Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [228]
Despite her lack of confidence in Ken Starr, there was a competing sense that “time was of the essence.” Reno did weigh the option of finding a different special prosecutor. At the time, she had asked herself as she sat in her empty Washington apartment, “Do you let Ken Starr do it?” Or was someone else a better choice? With the Isikoff deadline ticking away, however, that question had become almost academic. “Trying to get that person up to speed in the context of the whole investigation with the time line,” Reno later explained, seemed futile.
There was another concern that gnawed at the attorney general. By this point in early 1998, she knew that Starr was distrusted (and even reviled) by a large segment of the American public. Correctly or incorrectly, many citizens believed that he was carrying out a costly, drawn-out, politically motivated witch hunt of the president and First Lady. “Under the ideal circumstances,” she said, later analyzing the situation, it was clear that this new, controversial Lewinsky investigation “should be [done] by a person in whom everybody had confidence, who was independent and who could make the call so that it was a clear objective call.” Starr was the antithesis of that person, but this was not a perfect world. A superaggressive journalist in the person of Michael Isikoff was pushing to get facts now, or he was going to spill the beans before Clinton’s deposition and make a mess. Ken Starr—however imperfect a selection—was already in place, ready to take action. In light of “the nature of the allegations,” Reno’s prosecutorial gut told her, this unfolding criminal situation “should be handled now.”
Reno remembered that the only other thought that had flashed into her head as she worried that night in her D.C. apartment had to do with turning back the clock: “I kept wishing that Fiske were there,” she said.
IN Little Rock, the young sex-crimes prosecutor Bob Bittman had driven to Best Buy and purchased several audiocassette players and sets of headphones. With dubs of Linda Tripp’s tapes having been overnighted from Washington, he and FBI agent Pat Fallon, Jr., reviewed a few of these in disbelief. Bittman paged Pam Craig, a loyal office manager-secretary who had been working for Hickman Ewing since 1995, and asked her to begin transcribing the Ritz-Carlton undercover meeting along with Tripp’s own tapes. Once Ken Starr was informed that Pam had been assigned the project, he protested to Bittman: “What do you mean Pam’s typing it? I didn’t want Pam hearing that.” Bittman reassured his boss: “It’s okay, Ken. We’ve never seen her type so fast.”
Agents and prosecutors huddled around the secretary, asking, “What’s she [Monica] saying? What’s she saying?” attempting to catch snippets of conversation from the earphones. Craig looked up from the keyboard and offered her initial impression: “Who cares what she [Lewinsky] is saying? She’s lying.” Two hours later, the secretary slumped back in her chair and reached a different conclusion. She recalled a sick feeling sweeping over her and thinking, “You know, I didn’t vote for the guy [Clinton]. I don’t like him, but he’s still president of my country and this is kind of disgusting, you know.”
Craig, a single mother, had brought her nine-year-old daughter with her to the office while she worked on this emergency assignment. The little girl slept in a chair in the OIC conference room as her mother transcribed tapes long into the night.
Craig took a break long enough to teach a Sunday school class in the morning, then returned to the OIC offices to wrap up the job. The whole experience distressed her. “I mean, it was a real wake-up call for me about how our kids can turn out if you don’t do the right thing,” the secretary said. After packing up her equipment and her daughter and carrying them both to the car, she stared sternly at her sleepy child. Suddenly, the woman grasped her daughter by the arm and blurted out: “Look, let me tell you something. When some