Living History (56 page)

Sheryl Crow, Sinbad and Chelsea and I flew in Black Hawk helicopters to visit soldiers in forward positions. We were flanked by gunships, an indication of what a dangerous job peacekeeping could be. We touched down at Camp Bedrock and Camp Alicia, army outposts in northeastern Bosnia. We watched our troops demonstrate how they were clearing mines from the fields and roads―a grim mission and another reminder of the precarious life our soldiers led. Many voices back home were raising questions about America’s role in Bosnia. Some argued that soldiers should not be involved in “peacekeeping,”

even though it has been part of our military’s historic mission in places and times as disparate as the Sinai desert after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and the DMZ after the Korean War. Others argued that European, not American, troops should bear responsibility for maintaining secure borders in the region. Because of these concerns, I spent time talking with the soldiers and their officers, asking for their opinions and listening to their assessments of their mission. One lieutenant told me he hadn’t understood the role the United States could play until he saw Bosnia for himself.

“Before we came,” he said, “it was hard to fathom what was going on here.” He described ethnic groups who had lived peacefully together and suddenly were killing each other over their religions. “You go out in the villages and see all the damage,” he told me.

“You see roofs blown off of houses. You see whole neighborhoods that were completely bombed out. You see people who had to survive for years with hardly any food to eat or water to drink. But now, wherever we go, the kids wave at us and smile,” he told me. “To me, that’s reason enough to be here.”

I got my own look at the desolation of war from the window of our chopper. From a distance, the rolling countryside seemed beautiful and green, typical of pastoral Europe.

But as I flew lower I could see that there were few farmhouses with an intact roof, and it was the rare building that had not been pocked by bullets. The fields weren’t tilled; they were torn up by shelling. It was springtime, but nobody was planting because of the dangers posed by land mines and snipers. The forests and the roads were not safe either. It was awful to see the extent of the suffering and to recognize how much work remained before the people of Bosnia could resume a semblance of normal life.

I had planned a stop in Sarajevo to meet with a multiethnic delegation to hear their ideas about what the United States government and private organizations could do to help heal a society ripped apart by war. The security situation forced me to cancel my trip to Sarajevo, but the people I was to meet were so disappointed that they insisted on braving the journey along fifty miles of treacherous roads to meet me in Tuzla.

We gathered in the conference room at U.S. Army headquarters. My visitors, including the first Bosnian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and the leader of the Orthodox Church in the Serb Republic, looked exhausted and beaten down by their ordeals, but they were anxious to talk. They described what they had tried to do to maintain a sense of normalcy in a world turned upside down by war. They described the shock of discovering that their longtime friends and colleagues would no longer talk to them and sometimes became actively hostile. When the violence started, bombs and snipers became a way of life. The Bosnian chief of Kosovo Hospital’s trauma ward told me the hospital had been kept open even after running out of supplies and losing power. A Croat kindergarten teacher, who lost her own twelveyear-old son in the siege of Sarajevo, reported that her class shrank in size as children fled with their families, stopped coming to school or became casualties of the chaotic and arbitrary violence. A Serbian journalist who had been beaten and imprisoned by his fellow Serbs for attempting to protect Bosnian Muslims confirmed that psychological wounds are often more damaging than physical devastation.

In many places I visited, the scarring effect of war on the hearts and minds of citizens was still evident decades and even centuries later. Rebuilding infrastructure in the aftermath of war is one thing; rebuilding trust among people is quite another.

After the meeting, I toured the camp, examining the soldiers’ living conditions and dropping into the infirmary, mess and recreation hall. When Sheryl and Sinbad returned to Tuzla, they put on a great USO show. Chelsea had been a big hit with the soldiers and their families throughout the trip, shaking hands and signing autographs with her usual warmth and grace. She was even drafted into the entertainment when the sergeant major emcee called her to the stage from her seat in the audience. Without a hint of selfconsciousness, she hopped up to the mike for some silly banter.

“Your name’s Chelsea?” the sergeant major joked.

“Something like that,” she replied, laughing.

He then urged her to demonstrate the Army cheer she’d been hearing from the crowd.

“Hoooo-hah!”

“That was good,” he said. “Try again.”

“HOOOOO-hah!” she bellowed. The crowd broke into applause and returned some raucous cheers of their own.

Although the usual media rules applied-no interviews with Chelsea, no unauthorized photos―she was obviously more self-assured and playful on this trip than ever. Like her father, she was naturally friendly and curious and at ease in a crowd. When we visited U.S. troops stationed in Aviano, Italy, later that day, Chelsea demonstrated more of her élan. She joined me in posing for pictures with a group of Air Force pilots and mechanics.

As we walked away a voice hollered from behind us:

“Hey, Chelsea! How’s your driving going?”

She wheeled around to answer the young man in combat fatigues who obviously had been following her recent press coverage.

“It’s all right,” she said, smiling. She walked a bit farther, then turned again and shouted: “Beware if you come to D.C.!”

This trip left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me. We were so proud of our men and women in uniform, who exemplified the best of America’s values and diversity. If the people of the Balkans needed further evidence of the benefits of pluralism, all they had to do was sit at a table in the mess at Tuzla or Camp Bedrock or Camp Alicia surrounded by an array of skin colors, religions, accents and attitudes. This diversity is one of America’s strengths, and it could be theirs as well.

Before wrapping up the trip in Istanbul and Athens, we flew from Turkey’s capital, Ankara, to Ephesus, an ancient Greek city on Turkey’s southern coast that has been beautifully restored. It was a flawless day, sunny and clear, with breathtaking views of the coastline and the blue-green Aegean Sea below. I remember thinking what a perfect day it was for flying and what a perfect moment to be alive.

I arrived back in Washington on the last day of March, physically tired but filled with information and impressions to share with Bill. The problems I saw in Bosnia made the ongoing sagas in Washington seem small and inconsequential. And the sagas continued.

But, for a change, Ken Starr was under scrutiny.

In an editorial critical of the Office of the Independent Counsel, The New York Times chastised Starr for continuing in his million-dollar-a-year private law practice while investigating the White House. The case, said the editorial, “demands a prosecutor who is evenhanded and unencumbered,” but it stopped short of calling for Starr’s resignation as independent counsel, arguing―nonsensically, I thought―that his possiby tainted investigation was “too far along to start over.” Nonetheless, it was refreshing that the press was alerting the public to Starr’s ongoing legal representations of businesses such as tobacco companies, whose interests were in transparent conflict with those of the Clinton Administration.

When Kenneth Starr was appointed independent counsel, he was not required or pressured to resign his senior partnership in the Kirkland & Ellis law firm; nor did he feel obliged to drop his profit participation in lawsuits that were directly affected by Clinton Administration policy.

A few intrepid journalists―Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and Joe Conason of the New York Observer―had been reporting about Starr’s conflicts of interest in limited-circulation publications, but now the story began to build in the mainstream Washington press corps. As a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush Administrations, Starr’s partisan Republican credentials were already well-known. So, to a lesser extent, were his connections to the religious Right and to Paula Jones. But Starr’s continuing business relationships with our political opponents had until recently been overlooked.

On March 11, 1996, USA Today reported that Starr was earning $3 go an hour to represent the state of Wisconsin in an effort to uphold its school voucher program, an educational policy that the Clinton Administration opposed. His fees were paid by the archconservative Bradley Foundation. The list went on: An article in The Nation magazine laid out the facts proving that Starr had an actual conflict of interest when he, in his part-time capacity as prosecutor, was investigating the RTC at the same time the RTC was investigating his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. The RTC had sued Kirkland & Ellis for negligence in a Denver S&L case. Starr’s own pecuniary interest in his law firm partnership was directly at stake, and at the very least, there was an appearance of a conflict of interest, which the media ignored. Starr should have recused himself from the RTC investigation.

And while the settlement between the RTC and his law firm, in which the firm paid $325,000, was kept secret under a confidentiality agreement, every aspect of the Rose Firm’s legal work for Madison Guaranty was thoroughly investigated by the RTC, Congress and the press. There was no investigation of the settlement and Starr’s actions.

The sudden burst of unfavorable press in March had no noticeable effect on Starr. He ignored The New York Times’s admonition to “take a leave from his firm and all its cases until his Whitewater duties are over.” On the contrary: On April 2, the independent counsel argued an important case on behalf of four major tobacco companies in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

I was dismayed by the double standard that protected Starr and his patrons from accountability, while the conservative faction openly played the “conflict of interest” card to eliminate nonpartisan jurists and investigators. Robert Fiske, the original special prosecutor, had been removed from his post in August 1994 to make way for Starr. Fiske was removed on a conflict of interest charge far more tenuous than the many political and financial conflicts which should have prevented Starr’s appointment in the first place and should have required Starr’s resignation at several points along the way.

Starr used a trumped-up conflict-of-interest complaint to remove from a separate case one of the most prestigious jurists on the federal bench in Arkansas because the judge had ruled against him. This case was unrelated to Bill and me; it didn’t even involve Madison Guaranty, the McDougals or anyone associated with the Whitewater investment. Starr had used his power as independent counsel to indict Jim Guy Tucker, the Democratic Governor of Arkansas who succeeded Bill, on fraud and conspiracy charges involving Tucker’s purchase of cable television stations in Texas and Florida. In June 1995, Starr was using threats and indictments as a tool of intimidation, threatening everyone he could and offering to cut them deals if they would say something―anything!―to incriminate Bill or me. U.S. District Judge Henry Woods was assigned the Tucker case and, after examining the facts, threw out Starr’s indictment of Tucker because it had nothing to do with the Whitewater investigation. Based on Woods’s reading of the independent counsel law, Starr had exceeded his authority. Starr appealed the decision and asked that Judge Woods be thrown off the case.

Judge Woods, a former FBI agent and distinguished lawyer, had been appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter. At seventy-seven, he was wrapping up a stellar career as a jurist and a champion of civil rights in the South. In more than fifteen years on the bench, Judge Woods had earned a reputation for fair, nearly airtight decisions that were rarely overturned―until he got in Starr’s way.

The three judges sitting on the federal court panel that heard Starr’s appeal were conservative Republicans appointed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals by Presidents Reagan and Bush. The three judges granted both of Starr’s requests, reinstating the indictment and agreeing to remove Woods, not because they believed he would be biased, but because critical newspaper and magazine articles about him might cause the “appearance”

of prejudice.

This unusual and unprecedented ruling offended me as a lawyer. A prosecutor should not be allowed to throw a judge off a case because he doesn’t like a ruling. And, in this case, Starr did not first make an application to Judge Woods to recuse himself. If he had, the judge could have defended himself, responded to Starr’s contentions, set the matter for a hearing and made a record. Since Starr made the motion first in the Court of Appeals, Judge Woods did not have any opportunity to reply.

The disparaging news reports that the appellate judges used to disqualify Judge Woods could be traced back to justice Jim Johnson, an old segregationist politician in Arkansas who had once earned the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan in his race for governor and who despised Bill and Judge Woods because of their liberal New South views on race. Johnson’s op-ed piece attacking Woods and nearly everyone else in Arkansas politics ran in the rightwing Washington Times. The op-ed was full of false information that most other media accepted as fact. After his removal, Judge Woods told the Los Angeles Times. “I have the distinction of being the only judge in Anglo-American history, as far as I can determine, who was removed from a case on the basis of newspaper accounts, magazine articles and television transcripts.”

I felt terrible that Jim Guy Tucker and his wife, Betty, had been caught up in Starr’s fishing expedition. Despite Starr’s effort, Jim Guy, who had lost the primary election for Governor in 1982 to Bill, wouldn’t lie about us. This didn’t prevent Starr from pushing ahead with another indictment that put Tucker on trial with Jim and Susan McDougal in Little Rock, Arkansas, in March 1996.