Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [331]
Starr, a scholar of the Constitution, felt that this so-called privilege was “totally groundless in law” and bordered on “frivolous.” Congress had already spoken on the subject, when it enacted a criminal law that required officers of the Executive Branch to report to the attorney general “evidence of wrongdoing.” There was no exception in this law for Secret Service or any other agents. As a matter of history, Secret Service agents had assisted law enforcement officials on plenty of occasions. Starr himself had represented the Secret Service during his Justice Department days, when agents had been “very helpful during Iran-Contra in disproving Oliver North’s alleged access to President Reagan.”
Granted, the shoe was now on the other foot, and the Secret Service was being asked to provide information damaging to the president, whom they were sworn to protect. Still, Starr felt it was irresponsible for the Secret Service and Justice Department to rebuff OIC’s “very carefully calibrated request” for information. Off the record, Starr knew that FBI Director Louis Freeh was unsupportive of his Secret Service brethren; Freeh had informed the attorney general “personally” that he opposed this privilege. So it was a double affront to Starr that Janet Reno would side with the renegade agency.
Seated in the front row behind counsel table in Judge Johnson’s courtroom, Secret Service Director Lew Merletti was accompanied by an intense-looking man who sat impassively beside him. Although the press did not know his identity, this man was former agent Clint Hill, who, at age thirty-one, had witnessed the assassination of a president.
Now sixty-six years old and living in Northern Virginia, Agent Hill was determined to keep others from being pursued by the demons that still haunted him. When it came to these stories suggesting that Secret Service agents had seen Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton engaged in nebulous forms of hanky-panky, Hill was incensed. It reminded him of the irresponsible reports about President Kennedy’s extramarital adventures published after JFK’s death, some of which were purportedly based on authors’ “off-the-record” conversations with Secret Service agents. (Seymour Hersh’s book on JFK, The Dark Side of Camelot, especially stuck in Hill’s craw.) Hill considered it poppycock for agents to assert that they knew what was going on behind closed doors in the Oval Office or inside the president’s private residence. “We provide a protective umbrella or envelope,” Hill explained. “We know who is going in and who is there.… That doesn’t mean we’re in the Oval Office all the time.” The job of a Secret Service agent was not to be a snoop or tattler. “We don’t know what the conversation is, and we don’t want to know.”
Hill’s response to Officer Lew Fox and others who gossiped about Monica Lewinsky was the same as it had been when loose-lipped agents speculated about President Kennedy’s activities: “Well, if you really thought that that was a violation of security,” Hill would give them a dressing-down, “you should have stepped up at that time and done something about it.” He had no patience for retired Secret Service agents or “uniformed officers” who tried to get “fifteen minutes of fame” by circulating White House gossip. These individuals were sworn to protect the president. “So, they either should keep their mouths shut,” said Hill, “or do something.”
Ken Starr now stood before Judge Johnson and told her that inventing a privilege for the Secret Service would create a “Praetorian guard,” allowing the president to “engage in criminal activity” at will. His twelve-page brief had already laid out these points in chapter and verse: No “protective function privilege” had ever been recognized in American law, and this was no time