Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [332]
Norma Holloway Johnson, an African American judge born “Normalie” Holloway in Lake Charles, Louisiana, was a former schoolteacher who ran her courtroom like a mathematics classroom. A Carter appointee with a Democratic registration, she had a reputation for being tough on criminals and even tougher on elected officials who violated their oaths of office. In sending one former Reagan administration official to prison for lying to Congress, the judge had tongue-lashed the defendant from the bench: “You violated the public trust and your perjury offends and strikes at the very core of the trust.” Recently elevated to Chief Judge of the federal district court in Washington, Johnson meted out punishment to criminal defendants regardless of political affiliation.
Starr now stood before the judge and posed this hypothetical: What if the president was “actually engaged in an act of treason”? Would Secret Service agents be immune from testifying, even when it threatened to bring down the nation? As the arguments droned on, Lew Merletti was concerned that “all of [Judge Johnson’s] body language was negative towards us.” Starr’s oratory, to Merletti’s ears, seemed like a bunch of “legalistic mumbo-jumbo.” After all, this highly confidential, close-lipped group of professional agents wasn’t called the “Secret Service” for nothing.
Merletti leaned over, staring at Clint Hill. The former agent’s eyes were sunken; he looked like a man with demons still climbing across his back encumbered by chains and shackles. Agent Hill shook his head slowly, agreeing with Director Merletti’s quiet message. “They just don’t get it,” Merletti thought.
One of the things that especially angered Merletti was that Starr and his prosecutors were creating the false impression that his Secret Service agents had facilitated inappropriate womanizing by Bill Clinton. With stories still swirling in the air about Arkansas state troopers arranging “dates” for then-Governor Clinton as part of the Paula Jones saga, Starr’s zealous prosecutors were now insinuating that Secret Service agents might have been playing a similar role inside the White House. The notion that he or his agents might have been “sneaking Monica Lewinsky” or any other female into the West Wing was an insult to a highly trained professional like Merletti.
“I’m going to tell you right now,” he said later, struggling to keep his voice restrained, “that would not have been going on. Not under my watch. That would not have happened. I can’t imagine any Secret Service person who would have allowed that.”
To the extent some former uniformed officers were now telling Starr’s investigators that they had “placed bets on how long it took for POTUS to move to the West Wing once Monica came into the gates,” this sort of after-the-fact gossip infuriated Merletti. Although the agents in the PPD did not talk about this subject publicly, they knew how to take care of business if there was even a hint that a female subordinate might be getting too close to the president. Evelyn Lieberman, who had risen in the ranks within the Clinton White House to deputy chief of staff under the president, was a no-nonsense task-mistress who watched the Oval Office like a hawk. Lieberman supervised females’ dress code in the White House. She spoke sternly to young women if she did not approve of their attire. It was Lieberman who was instrumental in transferring Monica Lewinsky from the White House into the Pentagon after she detected that the young intern was “spending too much time around the West Wing.” If agents had even the faintest suspicion that inappropriate conduct was going on within the confines of the White House, their job was to report it to their superiors, who would take it to Evelyn. Said one high-level Secret Service official: “It would have ended.”
It was also maddening to Merletti that people like Starr and Judge Johnson had no idea what it meant to wake up each morning before dawn, as a member of the elite Presidential Protection Division (PPD), mentally preparing oneself to “step in the