Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [162]
Starr’s own staff was in rebellion, especially those working on the Jim Guy Tucker cable case and the Susan McDougal contempt matter, fearing their prosecutions would fall apart. The conservative pundits did their own part by calling Starr a traitor. William Safire, in a New York Times piece titled “The Big Flinch,” referred to Starr as a “wimp” who had brought “shame on the legal profession.” The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, no fan of Bill Clinton’s, called Starr’s departure “puzzling and inappropriate.” The paper declared sourly: “At the least, Starr should issue a definitive Whitewater report before leaving for academe. The job of an independent counsel is to clear up mysteries, not create them.”
With his office under siege and his character under attack, Starr beat a hasty retreat. He arranged a hurried press conference in his Washington office and announced that he had changed his mind. Quoting the onetime New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Starr commented in a characteristic old-fashioned—some would say corny—manner: “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”
President Clinton later went a step further: “You know, the first rule of living a sane life is when you get into a hole, stop digging,” said Clinton. “So I thought Starr decided to stop digging. But ideologues and out-of-control people, when they get in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel. And so the bigger-shovel crowd got ahold of him.” The problem, Clinton insisted, was that a group of influential conservative Republicans was now chanting in unison: “If we just keep this going … we can break this guy [Clinton] or break somebody. Surely, we can do something. Gosh, there had to be something.”
With a dismissive wave of his hand, President Clinton concluded that Ken Starr had listened to that loud chorus and taken a leap over a cliff that took him straight downward like a man in free fall.
IF one could trace on graph paper the trajectory of the independent counsel investigation headed by Ken Starr, one would certainly mark his abrupt nonretirement in February 1997 as a crucial turning point. Until that turnabout, his tenure as independent counsel had earned relatively high marks, at least among neutral observers who made a point of watching and judging special prosecutors.
Subsequent events would allow Starr’s critics to portray his entire operation as an investigation run amok. Yet, until his botched Pepperdine decision in early 1997, there were scant facts to bear that out. He was deferential to the president far more than some on his staff would have liked (for instance, he never tolerated prosecutors speaking ill of the Clintons—he always insisted on displaying respect for the president and First Lady). Although he plodded along, he was still doing little more than carrying out the investigations begun by Robert Fiske.
As of this juncture in early 1997, Ken Starr was not even a darling of the right wing. He endured a heap of criticism from the far right when he filed his report on the Vince Foster suicide and refused to validate the conspiracy theories that had been spun by those who remained convinced that Foster had been murdered. One right-wing newsletter accused Starr of taking illicit fees from Chinese military weapons-exporters, declaring: “Starr can now kiss goodbye his widely-reported, widely-supported dream of being appointed to the Supreme Court by a Republican president.” Every night, when Ken Starr returned to his home on a quiet cul-de-sac in McLean, his mailbox was stuffed with postcards and letters from groups accusing him of participating in a “cover-up” in the murder of Vince Foster. Even Richard Mellon Scaife, the conservative multimillionaire whose foundations helped to finance Pepperdine University, where Starr still aspired to move when this flap died down, took potshots at Starr for his perceived lack of fortitude.
Scaife, seated in the neatly appointed office of his family’s philanthropic foundation on the