Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [191]
Bennett paced around his desk. There was no indication that this woman was “a nut case.” She did not “come off as somebody who was so off the wall that… we can dismiss out of hand this person.” Rather, “she seemed pretty articulate, pretty intelligent.”
Bennett pressed the woman—what was her name? After a long silence, the caller relented. “I’m Linda Tripp,” she said. She had previously worked in the White House; she had been the last person to see Vince Foster alive. She had also been a minor witness in the Travel Office flap. She had never dealt with Bennett directly, but she had worked with OIC and knew his name and reputation. She trusted him.
Bennett cupped his hand over the receiver and waved more lawyers and FBI agents into the office. He spoke directly into the receiver: “We’re coming out.” By this time, it was 10:15 at night. There were only a few hours before Tripp’s lunch date with this “Monica person.”
Linda Tripp croaked, “Okay.” There was no point, she said, in avoiding the inevitable. She gave Bennett directions to her home in Columbia, Maryland, a forty-five-minute drive from Washington. The prosecutor scrawled down the information, hung up the phone, and stared incredulously at the roomful of law enforcement people. This was not, he concluded, likely to be a normal night.
JACKIE Bennett never felt that he needed Ken Starr’s approval before embarking on this mission. He later explained how his prosecutorial gears clicked: “I mean, that was not the kind of thing you needed to fill out a form to do. That’s the kind of decision that I felt I had the authority to do, and certainly I had made that sort of decision from time to time in my career. Your job is to enforce the law, and that occasionally means in a proactive fashion.” Bennett elaborated: “The guys who really do that are drug prosecutors. I hadn’t done that kind of work very much in my career, but I’d done it a little bit.” He had spent enough time with street-crime prosecutors, who had taught him the importance of making snap judgments. “So I was comfortable with the decision,” he said firmly.
Before grabbing his note pad and heading out the door, Bennett did place a call to Ken Starr at home, to update him. Bennett told his boss about the call from the mystery woman and gave this synopsis: “It sounds real, and we’re going to go out and meet with her now and get a briefing.” Although events were moving fast and might involve wiring Linda Tripp the next day, he promised to take it one step at a time. His team would regroup in the morning. Bennett told his boss, “I won’t call you at three A.M. with the briefing unless I really, really have to.”
Starr himself considered this call “informational” rather than an action item. “This was not really a decision for me to make,” he explained. His view was that his prosecutors and deputies had ample experience; he routinely deferred to them on these sorts of judgments in the investigative trenches. “My general position was that I was blessed to have remarkably gifted, highly experienced lawyers,” Starr said. “Jackie Bennett had won the John Marshall Award from Janet Reno. He was the ‘can do’ guy.” This was no time, Starr felt, to second-guess his top men.
So Bennett and a group of lawyers and FBI agents sped off in a white government minivan. It was driven by recently hired prosecutor Sol Wisenberg, who was eager to see some action.
Wisenberg, age forty-three, was an enigma even within the eclectic OIC office. The product of a wealthy Jewish, Democratic family in Houston, he had attended law school at the University of Texas, clerked for a pair of federal judges, worked in the Justice Department under Attorney General Edwin Meese in the Reagan administration, and prosecuted criminals for the U.S. attorney’s office in San Antonio. Over time, he had become so conservative that he now termed himself a “paleoconservative.” Wisenberg had worked behind the scenes to help the Bush administration get Clarence Thomas