Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [384]
There was “no joy in it,” Starr said later. To the contrary, there was “an enormous amount of discomfort.”
As the Starr Report took shape and grew fatter, it blossomed into two parts. Initially, it had been crafted as a list of “potential impeachment allegations” with little commentary. Before long, it became so hefty that it was divided into a “charging section” that spelled out possible offenses, and a more descriptive “narrative.” With two teams of authors working around the clock, the two sections took on lives of their own, with many sexual particulars repeating themselves multiple times.
Jackie Bennett later emphasized that none of this was designed to “pile on” Bill Clinton. “I think we could have made it much more embarrassing if that had been anybody’s goal,” he insisted. “We just kind of had to put our nose to the grindstone and go prove the case.” Consciously or not, however, Starr was taking a step that would forever damage his legacy. He was permitting his prosecutors to construct a report that erred on the side of overinclusion, rather than a lean and precise document like that produced by his Watergate predecessors.
Starr was aware of the history: During the final stages of the Watergate probe, before President Nixon had resigned in disgrace, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had written a bare-bones list of potential impeachable offenses and delivered this compact report to Congress. Jaworski’s factual recitation amounted to a mere “road map,” taking no position as to whether President Nixon had committed any impeachable offenses. Judge John Sirica authorized the report’s transmittal to the House Judiciary Committee under seal, taking steps to ensure that it could not be leaked.
Only a few people in the world had ever seen the Jaworski road map. Scattered sources would later describe it as “a simple document, fifty-five pages long, with only a sentence or two on each of the pages.” Each entry referred to some relevant piece of evidence, such as: “On March 6, 1973, E. Howard Hunt demanded $120,000” and referred to pages of grand jury transcripts and White House tape transcripts that discussed the relevant evidence. Judge Sirica himself verified that the report drew no “accusatory conclusions.” Nor did it contain any “recommendations, advice or statements.” The Jaworski Report left Congress to conduct its own investigation and to reach its own conclusions on the monumental impeachment question.
It should have been a telling clue, within Starr’s office, that its own researcher was unable to get his hands on a copy of the Jaworski Report, even twenty-four years later. Stephen Bates had visited an archivist friend at the National Archives and had obtained “a lot of cool stuff” from the Watergate era. When he requested the Jaworski road map, however, the archivist demurred. That document was still locked up; Bates was unable to get his hands on it.
Had Starr and his deputies opted to construct even a scaled-back version of the Watergate model, this might have provided a fig leaf behind which they could have hidden when the lewd details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair were revealed. Instead, the special prosecutor’s team chose the “more rather than less” approach, the same approach Starr had taken in compiling a fulsome report in the Vince Foster matter. Starr explained to his prosecutors that he took seriously the language in the independent counsel law, which declared that a special prosecutor “shall advise the House of Representatives of any substantial and credible information which such independent counsel receives … that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.