Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [106]
Nor did Starr believe that he was shirking his duties. He rented an apartment at the Shadow Lake complex in Little Rock to maintain a presence amid his Arkansas staff. He also tirelessly churned out work on planes and in cabs. When he sneaked off for weekends with the family, Alice would usually drive so that Ken could sit in the passenger seat, marking up briefs or sketching out oral arguments on tablets.
When he was in Washington, Starr would schedule meetings at the Kirkland firm in the mornings and then head over to the OIC office on Pennsylvania Avenue for the rest of the day. In Arkansas, he did the bulk of his private work at night. “So I continued to practice law as best I could while at the same time giving [OIC work] top priority,” he explained. “And the hours would reflect that. The hours devoted to the OIC eclipse the hours that I was devoting to [law practice at] Kirkland.”
The small group of holdover OIC prosecutors, who had previously labored alongside Robert Fiske shoulder-to-shoulder, saw a dramatic change the moment Starr took over. None of them viewed Starr as a right-wing nut. Nor did they see him as a Christian extremist or as a political zealot. Yet most worried that he was a former appellate judge, with no prosecutorial experience, who had spread himself too thin with other commitments as he worked on the investigation in slow motion, on a less-than-full-time basis, losing gobs of time.
Bill Duffey, the senior lawyer in the Little Rock office who had functioned as its de facto deputy under Fiske, was later quick to praise Starr for his “deep academic interest in legal issues.” Still, Duffey and his fellow prosecutors with decades’ worth of experience in criminal investigations were startled by the new independent counsel’s lack of preparedness for the job. He recalled being floored when Judge Starr quizzed him about how to assess a “certain witness’s trustworthiness.” When Duffey gave his appraisal of whether the witness was lying through his teeth, Starr asked in awe, “Well, how can you tell that?” The new independent counsel seemed to be an academic fish out of water. Although Starr seemed earnest and well intentioned, Duffey observed that the line prosecutors had to regularly coach the new boss “to help him interpret the facts that were being developed.”
For OIC lawyer Gabrielle Wolohojian, the starkest difference between Starr and Fiske was that Starr “wasn’t physically present as much.” When Fiske was in charge, prosecutors could ask him about subpoenas or witnesses at any time of the day or night. He was virtually nailed to his desk and would instantly give them expert guidance based on decades of experience as a federal prosecutor. Starr, on the other hand, floated in and out of the office and reached most major decisions by seeking consensus from the group. He was a “big-picture-type” guy, a pleasant father figure who tended to revert to his judicial role and seek out the “collective judgment” of staffers in order to compensate for his own lack of experience. Getting concrete action accomplished in the Starr office often required a “cycle” of a week or two. Prosecutors needed to arrange a sit-down when their new boss was in town or set up conference calls, so that Starr could vet the issue with his whole staff.
The difference between Fiske and Starr was “a bit too stark for many people on the staff,” noted one former OIC prosecutor. As this lawyer with Republican credentials observed it, Starr was a product of a “pretty bookish environment,” whereas most OIC prosecutors had come from the rough-and-tumble world of criminal prosecutions. They handled blood and guts on a daily basis and didn’t have time to deal