Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [232]
IN hindsight, there were few compelling reasons for Starr’s office to jump into the Lewinsky case. Isikoff’s deadline, in reality, was artificial. Just as OIC prosecutors rightly concluded that they had no duty to warn the president to keep him from lying at his upcoming deposition, they also had no duty to stop a journalist from printing a story that might cause Clinton or Monica Lewinsky to tell the truth. If Starr’s prosecutors and Justice Department lawyers had resisted the urge to act precipitously—refusing to allow Isikoff’s “deadline” to dictate the course of their investigation—many of their own problems would have dissolved.
Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, where Isikoff first broke the Paula Jones story, kicked a foot up on his desk and defended his former reporter: “I loved a guy like [Isikoff].” When a tenacious investigative journalist like this latched onto a story, “you knew they were going to bring all the firepower to bear that they could, and they’d give the story a good run.” Bradlee pushed up his shirtsleeves, rocked backward, and added, “Hell, he was never proved wrong, was he?”
The legendary Washington Post editor had been a personal friend of President John F. Kennedy’s; he knew of JFK’s reputation as a world-class “girler;" he understood the arguments that reporters were supposed to stay away from these “personal” matters. Still, Bradlee saw a big difference between JFK’s sexual “indiscretions” and Bill Clinton’s, which had produced an actual civil lawsuit. The latter, he believed, gave reporters like Isikoff license to dig deeper. Bradlee, who had overseen Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein when they blew open the Watergate scandal story, viewed Isikoff as being cut from the same cloth. “It is in his genes to go after something aggressively,” said Bradlee, “which is one of his great virtues.”
Many journalists who had cut their teeth during the Watergate era were now editors or publishers of major newspapers, Bradlee noted, which made them even more aggressive in covering the Clinton scandal. Why not? Every news-hound in the business hungered to be part of history, as Woodward and Bernstein had been in Watergate. Bradlee made no apologies for his colleagues’ zeal. Alternative “news” purveyors like Matt Drudge, who were beginning to use the Internet to scoop the mainstream press, were constantly cutting corners. Old-fashioned bulldogs like Isikoff, he felt, should not be handicapped when they latched onto the news and brought it to readers in a responsible fashion. As Bradlee saw it, the American public was well served by such tenacity. “We didn’t make any news in Watergate,” the white-haired editor said, sliding his thumbs under his suspenders. “President [Richard Nixon] made the news. And I think that’s certainly true in the Clinton incidents.… I mean, we didn’t take up with Monica Lewinsky.”
Bradlee sat back and said resolutely, “Where do I draw the line? I draw the line at the truth.”
Michael Isikoff would later acknowledge that he faced a difficult situation as a journalist. “Given that I knew what Starr’s team had done in taking over the Lewinsky investigation,” he said, “I had to move quickly and aggressively. But I also didn’t want my reporting to influence what decisions any of the principals made—which in retrospect may have been impossible. It didn’t make me popular with the OIC prosecutors when I told them that I had a deadline, and that I was prepared to report their still secret investigation one way or another. But the fact remained that Starr’s involvement in