Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [291]
Dash did not think that he was intentionally left in the dark by the special prosecutor. Still, he was upset and embarrassed that he, the highly touted ethics adviser of Watergate fame, had been left out of the loop on the all-important Lewinsky decision. His colleagues at Georgetown Law School were encircling him like riled coyotes demanding to know whether he agreed with this new, unseemly course charted by the independent counsel to whom he reported. Dash therefore threw on his winter coat and walked briskly from his Georgetown office to the OIC command center, ten blocks away, to confront Starr about the latest turn of events.
Dash’s exclusion had been only partly unintentional. Behind closed doors in Starr’s office, Dash was considered “high maintenance” and “a real pain.” The OIC prosecutors felt they didn’t have time to stroke the egos of self-important academics—so when the Lewinsky story broke, Jackie Bennett had blocked Dash out of his mind, consciously or subconsciously. Bennett later accepted the blame: “Somebody probably should have called Sam. And that was me. And I didn’t do it. With predictable results.”
The moment the bald ethics adviser marched into the office, he told Starr: “I’ve got to talk to everybody. I’ve got to see what the basis of all this was.” He started with Jackie Bennett and quizzed every prosecutor who had played a role in expanding OIC’s jurisdiction, including Ken Starr himself.
Before he died in 2004, Dash declared—in a remarkable defense of the Starr operation, from which he ultimately resigned—that he was satisfied that OIC had acted properly in taking on the distasteful Lewinsky case. From the facts he had gathered from Starr and his staff, including OIC’s notes of the meeting with Eric Holder, he had determined they “were not salivating for this, or aggressively seeking it.” Starr’s lawyers had simply presented the facts to the attorney general’s lawyers, who in turn had requested an expansion of jurisdiction for Starr. As Dash saw it, “If she [Janet Reno] thought that she was being pressured by Ken, or that Ken wasn’t the appropriate guy to do it, there’s nothing that would have prevented her from asking for the appointment of another independent counsel.”
Yet Dash still emphasized that he would have strongly counseled against expanding into the Lewinsky investigation if he had been given the chance. Given the “whirlwind of attacks on Ken” that the White House had already set into motion, nothing could be gained by delving into Clinton’s alleged sexual dalliances with a young intern. Now, Dash concluded with dismay, “It was too late.”
ONE unexpected consequence of switching gears so abruptly from the dried-up Whitewater investigation to the red-hot Lewinsky matter was the appointment of the young, previously untested Bob Bittman to run the Washington office. Precisely how a thirty-five-year-old neophyte federal prosecutor who had worked as an assistant state’s attorney in Annapolis and who had been practicing law for not quite ten years could wind up managing the most important criminal case in the United States was the subject of some mystery, even within the office. Bittman had come to OIC early in Starr’s tenure and had impressed his boss with his orderly mind and diligence. A solid, clear-thinking, button-down son of a well-known Washington criminal defense attorney, Bittman displayed all the signs of a quick study and a good administrator. Nicknamed “Bulldog” or “Maximum Bob” for his no-nonsense style, Bittman knew how to buckle down and get assignments done. Hickman Ewing, whom Bittman was assisting in Little Rock, was a brilliant courtroom advocate, but got bogged down in the minutiae of the sprawling Whitewater/Madison case. In contrast, Bob Bittman could sit behind a desk and bull forward to a conclusion.
When the Lewinsky case broke open, Bittman was in Arkansas helping Ewing wrap