Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [290]
Clinton found the whole notion appalling that Starr and his Republican co-conspirators should have been given the green light to leapfrog from Whitewater to the Lewinsky affair. “Otherwise, we should have a special prosecutor on every president,” explained Clinton. “And we should have the FBI looking into the past of every president. And every time they don’t get an answer they like about, you know, sexual matters, past drug use, past treatment for drug use, any kind of this kind of stuff, we should just start indicting people like crazy. That’s what was wrong. And everybody knows it was wrong.” The former president paused for emphasis, before adding, “I think they did it because they could.”
Looking back on the tidal wave of events that nearly sank him during his second term in the White House, the former president made no effort to disguise his anger. In Clinton’s view, Ken Starr was the last human being on earth who should have been deputized to spearhead an investigation into his sexual sins, because Starr “had a stackful of conflicts of interest.” Granted, Clinton’s own attorney general, Janet Reno, had been cajoled into permitting Starr’s team to jump from Whitewater to this sex scandal. Yet the president forgave his top law enforcement official. First, he concluded that she hadn’t been “told the truth” by Starr about OIC’s reasons for the expansion. Second, Clinton recognized that there was enormous pressure on Reno to give “Kenny Starr” the green light. “I think the baying at the moon of the conservative Republicans in the Congress, and in the media, and those that had a vested interest in salvaging something out of Whitewater—which by then we knew was nothing—put her in a difficult position,” Clinton conceded.
In fact, the president came to agree wholeheartedly with First Lady Hillary Clinton’s assessment of this episode as a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” with one caveat. “The only thing that I thought was questionable about her characterization,” Clinton said, sitting back in his chair and pursing his lips, “was the word ‘conspiracy.’ Because most of it wasn’t a secret at all. A conspiracy is a secret, and people try to keep it a secret. Most of this stuff was right out in the open.”
Yet the alleged right-wing conspirators themselves considered this an absurd outburst of self-pity on the part of Bill Clinton. Richard Mellon Scaife, Clinton’s purported nemesis, insisted that the so-called Arkansas Project—by which right-wing extremists set out to ensnare Clinton from the start—was entirely a figment of the Clinton White House’s imagination. The Scaife foundations, he pointed out, had contributed to the American Spectator’s “Editorial Improvement Project” only after Vince Foster’s death and Troopergate had created issues worth exploring. “He was POTUS,” said Scaife. “President of the United States. What he and his wife had been doing pre-POTUS, I think, reflected a lot on their ethics.” The Pittsburgh multimillionaire had long been an advocate of “transparency in government.” For him, it was the job of responsible investigative journalists to ferret out misbehavior by those occupying high office.
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., found er and editor of the American Spectator, likewise expressed amusement at the Clintons’ screeches of indignation. Tyrrell’s cousin had gone to high school with Hillary Rodham; this cousin had alerted the publisher as early as 1991, during Clinton’s first run for the presidency, that this story was worth pursuing because Clinton was “tarnished with sex scandals” for years.
Around the Spectator offices, said Tyrrell, there was a running joke about the White House’s protestations concerning the “Arkansas Project” and vast conspiracies. “There was no conspiracy,” said Tyrrell. “It was a legitimate news story. There was nothing secret about it. This was no different than Frontline getting special funding to do an investigation.”
AS each side cast blame on the other, one person who was especially peeved that this new scandal had burst like a supernova over Washington was Starr’s ethics adviser,