came of age at the time when the legal and political systems were merging and one had to take a stand with one side or the other to chart a route for personal advancement. Politely but unmistakably, Starr had done just that, and by the time he was named independent counsel, he had long ago signed on with many of the people who wanted Bill Clinton destroyed.

Indeed, while Starr was no ideologue himself, he had always surrounded himself with them. He may have been a member of the middle-of-the-road ABA, but his real friends belonged, as did Starr, to the Federalist Society, the partisan fellowship that provided the intellectual energy behind the Reagan revolution in the courts. He had been hired by the right-wing Bradley Foundation—which financed, among other things,
The American Spectator
—to defend a school-choice program in court. Starr served on the legal-policy advisory board of the Washington Legal Foundation, another conservative think tank. In his work at Kirkland & Ellis, he represented Brown & Williamson and Philip Morris, two tobacco companies whose interests clashed with the Clinton administration’s at every step. He had, of course, already spoken out against the president’s
legal position in the Paula Jones case, and he was on the verge of submitting a brief in her case on behalf of still another conservative organization, the Independent Women’s Forum. Starr had even offered advice to Gil Davis, Jones’s lawyer, about how to handle the issue of presidential immunity from civil suits. None of this activity was improper or even surprising. It simply reflected the legal world in which Ken Starr lived before he answered the Special Division’s summons in August 1994.

The nature of that world was, in fact, what Phil Heymann learned about Starr when he first examined his record at Janet Reno’s request. No one doubted Starr’s intelligence or his integrity. But Heymann also heard a warning: Look at the people around him. Starr was a man who had never prosecuted a case in his life. Someone would have to teach him the rules. As Heymann and anyone else with experience in the criminal justice system knew, many of these rules—about fairness, judgment, and proportionality—weren’t written down, and some prosecutors followed them more closely than others. Starr would be more dependent than most potential prosecutors on the people he hired. More than almost any independent counsel in history, Starr’s destiny would be in the hands of his staff.

Where, Heymann worried, would Starr get his advice?

5

A Really Big Crush

“T
oday is October fifth, exactly eight weeks since I became IC,” Starr would begin a typical meeting of his staff in Little Rock during 1994, “and this is what I have not accomplished. We’re not going to be Lawrence Walsh. I’m not going to be here forever.”

Almost without exception, the Fiske prosecutors fled their jobs as soon as decency permitted. But Starr surprised the stragglers—and the new arrivals as well. His staff nearly matched Fiske’s in their experience and professionalism. In his Washington office, the top people included Mark Tuohey III, the former president of the District of Columbia Bar Association; Roger Adelman, a former high-level prosecutor in Washington; and John Bates, who had just left a senior position in the United States Attorney’s Office in Washington. In Little Rock, Starr recruited the husband-and-wife team of Ray and LeRoy Jahn, who were experienced federal prosecutors from San Antonio, and Bradley Lerman and Amy St. Eve, both veterans of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. Several of these lawyers had the perspective of having worked as defense attorneys as well as prosecutors. Starr even adopted Fiske’s obsession with Walsh. Like his predecessor, Starr vowed a quick and fair resolution of the matters before him. He asked his staffers for commitments of just one year, because he
believed—and here his inexperience showed—that was all it would take to finish the investigation. (Unlike Fiske, Starr did not take a leave from his firm, so he continued making his seven-figure salary during his first four years as independent counsel.)

On the whole, Starr successfully capitalized on the cases Fiske’s staff had begun. On December 6, 1994—just four months into Starr’s tenure—Webster Hubbell pleaded guilty to defrauding the Rose Law Firm and its clients of more than $400,000. On June 7, 1995, Starr indicted Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton’s successor as governor of Arkansas, and two others in a bankruptcy-fraud case. (After a protracted series of appeals on legal issues, all of the defendants eventually pleaded guilty in the case, which concededly had nothing to do with the Clintons.)

Then, on August 17, 1995, just after the first anniversary of his hiring, Starr unveiled the results of his Whitewater investigation. Starr’s grand jury in Little Rock charged Tucker and James and Susan McDougal in a conspiracy case involving Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Starr’s staff called it “the 825 case,” because the complex chain of events began with a loan of $825,000. The theory was that Tucker and Jim McDougal conspired to have Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan lend this amount to a third party, who, in turn, shared the proceeds with David Hale. Hale’s company—which was supposed to make loans to minorities—then used this money to obtain a fraudulent loan of $1.5 million from the Small Business Administration. The only link to Clinton concerned his famous (and disputed) conversation with Hale in February 1986. There, Hale claimed that Clinton asked him to lend some of the $1.5 million to the McDougals, whose business ventures included the shared investment in Whitewater. Of course, Clinton claimed that this by then nine-year-old conversation never took place, and in any event the alleged conversation scarcely related to Starr’s conspiracy case. But that purported David Hale conversation was as close as Starr could get to the president.

All in all, the 825 case was a typical, if rather small, federal white-collar-crime prosecution—complex, unsexy, and based on the testimony of a cooperating witness (Hale) who was probably more culpable than anyone who went to trial. And as the months devoted to pretrial preparation passed, the prospect of tying the president into this conspiracy faded even more. Hale’s uncorroborated word would never suffice to bring down a president. Jim McDougal—an eccentric, mercurial man whose financial reverses had driven him from a life of white suits and Jaguars to a new
home in a trailer—was publicly defending Clinton and denying Hale’s charges. His ex-wife, Susan, was not speaking out in public, but her lawyer was saying she also rejected Hale’s accusations. Even if the two McDougals would eventually flip on Clinton (and Jim did), their words would likely mean little. The experienced prosecutors in Starr’s office began to realize that their Whitewater case would begin—and end—with the trial of Tucker and the McDougals. Starr’s prosecutors had gone to where the evidence had taken them—and it wasn’t very far.

In a peculiar way, these early days of the Starr investigation almost helped the Clinton presidency. Because of Starr’s probe, all the important evidence was protected by the shield of grand jury secrecy, and there were never any leaks of consequence (perhaps because there was so little incriminating evidence to leak). Starr was considering using most of the Whitewater witnesses in the grand jury or at trials, so he deprived the multiple congressional investigations of Whitewater of these potential stars. The hearings on Whitewater—which included those chaired by Alphonse D’Amato, of New York, and Jim Leach, of Iowa—attracted little interest outside of Washington.

Strangely enough, 1995 proved to be a year of renewal for the Clinton presidency. The previous year had been consumed by disasters—the appointments of Fiske and then Starr, the failure of the Clinton health-care plan, and, worst of all, the midterm congressional elections. In November 1994, Republicans regained their majority in the Senate and, astonishingly, won a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in almost four decades. In the days after the rout, the president was reduced to protesting wanly that he was still “relevant” in a city that seemed to belong to the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. But guided by his resurrected Svengali, Dick Morris, Clinton co-opted some elements of Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” rejected the more extreme parts of the program, and positioned himself at the moderate center of American politics.

The defining moment of Clinton’s comeback came in the fight over the federal budget in November 1995. At the time, Clinton chose to pick a fight with Gingrich and company over Medicare rather than “triangulate” between the congressional Republicans and Democrats. The more the president vowed to protect that prized entitlement, the higher he went in the polls. As the showdown loomed, more good news came Clinton’s way. On November 8, Colin Powell announced that he would not run for president
in 1996, leaving only the elderly and uncharismatic Bob Dole as Clinton’s likely opponent. On November 14, Clinton denounced Gingrich and Dole for their “deeply irresponsible” insistence on cutting Medicare “as a condition of keeping the government open.” Clinton refused to sign their budget, and nonessential federal workers were sent home that day.

The following morning, the second day of the shutdown, the White House had a giddy, almost euphoric feel to it. The few staffers who were allowed to come to work scrambled to complete the marathon budget negotiations in what felt like, for some, a no–grown-ups slumber party. The morning of November 15 brought the president even better news. At a breakfast with reporters, Gingrich said that he had sent a tougher budget bill to the president because of the way he had been treated on Air Force One during the trip to Israel for the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “You land at Andrews Air Force Base and you’ve been on the plane for twenty-five hours and nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp.… It’s petty,” Gingrich said, “but I think it’s human.” Gingrich’s remarks caused an immediate sensation, and by noon George Stephanopoulos arranged for an official White House photograph of Gingrich and Clinton on the flight to be released to the news media. Suddenly, the president—and everyone else—could see a clear path to one of the most extraordinary political rebirths in American history.

At exactly 1:30
P.M
. on November 15, according to the computerized Workers and Visitors Entrance System (WAVES), an intern named Monica Lewinsky entered the White House. She didn’t leave until eighteen minutes after midnight the following morning.