Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [226]
Jackie Bennett stood up. Before leaving the meeting, he gave Holder a firm, serious handshake, telling his old Public Integrity basketball buddy, “I’m sorry to leave you with this.”
THAT evening, Ken Starr huddled with his prosecutors around a computer terminal as Stephen Bates typed. Within hours, Starr had completed a two-page letter to Attorney General Reno, switching his position to favor the more hard-line prosecutors in his office. In this revealing document, Starr argued (perhaps to cover himself when the letter became public) that OIC already possessed related-to jurisdiction and did not need, as a legal matter, the attorney general’s permission to continue the Lewinsky investigation. He emphasized that Linda Tripp “is already an important witness in our investigation.” Starr interjected: “Should she in fact perjure herself” in the Jones case, “her usefulness as a potential witness in any trial would be greatly reduced.” He also reiterated the purported link involving Vernon Jordan and stressed the “nexus” with the Webster Hubbell case already under OIC’s jurisdiction. Starr ended the confidential letter by expressing his strong view that his office alone was in the best position to handle this highly sensitive new investigation that might reach into the Oval Office. Unlike the Justice Department, Starr emphasized, OIC was already up and running in this investigation. Additionally, his prosecutors could bring an element of independence to this assignment that would instill public confidence in this difficult yet necessary criminal probe—something Janet Reno’s Justice Department could never do.
With that, Ken Starr signed the letter and dispatched a messenger to deliver it to the attorney general’s office posthaste.
CHAPTER
27
VANITY TO PRAYER
Eric Holder had resisted interrupting Attorney General Janet Reno in the midst of her weekly Thursday night excursion to a Kennedy Center symphony, in part because the press had a habit of tailing her. Pacing the floor of his home in Northwest D.C., Holder couldn’t wait another minute.
At 11:00 P.M., the DOJ Command Center alerted Reno’s security detail that Holder had an urgent matter to discuss with his boss. Reno had just returned to her apartment on Eighth Street a few blocks from the Justice Department. The no-nonsense attorney general asked Holder directly, was there a problem? Holder had a good relationship with Reno; he didn’t attempt to sugarcoat this news. Holder put the phone down and retrieved his three pages of scribbled notes so that he could convey Jackie Bennett’s statements verbatim.
Still dressed in a long dress from the symphony, Janet Reno stood in her two-bedroom unit in the Lansburgh Apartments, frozen in her tracks. She did not ordinarily experience fear. The only time FBI Director Louis Freeh had insisted she permit agents to post themselves around her apartment building—for security purposes—was following the Oklahoma City bombing, when safety concerns trumped her insistence on privacy. Tonight, however, the attorney general was feeling unusually vulnerable. In the modest living area of her apartment, knickknacks and decorations from the Florida Everglades were the only reminder of her Miami home. Here in Washington, so distant from that world, political eruptions seemed to batter the landscape more fiercely than hurricanes that ravaged the Florida coastline. Janet Reno, a tall woman at six feet one, would remember taking a deep breath. All she could summon up in her mind was a quote from the mid-twentieth-century statesman Adlai Stevenson: “The burdens of office stagger the imagination and convert vanity to prayer.”
Reno paused a minute, then said, “Let me call you back, Eric.”