Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [247]
Back at the hotel room, the prosecutors learned that Marcia Lewis had called to report that her train had been delayed. Now Starr’s office was losing its cool—both mother and daughter, they were convinced, were playing them for dupes. Starr himself, who had repaired to his home, where he was receiving periodic briefings from Bennett, was skeptical of the whole mother-daughter sob story. Monica Lewinsky “was playing Hamlet,” he felt. She was also getting “extension after extension after extension.” They were extremely leery of her mother’s convenient excuse: “‘I never fly. I only take trains.’” Starr would state bluntly: “I find it difficult to believe that she [Marcia Lewis] travels from Los Angeles to New York by train or Greyhound or Oldsmobile Aurora. I think it was all buying time. She was buying time. The FBI viewed us as being soft. She was playing us like a fiddle.”
Monica responded to this charge with a swift counter-jab: “They should have gone to look at the records of how many times my mom had flown from New York to D.C. They would see that she normally took the train. Because she doesn’t like to fly. She has a bad back.” For Lewinsky, this sort of paranoid thinking only confirmed that Starr’s office was predisposed to assume the worst, demonstrating that these prosecutors were on a mission to nail Clinton, whatever it took.
Bennett had become famished. He rounded up a few other prosecutors from the OIC offices and located a pizza joint across from the Ritz-Carlton, where they could have dinner and wait in vigil. The group, by this point, was consumed with wildly conflicting emotions. “We all had high hopes going into this that we would be able to enlist [Lewinsky],” Bennett explained. “And it was kind of—your head tells you one thing, your heart tells you another.” If the prosecutors had taken a dose of truth serum, they would have admitted they had a strong sense that “it wasn’t going to happen.” On the other hand, said Bennett, “you really, really wanted it to happen. And you invested so much in preparing your best approach to try to make it happen.”
These clashing emotions led to “increasing frustration” within the OIC ranks, accompanied by “a little bit of backbiting.” Bennett learned during his pepperoni-pizza dinner that Emmick “had essentially agreed not to prosecute [Lewinsky],” something that added to his heartburn. Bennett would later say, “I was angry about that. Because we hadn’t vetted it.”
Among the hard-liners, which included Bennett and most of the Starr team who had started out together in Arkansas, there was a creeping sense that the new “Democrats” in the office were trying to sabotage their operation. It was clear that Emmick, Udolf, and Mary Anne Wirth were hostile toward Linda Tripp from the start. The day the FBI had wired Tripp, Udolf had driven her home and reported that she was “rude,” “mistrustful,” and “paranoid.” Tripp, for her part, had called Wirth a “big-haired witch.” At one meeting with his fellow prosecutors, Udolf had blurted out, “Do you think Clinton is a bad president? Do you think he ought to lose his office over a piece of ass?” All of these pieces of evidence were starting to add up in the minds of Bennett and others. The “hawks” had tried to put aside their distrust and display good faith by putting the “doves” in charge of the brace of Lewinsky. Now, they felt Udolf and Emmick were intentionally tanking the investigation.
Back in the room, the OIC prosecutors and agents stationed with Emmick lounged on the bed watching a Monty Python movie. As one prosecutor recalled, “It did feel a bit like a time lock in a movie where the clock is ticking down and the bomb’s about to go off.” There was also