Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [227]
Sitting down in a chair, Reno sorted out her options. “I was trying to think of what I should do,” she later recalled with characteristic terseness. Specifically, the attorney general was thinking, “How should it be handled? What were my legal options? What could produce an expansion [of Starr’s jurisdiction]? Was it sufficiently connected?”
A hodgepodge of other concerns swam around in her head. First, what about the fact that OIC had already wired Linda Tripp before requesting an expansion of jurisdiction? This meant there would be immediate questions about whether Starr’s group had overreached. Second, Reno had secretly harbored misgivings about the appointment of Ken Starr from the start. When she had served as Dade County district attorney, she had worked closely with “specially appointed state attorneys” named by the governor. She knew how the system of special prosecutors was supposed to work, and she respected it.
From the moment the three-judge panel named Starr to replace Robert Fiske, though, the attorney general had experienced serious misgivings. She liked Starr, personally. He was a brilliant lawyer and judge. He had been an impressive solicitor general. He was an affable enough fellow, even though (she told herself) he tended to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Reno’s biggest problem was on the practical side of things: “To my knowledge,” she would later say, “he had limited experience in investigating and pursuing allegations. That was my concern.”
When Starr had announced in the spring of 1997 that he was quitting and moving to Pepperdine, Reno had heaved a sigh of relief: “There was a faint glimmer of hope on my part that the court might appoint someone who would organize and work through it. Take what action was necessary, and get it done.” On the other hand, she said, “I was very surprised that someone would undertake that assignment and then leave it, or try to leave it, midstream.”
As attorney general, Reno had scrupulously avoided commenting on Starr’s investigation. Now, years after leaving that post, Reno would for the first time reflect on the Starr dilemma. She sat on the back porch of her country home, a modest structure that her parents had built in the 1940s, stuffed baby alligators and fossils adorning the ledge of her screened porch. Here, in late 2001, Reno confessed that the entire Starr operation had underwhelmed her. Even before it spiraled into the Lewinsky affair, Reno acknowledged, she had felt that the Starr investigation lacked focus. Dressed in a colorful gardening shirt that matched the bright Florida peacocks strutting around her backyard, the former attorney general voiced her overall opinion: “I thought that if all of us had the opportunity to pursue matters with the kind of resources or dollars that he [Starr] had, we would have concluded it and taken whatever action was necessary in a more timely manner.”
These days, Reno’s hands trembled from Parkinson’s disease. A collection of framed badges from a dozen federal government agencies—a gift when she had left the Justice Department—hung from the wall of her screened porch, bearing witness to the vast responsibility that she once shouldered as the nation’s top law enforcement official. Her mind was still as sharp as the day she drove home from Washington in her red Ford pickup truck, a vehicle that allowed her to navigate the swampiest roads of South Florida. Reno was a prosecutor who had been reared on tough decisions and sought out pragmatic solutions. From the start, she confessed, the OIC investigation led by Ken Starr had given her dyspepsia.
Yet Reno also admitted that the circumstances presented in January 1998 placed everyone, including the top deputies in her own office, in a tough spot. She had dealt frequently with Michael Isikoff; she understood that he was “a very, very aggressive reporter.” That he had drawn a line in the sand, setting a deadline by which Jackie Bennett