Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [109]
Jackie Bennett, then stationed in Little Rock, acknowledged that Starr’s style of running a prosecutor’s office could be frustrating. “Everything [involved] spending time in meetings and talking and talking and talking. And I think even Ken would tell you, we probably did a little too much of that from time to time.” Meetings could last three to eight hours, depending on the topic. Bennett described Starr’s approach: “He’s assimilating it. And that’s probably not time that’s all that badly spent. It was frustrating to us. It was expensive. It wasn’t an efficient thing to do. But it wasn’t foolish.”
Most important, for Bennett, was Starr’s unassailable judgment. “I can’t think of any decisions on substantive issues that Ken got wrong. I’d be hard pressed to say, ‘This was a mistake. This was a major mistake.’”
Moreover, Bennett marveled at Starr’s remarkable capacity to produce. “I got on airplanes with him and had seen how the guy works,” Bennett said. “On a leg between Washington and St. Louis, he would pull out a draft court of appeals brief, and he would sit there and mark it up and make it really sing. Now, that’s what lawyers do.”
Even Sam Dash, an expert in the field of complex criminal investigations, would dismiss as bunk portrayals of Starr as a bumbling, worthless independent counsel. “Ken worked almost twenty-four hours a day. I don’t remember an important issue where Ken wasn’t present, either physically or on the phone,” Dash said, defending his former boss. It was clear that Starr was the person responsible for making “the ultimate decisions.” But his management style “was that of a judge, rather than of a U.S. attorney.” This meant that, as a rule, “he listened and decided issues like a mediator.”
Whatever shortcomings Starr may have had as a prosecutor, Dash insisted that Ken Starr was not somebody who was asleep at the wheel: “He was not an absent independent counsel.”
AS Whitewater prosecutor, Starr was not the diabolic Clinton-slayer that some (including Bill Clinton) would later make him out to be. “To hear some people say, ‘Ken Starr parachuted in here and started witch hunting,’” Hickman Ewing said, “well, no.” The Tennessee prosecutor noted that the investigations on Starr’s plate were almost entirely continuations of work that Fiske had begun with the blessing of Clinton’s own Justice Department, none of which had been seriously questioned.
For instance, on December 6, 1994, when Independent Counsel Starr announced to a cold gathering of camera crews that Webster Hubbell had pleaded guilty to two felony counts, this was merely the culmination of Fiske’s work. Hubbell had confessed to engaging in a scheme to defraud the Rose Law Firm and its clients, as well as to filing fraudulent tax returns. The six-foot-five Hubbell wept as he promised to cooperate fully with Starr’s prosecutors or to face a sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on each count.
Robert Fiske’s final report, filed under seal shortly after his departure, confirms that the Hubbell matter was largely complete even before Ken Starr entered the picture. From the start, Fiske’s team had viewed Hubbell as a top priority. He had worked closely with Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster on Whitewater matters. If anyone held the key to information that might unlock the door to OIC’s broader investigation, Hubbell seemed a likely candidate.
And this prosecution was regarded as a slam dunk. As Rusty Hardin, the Texas lawyer who was scheduled to try the case, put it, “I mean a chimpanzee could have tried it.… I’ll guarantee you, an Arkansas jury of twelve of his tried and truest friends, once they were exposed to the evidence against him, would have turned on him in a New York minute.”
If anything, Starr’s prosecutors came to believe that their boss had gone too easy on Hubbell. They would forever regret that their office had signed off on a weak plea deal (Hickman Ewing had been the principal negotiator) without ever demanding a proffer, or a detailed