Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [295]
Cox was so troubled by the unexpected direction Starr’s investigation was taking into the Lewinsky mess that he privately told his wife that he feared the whole independent counsel law might have to be scrapped.
Robert Fiske, the first Whitewater independent counsel, who had been replaced by Ken Starr, also avoided taking sides. He declined to speculate on whether he would have gone down the Lewinsky path if he had still been in Starr’s position. Because he understood the significance of the Vernon Jordan connection, assuming it was real and not exaggerated, Fiske was not prepared to condemn Starr’s decision to get into the case. All the silver-haired former prosecutor could say, with certainty, was that he was “grateful” that he was not in Starr’s shoes.
Most prosecutors who had worked closely with Fiske, however, were far less diplomatic. In private discussions among themselves, they agreed that Robert Fiske never would have ended up in this Lewinsky jackpot, in a million years. Julie O’Sullivan, who had since moved to the law faculty at Georgetown, summarized the sentiment of many of her former colleagues by saying that Fiske would have wrapped up and gone home much earlier, mooting this issue. “We’d have been long since done,” she insisted.
William Duffey, Jr., who had returned to practice in Atlanta after having served as Fiske’s top deputy heading up the investigation in Little Rock, believed that Starr’s insistence on working part-time rather than devoting twenty-four hours a day to the independent counsel job had finally caught up with him. “I have always said that if he had done it full time, [Starr] would have been at the point of [wrapping up the case] when the Monica Lewinsky thing came up,” said Duffey. “And at that time, it would have made more sense to appoint a different independent counsel to investigate that.”
He added with a note of regret, “Which I think would have had a totally different result.”
CHAPTER
35
THE VILIFICATION OF KEN STARR
In the midst of the hubbub involving the newly launched Lewinsky investigation, Ken Starr was in San Antonio, speaking at an American Bar Association conference and visiting with his ninety-year-old mother. “She was not in good health, so I made it down to San Antonio as frequently as I could to be with her,” Starr recalled. “She lived by her own choice alone, so I had stayed with her the night before, and I knew it was going to break that next day.”
Immediately after the conference session, the special prosecutor took his mother to lunch at her favorite eatery—Luby’s, a cafeteria chain that specialized in Southern fare—and then drove Vannie back home to get her settled in. Before kissing the most important woman in his life good-bye, Ken knelt down and said, “Mother, there may be some press; you may be reading about some things … but just don’t worry about it, and if there’s any issue, just call me and we’ll take care of it.”
With that, Ken Starr drove to the airport, where he was greeted by a phalanx of cameramen and journalists. No sooner had he returned home to Virginia than the FBI and U.S. Marshal’s office were compiling “death threat assessments,” assigning Starr “round-the-clock security.” The Monica Lewinsky matter had transformed him from a low-key figure to a reviled prosecutor wearing a target on his chest.
The vilification of Ken Starr, among Clinton fans and Starr-bashers around the globe, had become increasingly distressing to Ken and Alice, who were struggling to shield their family from this unexpected backlash.
Seated in the TV room of his home in McLean, Ken would later observe that the impugning