Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [306]
Some members of the OIC team were certain that Marcia Lewis’s breakdown was simply a theatrical performance designed to pull at the heartstrings of the grand jury. “I don’t think her angst was legitimate,” Jackie Bennett said. “I think it was all kind of putting on a show.” Sol Wisenberg added, “Certainly, Billy [Martin] milked it for all it was worth.”
Moreover, Wisenberg would insist that there was nothing legally or ethically improper about calling the young woman’s mother to testify. “It’s not done often, but it’s certainly done,” he said, defending the decision. “You can make an argument that it was dumb for us to do it and alienate her.… You can make that argument. I can certainly understand why somebody wouldn’t like it. But she certainly had evidence. We thought she had evidence that we needed.”
To the extent that anyone in Starr’s office thought that her collapse might have been contrived, Marcia Lewis’s first reaction was, “I have no response.” She would quickly add, “Why should I care what they think? They think it’s a show? That’s outrageous. That is outrageous. How dare they. Maybe that’s how they salve their conscience.”
Her daughter jumped in: “I think anybody who would allow that to come out of their mouth is a disgusting human being.” She took a deep breath and added, “They should be subpoenaed to testify against their child. Period. End of story.”
Ken Starr himself would decline to take a position as to whether Marcia Lewis’s breakdown had been real or feigned. Yet he emphasized that OIC was between a rock and a hard place: “Here we are as prosecutors under assault, having to establish that the president of the United States—and a very popular and pretty successful [president]—had lied to the American people. And had lied under oath. This was a very daunting, challenging assignment.” One important slice of facts, Starr noted in defense of OIC’s decision, was known only to Monica’s mother. “So, part of the unfortunate thing about all of this,” explained the independent counsel, “is there were any number of individuals who suffered through this process. And that process could have been much more abbreviated, had the president been forthcoming and truthful in the first instance.”
For Starr, there was a “certain perversity” connected to the accusation that his office was being “too tough” on witnesses. All this was happening, he underscored, because of “the president’s continued unwillingness to face up to the truth.”
Monica Lewinsky, still at home in California, tuned in to a minitelevision in the kitchen, where she saw footage of her mother leaving the court house in a state of emotional distress. Monica recalled becoming sick to her stomach. “I had never seen my mother like that,” Monica said later. “You have to know my mom.… She’s one of those people who has this sort of warm spirit and is sort of very effervescent.” Witnessing this breakdown and seeing what the Starr prosecutors had done to her mother was too much for Monica to bear. “She was just an empty body,” she recalled thinking. “There was no soul.”
So Monica turned off the television, packed her clothes, and booked a flight to Washington. “I came home straightaway,” she recalled.
IN a misguided strategic decision it would come to regret, the White House decided to launch an attack on Mike Emmick and Bruce Udolf, assuming (incorrectly) that these two prosecutors would be leading OIC’s offensive against President Clinton. The Clinton forces began disseminating “opposition research” over fax machines and in sealed envelopes, spreading the word to its vast network of media contacts about purported skeletons in the closets of these two Starr prosecutors. This effort was coordinated, OIC believed, by Sidney Blumenthal (known as “Sid Vicious” and “Sid the Squid” within Starr’s office), a superaggressive political journalist