Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [100]
Judge Sentelle would later express shock and dismay that the appointment of a distinguished public servant like Ken Starr would generate such intense political assaults. “Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly,” said Sentelle, “within less than 24 hours after we announced his appointment to investigate President Clinton, various persons connected with the Clinton organization were making just such attacks.”
Judge Sentelle also later insisted that the special court’s decision to appoint Starr was unassailable, because it was “unanimous” and thus the product of bipartisan consensus on the court. Yet this was not fully accurate. Judge Butzner’s papers and his own statements confirm that he opposed the Starr appointment vigorously. As Butzner would write to Judge Sentelle, several years later, after Chief Justice Rehnquist relieved him of his duties on the special court: “I think we differed only once—the appointment of Mr. Starr. But in the end, I decided, as you will recall, to concur. A dissent on this question would have been perceived as politicizing the court.”
President Clinton would himself assert that the makeup of the three-judge panel was no coincidence. “You know,” he said, “Sentelle was appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who’s a very shrewd man and knew exactly what he was doing when he named him [Sentelle] to that panel.” As Clinton saw it, Judge Sentelle was exactly what the Republicans wanted, especially those who despised him most. “They’re on a crusade,” he said. “God has ordained them to crush the infidels. That’s the way they look at it. So it’s unfortunate when the rules of evidence, the rule of law, the facts, don’t conform to what they want to do.”
“Ken Starr was their errand boy,” the former president said, folding up a pair of half-glasses and smacking them against his palm. “And he danced to their tune, just as hard as he could dance.”
DAYS after the surprise announcement, Bob Fiske and Ken Starr, dressed in dark business suits, gathered with OIC attorneys in their cramped Little Rock office. The goal was to lay out a transition plan and hopefully to avoid a stampede.
Fiske had worked with Starr over the years and respected him—he had even tried to recruit Starr to his law firm after Starr stepped down as solicitor general. Now, Fiske’s goal was simple. “I wanted there to be a minimum amount of disruption,” he would later say.
A palpable tension gripped the meeting room. As Fiske introduced his successor with gracious remarks, Starr returned the kind words, waxing eloquent about the gentlemanly Fiske. At one point during the awkward session, Starr in his affable style placed one hand on Fiske’s knee and said, “I love this man.” There was a collective gasp. Recalled Bill Duffey, “And it just struck people as peculiar.”
Julie O’Sullivan, seated across from the two independent counsels, perceived that part of the unhappy reaction was due to the fishy-smelling circumstances. Many staffers knew that Fiske had recently approached Starr about working on an amicus brief in the Paula Jones case. Now Starr had been sneaking around talking to the special court, right under Fiske’s nose? “And the sort of sense was that, ‘Well, if you love him so much, you know, why did you take his job?’”
Starr seemed startled that so many OIC prosecutors were talking about quitting. He pleaded with the lawyers: “Please give me the consideration of at least thinking about it. Or allowing me to talk to you individually about it.” Their faces remained blank. Rusty Hardin, the hard-charging Texas trial attorney who had been recruited by Fiske to try the David Hale case, said the scene resembled “a Brown & Root safety convention.” Nobody was smiling. In plain Texas terms, it came down to this: “You know, you’ve taken away Daddy, man.”
O’Sullivan saw it as unfortunate all the way around. “Ken Starr did his best in a bad situation,” she said. Under these circumstances,