Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [278]
On Ken Starr’s side of the divide, friends and family were confident that the independent counsel would adhere to his strong principles and follow the evidence wherever it took him. His sister, Billie Jeayne Reynolds, who lived in Kingwood, Texas, saw support for her brother running high. The retired fourth-grade teacher would steadfastly decline interviews during the scandal, but later say of Ken, “He was looking for the truth. And we knew that they felt that if he could do this additional thing [investigating the Monica Lewinsky case], he would do a good job.” Her son, Gary, added a nephew’s perspective: “I don’t think any of us were terribly happy about it or pleased, but we knew that Ken was doing a good job.”
Alice Starr, the independent counsel’s wife of twenty-seven years and his most ardent supporter, had sensed something unusual was up. Ken never talked about his OIC travails, in large part to protect his family. Yet Alice saw her husband’s patterns changing. During this period in mid-January, Ken had been coming home regularly after midnight. All she knew was that he was “working [hard] on a project” and that “things were very tense in the office.” Like most Americans, she was totally shocked when she opened her newspaper on January 21 and read that her husband had moved from investigating the Whitewater/Madison deal to investigating perjury and obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones case. Yet Alice could see “a connection with what [Ken] had been working on.” She saw the link between the Webster Hubbell jobs-for-silence investigation and Vernon Jordan. “So I don’t think he was really looking at Monica Lewinsky’s love life,” Alice said, “but that’s what it turned out that the press thought.”
During this period of stress, Alice saw deep creases developing on her husband’s face. “If you know Ken,” she said, seated at a wooden conference table at her corporate real estate office, “he’s just not someone who’s ever read a magazine that even hints at that kind of [sexual] thing. He’s just a very proper person and does not discuss people’s personal lives or want to know about them. I am sure it had to be very hard on him.” Ken’s workdays now seemed to last eighteen hours, regularly. There was little time for dinner or relaxation of any sort. When her husband did come home, he could not speak to his spouse about the case that was consuming his life and turning him into a pariah in the eyes of many Americans. “He just worked very, very hard on it,” Alice recalled, “trying to get the facts out.”
THE final weeks of January, after the Lewinsky story erupted in the media, were among the most fast-moving in American political history. On the same day that “Unabomber” Theodore J. Kaczynski earned life in prison by pleading guilty to a spree of mail bombings that killed three victims and maimed others, Vernon Jordan issued his first public comment in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Dressed in a gray suit and speaking into a bank of microphones, the six-foot-four Jordan told journalists at the Park Hyatt Hotel that he was prepared to speak the truth. “I want to say absolutely and unequivocally that Ms. Lewinsky told me in no uncertain terms that she did not have a sexual relationship with the President,” Jordan stated with his classic smooth delivery. “At no time did I ever say, suggest or intimate to her that she should lie.”
Judge Susan Webber Wright postponed Monica Lewinsky’s Jones deposition, to keep the beleaguered young woman away from the salivating media. Starr and his staff used the time to issue a spray of subpoenas to the president’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, and other potential witnesses in the White House. They also filed a subpoena duces tecum requesting entry logs that would show how often, and when, Lewinsky visited the White House after her employment in the executive mansion ceased in April 1996.
The American public, if ever it