Washington Times-May 23, 2000
Undoing of Kenneth Starr
By Michael Rust
In the future, when some historian compiles a multi volume
chronicle of the Age of Clinton, it is likely that the eight
years leading up to the new millennium will be remembered as a
moment in time when the affluent got far more affluent and oral
sex became a topic of conversation at dinner tables across
America. And Americans, it seemed, were reasonably happy with the
result.
If the future historian is a serious craftsman, he or she
will consult "Truth at Any Cost," easily the best book yet to
appear on the unpleasantness surrounding President Bill Clinton's
relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Authors Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post and Michael
Weisskopf of Time magazine were in the front lines of
journalistic efforts to get at the truth hidden behind the
evasions and distortions of the Clinton White House.
In a tale rife with rumor, innuendo and quickly minted
mythology, the authors cut through the self-serving verbiage
which emerged from the Lewinsky scandal to provide a clear,
balanced look at Kenneth Starr's Office of the Independent
Counsel and its case against the president.
For those who care about what might have been, the pending
Senate career of Hillary Rodham Clinton might have been stopped
in its tracks if Arkansas paid more attention to the health
problems of inhabitants of its prison system. The death of Jim
McDougal, Mr. Clinton's freewheeling former business partner,
deprived Mr. Starr of a key witness against the first lady. A
month following McDougal's 1998 death, Mr. Starr's staff decided
that without McDougal, the evidence was not strong enough to
indict Mrs. Clinton for her Whitewater involvement or grand jury
testimony.
Villains, and not just the obvious ones, emerge in the book.
Stephen Brill, soi-disant press critic, almost managed to derail
the entire investigation when his interview with Mr. Starr
seemingly implied that the independent counsel had been leaking
to the press. Monica Lewinsky comes across as less the
not-too-bright victim than as a hard-boiled practitioner of
self-preservation who managed to turn the tables on the
prosecutors without compromising her president.
Both Mr. Starr and Mr. Clinton were lawyers from Southern
backgrounds; after that, virtually nothing united the two men.
Mr. Starr had "a nearly religious reverence for the rule of law."
Mr. Clinton obviously did not. The president, particularly with
his back against the wall, had an almost feral instinct for
political survival. Mr. Starr, even after nearly four years in
the independent counsel's office, was capable of believing,
naively, that his graphic report on the Lewinsky matter would not
be leaked by the Senate.
The portrait of Mr. Starr painted by the authors is at odds
with the picture painted by his enemies. However, it seems to
meld well the independent counsel's actions during the
investigation. The Ken Starr of the book is a man with little
appetite for political warfare despite his own Washington
experience.
For much of the public, Mr. Starr became a latter-day
Javert, from Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," obsessed with Mr.
Clinton. A lot of this, the authors show, was due to Mr. Starr's
tunnel-vision devotion to the law as an entity separate from
political realities. And a lot can also be attributed to
fumbling, misreading and hypocrisy on the part of the maladroit
Republican opposition. However, the authors also demonstrate that
a not inconsequential part of the public perception, or
misperception as the case may be, was derived from a frenzied,
sometimes vicious campaign by the White House and the president's
private lawyers against his opponents.
Clinton consultant/celebrity James Carville, the authors
report, made tape recordings of calls that purportedly contained
discussions about the sexual and personal backgrounds of Mr.
Starr's team. When Mr. Starr was preparing to testify before
Congress, Attorney General Janet Reno informed him she had a duty
to investigate charges of prosecutorial misconduct against him.
Two weeks earlier, days before the 1998 election, a confident
Sidney Blumenthal, the authors report, "was savoring the prospect
of settling scores."
That did not happen, but whatever wind which might have
filled Republican party sails was long gone by the time the
Senate acquitted the president the following year. As for Mr.
Starr, the authors are blunt: "A man once considered a likely
future Supreme Court justice was now the subject of a D.C. Bar
Association ethics probe." Clearly, Mr. Starr had made better
personal decisions than when he agreed to take on the job of
independent counsel. Eventually, the authors report, he came to
believe that he should never have taken on the Lewinsky
investigation. Of course, after-the-fact revisionism is far
easier as the frenzied events of that fateful January fade into
the fact.
If the Clintons emerge from their White House sojourn
relatively unscathed, it will be less a reflection on the
reporters covering them than a comment on the state of the
country and its culture. But that is a subject for another book.
Michael Rust is a writer for Insight magazine.
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