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governmental posts; he did not want his agents participating in it. Merletti had no intention of telling Ken Starr or anyone else the precise details of how the Secret Service agents and uniformed officers rotated around the White House. “This is all tactical information that any terrorist would love to have,” he said, shutting the door on that subject. Yet, it was public knowledge (from published accounts of the Secret Service operation) that the agents and officers moved around the White House at frequent intervals. As soon as the president entered the Oval Office, a Secret Service agent relieved the uniformed officer who moved down the hall. In regular rhythms, they engaged in rotations, or “pushes.” This meant that all Secret Service personnel were constantly moving. It would be virtually impossible—especially for a uniformed officer—to know how long any individual was present in the Oval Office.

There was another important fact to which the media seemed oblivious: The White House operated on a pass system, with codes indicating where individuals had security clearance to move about. Once an individual had obtained clearance to walk around the White House, no further questions were asked. The Oval Office was a working office with as many as four hundred or five hundred individuals flowing in and out on any given day. There was simply no way for Fox or any other officer to look inside the walls of the Oval Office, and to know what—if anything—was going on with Lewinsky or any other visitor.

FBI interviews later confirmed that Lew Fox knew no damning details. He admitted to the FBI that he had never walked in on the president and Lewinsky, and made clear that if he had ever barged into the Oval Office or the presidential study without knocking and being invited to enter by the president, “I would have probably been transferred immediately.” The FBI report reached an unambiguous conclusion: “FOX never observed any physical contact between MONICA and the President.”

Still, the stories of Fox observing “his girl” Monica Lewinsky as she entered the Oval Office tickled the interest of the national media. They also piqued the interest of the Office of Independent Counsel.

CHAPTER

34

ONE NATION DIVIDED

Ken Starr would later conclude that it was a mistake for him to expand into the Monica Lewinsky matter, largely because of the disastrous impact it would have on his Whitewater/Madison investigation and in sullying his otherwise sterling professional reputation. His view in hindsight about the Lewinsky case was that “it had to be investigated. But I was a poor choice to do it.”

If he had this decision to do over again, Starr would later muse, he would have gathered up the evidence from Linda Tripp prior to the president’s deposition in the Jones case and dropped it on the doorstep of Attorney General Janet Reno. In this revised scenario, as he later daydreamed about the Lewinsky matter minus Ken Starr, Attorney General Reno would have said, “Thank you very much, and I have another independent counsel ready to go.” The case then would have been assigned “within twenty-four hours” to a different lawyer with an impeccable reputation, someone who had not been tarred with a negative image, however unfair it had been in this case. Sadly, however, life did not allow such replays of fumbled handoffs.

Former President Bill Clinton, on the other hand, would see Starr’s expansion into the Lewinsky morass not as an error in judgment, but as conclusive proof that the special prosecutor’s motives were impure. “What should never happen,” Clinton insisted, “is that someone [like Starr] should be appointed a prosecutor with unlimited powers, unlimited access to law enforcement personnel, unlimited access to budget, an unlimited time frame in which to operate, and their main purpose becomes using the criminal law and its ability to indict, to bankrupt and to destroy, to dig up things on someone’s personal life. That’s wrong.” Clinton added, “It’s wrong for me; it would be wrong for any person [investigating] a Republican president.