Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [182]
Not only did Starr have a recalcitrant witness on his hands, but she was now developing a fan club. And she held the key, potentially, to filling in the missing pieces with respect to their case against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The OIC prosecutors kept racking their brains, asking themselves, “How do we break through this logjam?” They even considered a new strategy—perhaps Susan could be brought out of jail for a deposition conducted by a respected lawyer who had no connection to OIC. One candidate was former Attorney General Griffin Bell, a mentor of Starr’s and a giant in American government. He could question Susan McDougal in front of the grand jury to assuage her concerns that this was a witch hunt. After all, Bell would be perceived as a “neutral person.” Starr’s prosecutors felt certain that Susan McDougal “holds the key.” If she started talking, Webb Hubbell might follow suit. Each of those two defendants “was likely quite knowledgeable in some important areas of the inquiry,” with regard to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Starr’s hundred-page draft referral was never made public. Yet there was an inexplicable bubble of conversation within the Washington Republican elite suggesting that something big might be brewing. Whether the fact of the draft referral had been quietly leaked, or whether Starr’s prominent friends simply intuited its existence from conversations with OIC’s top brass, is still not clear. But this odd coincidence cannot be disputed: A “test-run” impeachment drive to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency was launched in late 1997 by highly placed Republicans in Washington, at the same time that Starr’s secret draft referral was being considered internally within OIC. This was months before the affair involving Monica Lewinsky was known to anyone inside the circle of Clinton detractors in Washington.
As early as October 1997, Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who would later play a lead role for the House managers in the actual effort to impeach President Clinton, appeared as the guest speaker at a Saturday Evening Club dinner hosted by the American Spectator. The theme of Barr’s talk, which he delivered to a select group of conservative writers and editors as they dined on poached salmon, was that impeaching Bill Clinton was a desirable “political strategy.” Muckraker David Brock, seated in the audience, listened to the speech in amazement. Although Brock was still employed by the Spectator, he had decided to abandon the conservative movement. Now he felt like a spy planted behind enemy lines. Barr was on a rant about removing Clinton from office on the basis of the thinnest wisps of evidence. As Brock would later recall: “Basically, Barr was trying to drum up support in the world of conservative pundits.… And so there was this whole conversation about how to move the impeachment forward.” Most of Barr’s theories related to imprecise Whitewater charges and to other peripheral accusations that were “incredibly flimsy.” But there was no question that a push to tangle Bill Clinton up in impeachment proceedings was under way as early as the autumn of 1997.
Within the leadership of the Republican conservative elite, there seemed to be a coordinated effort to promote the impeachment concept. Conservative writer Mark Helprin published a piece in the October 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal, titled simply: “Impeach.” Helprin wrote: “At the very least the president, before he became president, was at the heart of criminal financial dealings and bribery involving his wife and various felons who were his close associates.” Helprin argued that American citizens had to decide if Clinton was still fit for office “in light of the many crimes, petty and otherwise, that surround, imbue and color his tenure. The president must be made subject to the law.” The journalist concluded with a dramatic flourish: “One word that will do justice. One word. Impeach.”
In issuing a rallying cry to conservatives and Republicans, American Spectator editor