Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [375]
Back at the OIC offices, Starr’s prosecutors gathered for a somber “postmortem.” The general consensus was, “As a whole, it was not a winner.” Those who had been in the room with the grand jury gave an especially gloomy report. As Sol Wisenberg expressed it in rather vivid terms, “We had gotten the ever-living sh——beat out of us.”
Still, as the demoralized lawyers went their separate ways, Brett Kavanaugh patted Wisenberg on the back and quietly congratulated him for asking the “sex questions.” Kavanaugh reassured him, “You got what you needed to get.”
Starr, thoroughly exhausted, had trouble imagining what the next week would bring, or the week after that. The independent counsel was not just angry that things had gone so poorly; he was also upset because “it was my mother’s ninety-first birthday. I was missing that birthday, my family was now away.” What could be more distressing? His life was in shambles, thanks to a hellish sex scandal caused by a president who seemed to slide out of trouble, no matter how shameless his behavior. Starr dragged himself home to McLean, walking tiredly past his security detail and feeling an overwhelming “sense of gloom.” He paced the floor of his empty house, called his ill mother in Texas for her birthday, and then collapsed into bed.
The question that kept churning over in his mind, as he fell into a troubled sleep, was, “How could a sensible and sane government come to this?”
CHAPTER
44
MAXIMUM PERIL
President Clinton, holed up in the White House solarium, was slashing his pen through draft after draft of proposed remarks, none of which seemed right. To defuse public speculation concerning his closed-door grand jury appearance, Clinton’s White House political team had arranged for the president to address the nation at ten o’clock that same night. Despite their boss’s strong showing in the Map Room, his political handlers still worried: Starr’s prosecutors might deem the whole session bogus and slap a subpoena on the president the next day. Those who had been with the president knew that it had been an emotionally draining day. Now Bill Clinton appeared downright “mad.” The scene in the solarium had turned into one of “chaos.” Political advisers and legal counselors and Arkansas friends were all offering conflicting advice. As one observer put it, “this was like half time at an NFL game.” People were shouting that he had to “do this!” or “do that!” as the president worked himself into a royal fury.
Some urged Clinton to savage his nemesis, Kenneth Starr. Other advisers, including John Podesta, felt it was important for the message to be “conciliatory” so the White House team could “pull up our socks and move on.” Clinton, in the meantime, was fuming that “no one was setting the record straight here.” No one was “putting in context what this out-of-control prosecutor was doing.” In the middle of this hubbub, Hillary Clinton walked briskly into the room. The First Lady looked cross-eyed at her husband and then said in a chilly voice, “Bill, it’s your speech. You have to decide.” She added a verbal jab: “You’re the President of the United States—I guess.”
As one person in the room would later sum it up, “so he went off and did it.”
At precisely 10:00 P.M., seated in the same chair in the Map Room where he had been questioned for four hours by the despised Starr prosecutors, President Clinton looked into a camera and told the nation that he had engaged in a relationship with Monica Lewinsky that was “not appropriate. In fact it was wrong.” Looking tired and combative, he acknowledged that he was guilty of a “critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure