A Vast Conspiracy (63 page)

During the three decades of Starr’s career, the legal profession integrated many women into positions of responsibility. This was especially true in criminal law. But in the Justice Department, at Kirkland & Ellis, and in the Office of Independent Counsel, Starr invariably chose deputies who looked and sounded like him. As someone who had benefited enormously from powerful mentors like Warren Burger and William French Smith, Starr, too, had a series of protégés in the law—all young white men. Starr’s refusal to delegate power to women was especially striking at the OIC. All of his deputies were men. Twenty-nine prosecutors represented the OIC in the grand jury—twenty-five men and four women. There were 121 sessions with witnesses before the grand jury—and women prosecutors led the questioning six times. There were small slights, too. After the convictions in the Whitewater trial, Starr called all the members of the prosecution team to congratulate them except for the one woman, Amy St. Eve.

Starr’s history with women made the OIC’s solution to its Lewinsky problem all the more striking. Who would ask Monica Lewinsky about the gory details of the caresses in the presidential study? Mary Anne Wirth and Karin Immergut. Ironically, they were two of the more experienced federal prosecutors in the group, and they had compiled admirable records on opposite sides of the country, Wirth in New York and Immergut in Los Angeles. In light of their accomplishments, it was all the more poignant that they agreed to be used in this manner, because the session they conducted with Lewinsky on August 26 was a disgrace—to the prosecutors themselves, to Starr, to Lewinsky, and, indeed, to the criminal process. It was also a monument to the absurdity of the entire Starr investigation, that an inquiry about a land deal in the 1970s had come down to … this.

“We are on the record,” Karin Immergut began. “Ms. Lewinsky, could you please state and spell your full name for the record?

It was 12:35
P.M
. on August 26. Immergut, Wirth, and Lewinsky were
gathered with a female court reporter in a conference room in the independent counsel offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. In light of the questions Lewinsky was going to be asked, the prosecutors thought she would find it easier if they conducted a private deposition rather than confront her in front of the grand jurors. For her earlier grand jury appearances, the prosecutors had prepared a chart listing each of Lewinsky’s sexual encounters with the president. On this day, Immergut handed the chart to her and said, “What I would like to do is go through the events that are written in bold, which deal with the private encounters you had with the president.”

Immergut started with the first one, the thong-induced intimacies of November 15, 1995. Lewinsky recounted that in the president’s study, “I know that we were talking a bit and kissing. I remember—I know that he—I believe I unbuttoned my jacket and he touched my, my breasts with my bra on, and then either—I don’t remember if I unhooked my bra or he lifted my bra up, but he—this is embarrassing.”

“Then he touched your breasts with his hands?” Immergut offered.

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he touch your breast with his mouth?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he touch your genital area at all that day?”

“Yes,” Lewinsky said. “We moved—I believe he took a phone call in his office, and so we moved from the hallway into the back office, and the lights were off. And at that point, he, he put his hand down my pants and stimulated me manually in the genital area.”

“And did he bring you to orgasm?”

“Yes, he did.”

Immergut was just getting started. She asked, “Was there any discussion during the November seventeenth encounter about sex during the encounter?”

“I don’t know exactly what you mean.…”

“Well, either about what he wanted or what you wanted, or anything like that, in terms of sex?” Immergut asked.

“No,” said Lewinsky. “I mean, I think that there were always things being said, but not necessarily in a conversational form. Does that make sense?”

Both Lewinsky and Immergut were kind of struggling at this point. “Okay,” the prosecutor resumed. “And when you say there were always
things being said, do you mean kind of chatting while you were having sex, or things that felt good? I don’t mean that. I mean—”

“Okay,” Lewinsky said, trying to rescue the floundering prosecutor.

“—trying either implicitly giving you direction about what he wanted, or why he wouldn’t ejaculate, anything like that?”

“I believe why he wouldn’t ejaculate was discussed again,” Lewinsky said.

As the prosecutor and witness continued their desultory march through the “encounters,” certain themes emerged. Lewinsky was defensive about the brevity of the trysts. (She generally removed her underwear before going to the Oval Office, which moved things along.) About the third one, Immergut asked, “Do you know how long that sexual encounter … lasted …?”

“Maybe ten minutes. Not, not very long. We would always spend quite a bit of time kissing. So.”

“And kissing and talking and just … being affectionate?” Immergut interjected helpfully.

“Yes.”

Lewinsky was also baffled by the president’s insistence on not ejaculating. “The two excuses he always used were, one, that he didn’t know me well enough or he didn’t trust me yet,” she said. “So that it sort of seemed to be some bizarre issue for him.”

As this surreal proceeding continued, Immergut at times sounded more like a sex therapist than a prosecutor. “On that occasion,” she said at one point, “you mentioned that he did not touch your genitals at all. Was there any discussion about that?”

“No,” said Lewinsky.

And:

“At that point, sex was sort of the more dominant part of the relationship?”

“Yes.”

“Rather than as it became—” Immergut continued.

“There was always a lot of joking going on between us,” Lewinsky said. “And so we, you know, I mean, it was fun.… We were very compatible sexually. And I’ve always felt that he was sort of my sexual soul mate, and that I just felt very connected to him when it came to those kinds of things.”

Always, though, Immergut returned to the sweaty minutiae. “And again,
just with respect with bringing you to an orgasm, did he touch you directly on your skin on your genitals, or was it through underwear?”

“First it was through underwear, and then it was directly touching my genitals,” said Lewinsky, who did display remarkable recall.

Immergut kept after Lewinsky for nearly two hours, and like any drama, this inquisition built, as it were, to a climax. On February 28, 1997, Clinton and Lewinsky had not been alone together in nearly eleven months, but after attending his Saturday radio address, she wangled an invitation to his study. There, she testified, “I was pestering him to kiss me.” One thing led to another, and then, “I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said, you know, I really, I care about you so much; I really, I don’t understand why you won’t let me, you know, make you come; it’s important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.

“And so he—we hugged. And, you know, he said he didn’t want to get addicted to me, and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him. And we were just sort of looking at each other and then, you know, he sort of, he looked at me, he said, okay. And so then I finished.”

“How did the meeting then end, or the encounter?” Immergut asked.

“We, well, we kissed after—”

“The ejaculation?” asked the prosecutor.

“Yes.…”

There was really only one more important question.

“The dress that you were wearing on this occasion, is that the blue dress from the Gap?”

Monica Lewinsky’s sigh was almost audible on the transcript. “Unfortunately, yes,” she said.

Kenneth Starr’s case for impeachment of the president was ready to go to Congress.

18

Winning by Losing

W
hen it became clear that Henry J. Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would be running the first presidential impeachment process in a generation, he received a rapturous greeting in the press. He was “a man of courtliness and character” (
Time
) who was “too intellectually honest to throw his weight around for partisan reasons” (
USA Today
). The praise was well deserved—and about ten years out of date. In 1998, Hyde remained a principled conservative, but he was also a tired and sick man who lacked the energy that statesmanship required. His challenge was to turn a rancorous political battle years in the making into a moment of dignity and honor for himself and for the House. Hyde’s tragedy was that he saw how to do it, but he just didn’t have it in him to lead the way.

Hyde was seventy-four in 1998, a congressman first elected in the face of the Democratic landslide of 1974, after eight years in the Illinois house. In his twenty years in the minority party in Congress, he was best known as an abortion opponent—the author of the Hyde Amendment, which barred government funding of abortions. He represented a solidly Republican suburban Chicago district, and he had, in the past, frequently reached out to Democrats on issues like adoption and gun control. In the early nineties, though, his wife died, and he endured a serious bout of prostate
cancer, which left a painful and inconvenient legacy in his life. He didn’t work as hard as he had formerly, and he had less patience, too. In every respect, as Hyde turned to face impeachment, his best years were behind him.

Late in the spring, Hyde turned to an old friend as his chief counsel, David Schippers, a Chicago defense lawyer and former prosecutor. He was a safe, familiar face for Hyde, but Schippers could not have been less suited for this kind of delicate political assignment. As news reports invariably noted, the sixty-eight-year-old Schippers was a Democrat, but the designation was misleading. Having grown up during Chicago’s days as a one-party state, Schippers had a sort of genetic predisposition for the Democratic Party, but he was in fact a ferocious conservative. Schippers had almost no legal experience outside of the Chicago city limits and none at all in Washington. His staff consisted almost entirely of former prosecutors and investigators from Chicago, none of them terribly distinguished. In the best Chicago tradition, Schippers, the father of ten children, also hired one of his sons.

In the months leading up to the release of the Starr report, Hyde often said that any impeachment had both to be and to be perceived as bipartisan. Yet during these critical months, Hyde did nothing to reach out to John Conyers, Jr., the ranking Democrat on the committee, or any other Democrat. In part, Hyde was the victim of the independent counsel law. Because the law in effect gave Starr the exclusive right to initiate an impeachment proceeding, Hyde might have looked overaggressive if he had started any impeachment work on his own. Still, there was much Hyde could have done, such as ask Conyers to have their staffs work together on some issues or allocate the number of staff members in an equal way. But Hyde lacked the energy for this kind of forward thinking. The chairman basically drifted through the summer without a plan for what to do when Starr finally made his case. In the months before September, Schippers spent most of his time in Chicago.

The Republicans did accomplish one thing. In an obscure corner of Capitol Hill, Hyde directed the construction of what amounted to a small chapel dedicated to the contemplation of whether President Clinton should be impeached. In ordinary circumstances, only a hodgepodge of congressional staffers, and no actual members of the House of Representatives, worked in the Gerald R. Ford House Office Building. Until September, the newly renovated first-floor suite called H2-186 sat empty. There
was a combination lock on the front door and a motion-detecting alarm system inside. There were two codes to disable the alarm—one for the majority Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and the other for the Democrats. This ecumenism also informed the interior design of the suite: flanking a little administrative area in the middle were separate offices for each party. Within these small rooms, the plan went, members of the Judiciary Committee would read and review the report on impeachment that Kenneth Starr was going to submit to them … someday.