Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [107]
The holdover lawyers also believed there was another problem with switching leaders in midstream. Duffey lamented, “It was just harder to get people to leave their practices or to leave their government jobs, to come into an investigation a year after it started.” Hundreds of impressive résumés were flooding into the office. But they were no longer top draft choices. Duffey, who coordinated interviews at that time, found it “shocking” that many would-be prosecutors openly announced that they wanted a job because they had a “political [predisposition]” and were itching to do battle with President Clinton.
Still, OIC prosecutors gave Ken Starr high marks for working to avoid hiring overt partisans. Mark Tuohey, a veteran of the Jimmy Carter Justice Department whom Starr hired to head up the Washington office, said that any time he scratched an applicant off the list because he determined the person was “politically motivated,” Starr backed him up completely. As Tuohey later said, “It was very professionally conducted in the front office.”
Yet some staffers worried that new hires with strong anti-Clinton views were slipping through the cracks, largely because Starr was “tone deaf.” Moreover, there was a concern that they were settling for “second-tier” lawyers to fill vacancies. Many of Fiske’s most highly qualified hires had quietly made the exodus back to their pre-Whitewater careers. The OIC operation was slowly restocked with a new brand of prosecutors, many of whom were young, aggressive, and untested.
Some prosecutors, especially those who had uprooted their families to move to Little Rock, were miffed that Starr was still living in Northern Virginia and commuting to Arkansas. They became downright “irritated” when Starr announced that he was jetting off to teach a course at New York University School of Law before he had even celebrated his first anniversary as independent counsel. They became even more distressed when their boss announced that he was taking three weeks off to teach a summer course at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California. Nobody doubted that Starr had a “huge capacity for work.” There was no question that he toiled away at his multiple occupations every night and weekend. Still, he couldn’t walk into a phone booth and turn into Superman. As several top OIC prosecutors saw it, although their boss might be “thinking about” Whitewater while he was in distant cities, his “absence and our inability to interact with him” had the impact of “slow[ing] us down.”
“I had no idea how much time he was spending [elsewhere],” said Wolohojian. “I only could tell how much time he was spending in our office. And I didn’t consider it to be sufficient.”
Picking up their families and moving to Arkansas while putting their “real” legal careers on hold, many staffers believed, created a powerful incentive to “wrap [the case] up and go home.” Starr had insulated himself from that incentive by clinging to his toehold in Washington. Like the fabled turtle who resolved to win the race at a quarter-mile an hour, the most consistent criticism of Ken Starr did not relate to lack of honorable intentions. Rather, it related to lack of speed.
As Bill Duffey would sum it up, “I have always said that, if he [Ken Starr] had done it full time, we would have been at the point of [wrapping up the investigation] when the Monica Lewinsky thing came up.” This in turn would have caused the attorney general to appoint “a different independent counsel” to investigate that explosive matter.
“Which, I think, would have led to a totally different result.”
KEN Starr tried to compensate for his handicaps by signing up Sam Dash as an ethics adviser on a contract basis. Dash was a legend in Democratic circles,