Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [184]
Ken Starr and his staff, particularly Hickman Ewing, still hoped that there might be a break in the case if Susan McDougal or Webb Hubbell found religion and disgorged new information. By Christmas of 1997, however, the odds of such a breakthrough occurring seemed low. Unless there was a legitimate basis for bringing an indictment against First Lady Hillary Clinton—a matter that was still being debated internally—the investigation appeared to be sputtering out of gas.
The most that can be said about the short-lived movement to impeach Bill Clinton as 1997 ended was this: There existed a seemingly choreographed effort to push that idea on multiple fronts, before OIC abandoned its investigation. Ken Starr’s office took a stab at it; the American Spectator promoted it; intellectual leaders like Robert Bork added their firepower to it. Although the draft referral fizzled out within several months, it was safe to say that a collection of anti-Clinton cohorts was beginning to formulate an impeachment state of mind. So, when the chance unexpectedly presented itself, in January 1998, to “get ahead of the curve,” as Jackie Bennett would put it, the OIC lawyers pounced at that opportunity with arms outstretched.
CHAPTER
23
AN UNEXPECTED CALLER
In reflecting on this period with the benefit of hindsight, President Clinton would later admit that he never imagined, in his most distressing nightmares, that Ken Starr and the Office of Independent Counsel would weave the Paula Jones case and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky into a single criminal investigation. The Lewinsky affair was something that the president had kept closed up in a box, where he thought it would remain locked forever.
Monica Lewinsky, after moving to New York and thereafter relocating overseas to the London School of Economics, would likewise express astonishment that the Paula Jones case had somehow morphed into an investigation by Ken Starr. After all, the relationship between herself and the president had become less physical by late May 1997 at Clinton’s insistence. On Christmas Eve of that year, Monica had worked her final day at the Pentagon, moving out of government work and raising a stink that the president had reneged on his promise to bring her back to the White House. The least he could do, Monica had stated in a raised voice, was to help her find a job in New York.
President Clinton leaped at the chance to bring closure to his ill-considered affair. His friend and Washington power broker, Vernon Jordan, agreed to contact the former intern and provide assistance. It was understandable that Monica would want to move to Manhattan, where her mother had already settled into a new apartment and where she could free herself of the emotionally ruinous relationship with the president.
In Monica’s mind, her affair with Bill Clinton had no bearing on the Paula Jones case, even if one assumed the allegations of Paula Jones to be true, which she did not. Her own sexual intimacy with Clinton had been consensual; it had no legal or logical connection to whether he had exposed himself to a young, female state worker in Arkansas in 1991. One was conduct between consenting adults; the other was potentially sexual harassment. Moreover, during Monica’s ample time with Clinton, he had never exhibited any predatory behavior of the sort that Paula Jones had alleged in her lawsuit. It sounded far-fetched, like a story concocted by a gold digger.
Yet, in this strange world driven by presidential power politics, the Jones and Lewinsky matters found a way to unite. It began with a phone call to Jackie Bennett at OIC’s Washington office on January 12, from a woman who said that she had proof that a young White House intern was having an affair with President Clinton and that the intern had been coached to lie about it in the Jones deposition. She had tapes, the woman whispered in a husky voice, that would confirm everything that she was telling Bennett.
Several factors came together to allow this strange phone call to propel