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By Root 1687 0

—at least up to a point. The president’s secretary acknowledged that her boss and Monica Lewinsky had been alone nearly a dozen times in the Oval Office or in the private study outside that office. Ms. Lewinsky seemed lovestruck; President Clinton had returned the flirtatious attention with phone calls and occasional gifts (many of which were kept in the box just turned over by her lawyer). Currie next described being “summoned” into the White House by her boss on the Saturday just after Clinton’s testimony in the Paula Jones deposition, and being led through a series of questions purportedly designed to refresh her boss’s recollection. The president had posed leading questions such as: “You do remember I was never alone with Monica, right?” and “You were always here when she was here, right?” and “You could see and hear everything, right?”

Currie had answered “Right” to these statements; yet she knew they were inaccurate.

Although the president’s secretary seemed wary and tentative as she spoke to Bittman and the FBI agents, she was “quite sharp in her recollection.” After debriefing with his prosecutors that afternoon, Starr concluded that this remarkable confession by the president’s secretary, and the delivery of the box of evidence by her lawyer, were “extremely promising.”

More than any other information they had gleaned to date, this new evidence solidified the feeling among Starr’s team that Bill Clinton was capable of all manner of deceit and misconduct in his quest to escape the clutches of Lady Justice.

KEN Starr and his top prosecutors were prepared to wager all their golden poker chips that future events—such as the conviction or resignation of President Clinton—would eventually justify their aggressive approach in the Lewinsky matter. Yet not everyone shared their optimism that history would vindicate them.

Archibald Cox, the legendary Watergate special prosecutor who had become a national hero a quarter century earlier, watched the Starr expansion with deep concern. Cox, then eighty-six years old, lived on a secluded farm in Maine and made it a point of staying out of politics. The retired Harvard law professor—one of the great constitutional lawyers of the twentieth century and a man who had helped secure the passage of the independent counsel law—was scrupulously close mouthed when television film crews tramped up to his remote property looking for sound bites about this new twist in the investigation. When asked by reporters whether the morphing of Starr’s investigation from Whitewater into the Lewinsky matter was justified, the crew-cutted Cox stood erect and declared that he possessed insufficient facts to pass judgment on the matter. He was loath to second-guess Kenneth Starr, a fellow special prosecutor and former solicitor general.

In private, however, Cox was plagued by increasing doubts about the wisdom of this prosecutorial decision. Before his death in 2004, Cox broke his silence and said that the first question that he would have asked himself if he were Ken Starr would have been “whether I had been given jurisdiction in that area.” Since the answer to that question, according to Starr’s narrow charter dealing with Whitewater, was likely “no,” Cox believed Starr should have avoided this case like a deadly plague.

Cox’s chief worry was that Starr’s detour into the Lewinsky sex scandal could damage the public perception of the entire independent counsel investigation, regardless of any good that it might accomplish. The ramrod-straight Water gate prosecutor had spent his whole life concerned about protecting the institutions of government. Explained Cox, “I would have been awfully reluctant to do it—whoever the president was—simply on the ground that I wasn’t comfortable, and I don’t think the country would be comfortable, in exploring sexual fault, weaknesses. I’m not saying that it was wrong. I just personally would have been disgusted.”

Moreover, Cox was concerned that both the White House and Starr’s office had lost their objectivity. They were now treating this investigation like a