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By Root 1974 0

1994. Dash had laid out the history of the Watergate investigation and had drawn circles on the blackboard, saying, “You need to continually draw concentric circles,” and reminding the prosecutors that the only reason the Watergate Senate Committee had located Nixon’s aide Alexander Butterfield—who revealed the existence of the White House tapes and blew open the Watergate investigation—had been through turning over every rock. “The course of history might have changed but for our approach and our concentric circles,” Dash stated dramatically. As Starr interpreted the message, it was like the story of the Titanic. The moral was, “In the waters of the North Atlantic, truth will find its way.” For Starr, searching the depths of the ocean to see if any females with close contacts to Governor Bill Clinton knew secrets about Whitewater or Madison Guaranty was merely part of the truth-seeking process.

President Clinton later pointed to this as another example of unmitigated excess. “If you’re conducting a Stalinist show trial and you’ve got to have something to produce, it made a lot of sense,” said Clinton. “You know, it was an unconscionable waste of the FBI’s assets, who could have been working on crime, drugs, terror, things that might actually make a difference to people’s lives.” Growing red in the face, Clinton concluded: “And I knew I couldn’t prevent him from looking into my personal life, because that’s what [overzealous prosecutors] do. I mean, he was into my destruction, not finding the truth about Whitewater.”

The precise impetus for Starr’s switching gears in the Whitewater/Madison investigation, directly zeroing in on Bill Clinton’s extramarital sexual liaisons, remains a puzzle within a puzzle. Journalist Bob Woodward, who broke the story, said later, “I always had the feeling there was more to it than we actually [knew].” Woodward recalled that Hickman Ewing and other OIC prosecutors had indicated to him that they were looking for “pillow talk” that might reveal a stray comment by Clinton about Whitewater-related matters and that might have slipped out during an amorous affair. Yet this explanation seemed to be a stretch: What Bill Clinton might have revealed to a person like Paula Jones or even a paramour like Gennifer Flowers about secret Whitewater matters was almost impossible to fathom. “It struck me,” Woodward said, “if they [OIC] could find anything on any subject—not even related to Whitewater—they were going to do it.” For Woodward, having broken the Watergate story and having watched the shadow of scandal engulf subsequent presidents, his instinct told him that OIC’s sudden desire to probe Clinton’s extramarital affairs “took [the Starr investigation] into a new realm.” That, as Woodward saw it, was one of the things that made the independent counsel law so pernicious. “It was just—‘have at somebody.’”

The summer of 1997 thus turned into a period of unusually aggressive activity, on the part of both the independent counsel’s office and the White House. The fragile civility between the two sides was finally shattering into a thousand pieces.

JIM McDougal, wearing loose-fitting prison garb and sucking on a peppermint, arrived at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, in fair spirits. At least this was one of the less terrifying institutions among the grim selection within the Federal Bureau of Prisons system. The date was August 26, 1997; the air was hot and sticky. McDougal climbed out of the prison van and inspected his new home. Built in the 1930s as a federal hospital, the white, red-roofed facility, originally constructed to accommodate heroin addicts at the turn of the century, now housed inmates with chronic health conditions. (McDougal’s arteriosclerosis had earned him this privilege.) He was wearing khaki pants, khaki shirt, khaki belt, “khaki everything,” standard garb for general population prisoners.

McDougal received a spot in the Fort Worth Unit, a good location because it was not cluttered with inmates in wheelchairs crying out from pain and terminal illness. Because of