Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [101]
Before Ken Starr caught a flight en route to a family beach vacation, Bob Fiske gave him two direct pieces of advice: “One, I told him he should move down here [to Arkansas], both for appearance reasons, and because it’s the only way to get the job done. Two, I told him to get someone very experienced in criminal prosecutions to help him, since he did not have that background.”
Years later, Fiske would say with a hitch of disapproval: “He agreed to the second, but not to the first.”
THE transition from Robert Fiske to Ken Starr might have produced fewer sparks if another firecracker had not exploded. On August 12, the Washington Post disclosed that just before Fiske was canned, Judge Sentelle had lunched in the Capitol with Senators Lauch Faircloth and Jesse Helms, both Republicans from North Carolina who had been vocal opponents of reappointing Fiske. With the revelation of the “clandestine” Sentelle lunch, all hell broke loose.
The political connections between these three men only heightened the suspicions of home-cooking. Sentelle had grown up in North Carolina, where Helms had been his political mentor; it was Helms who had sponsored Sentelle for appointments to the federal district court and the court of appeals. Faircloth, a wealthy hog farmer from rural North Carolina, had been friendly with the judge back when Sentelle was a local Republican Party chairman. An unidentified witness now told Post reporters that Faircloth and Sentelle had been engaged in an “animated” discussion while waiting for the tram underneath the Capitol complex. Rumors swirled around that another witness had heard the men discussing the replacement of Fiske at lunch in the Senate dining room.
Judge Sentelle suspended his usual rule of declining interviews with the media and wrote a sharp retort to the Post reporter, denying any impropriety. He noted that both Faircloth and Helms were “old friends” with whom he socialized on occasion. At their lunch in the Senate dining room, Sentelle insisted, most of the conversation had revolved around “prostate difficulties,” combined with “western hats, boots, and my relatives in Texas.” Judge Sentelle insisted: “To the best of my recollection nothing in these discussions concerned independent counsel matters.”
As the “Sentelle lunch” story exploded in the national press, five former presidents of the American Bar Association declared that the lunch “[gave] rise to the appearance of impropriety.” Thirty-six Democratic members of Congress wrote to Sentelle decrying his meeting with the Republican senators and calling for Starr’s “immediate resignation.”
The truth concerning the now-infamous Sentelle lunch with Senators Faircloth and Helms remains one of the unresolved mysteries of the Whitewater saga. Evidence confirms that Washington Post reporters had located at least one source who observed the three men engaged in an animated discussion in the bowels of the Capitol, en route to lunch. One prosecutor in the Office of Independent Counsel, himself a Republican, recalled receiving a phone call from a reporter working on the story. This journalist indicated that “a confidential source”—identified as a lobbyist—“had been on a little railway underneath the Capitol complex” and had overheard the conversation between Faircloth and Sentelle. Moreover, “the lobbyist had told [the reporter] in background that they were talking about getting rid of Fiske.” Another OIC prosecutor confirmed that he or she had received a call from the Post repeating that information and indicating that the confidential source was trustworthy.
In response to a series of written questions years later, Judge Sentelle would address these charges forcefully: “Neither Faircloth nor Helms ever attempted to influence me or to the best of my knowledge any other member of this or any other court in any way, manner, or means. Not only did neither one of them ever specifically suggest Ken Starr, neither of them knew Ken Starr from Adam’s off ox.” Sentelle added: “We did not discuss Fiske, Starr, or any