Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [390]
O’Sullivan was also troubled that Starr’s team had intentionally lined up the case for the House to impeach Clinton. She explained: “Ken made it very easy. He organized the documents for them. Organized the evidence. Wrote an indictment. I thought the report itself was written as an advocacy piece, instead of a balanced statement of the facts.”
William Duffey, Jr., a Republican who had served as one of Fiske’s chief prosecutors before returning to private practice, was especially troubled by the level of sexual information. “That sort of detail wasn’t necessary to inform Congress of offenses or things that might be grounds for impeachment,” the Atlanta attorney said. When he and Fiske had worked on the first Vince Foster report, they had consistently deleted information that was “too private.” Fiske would ask Duffey, “Is this detail really necessary to communicate our findings?” If the answer was “probably not,” it would be stricken. The Starr Report seemed to do just the opposite.
Even Archibald Cox, the principled and soft-spoken Watergate special prosecutor who had scrupulously avoided reporters during the Starr investigation to avoid second-guessing a fellow independent counsel, would later confess that he was deeply disturbed by the issuance of Starr’s bombshell report. The ninety-year-old Cox would fault Starr for succumbing to pressure from his younger, more aggressive prosecutors. During Watergate, Cox emphasized, he had literally sealed himself off from his own hard-charging prosecutors, sitting down in private with Attorney General Elliot Richardson in order to exercise restraint despite his staff’s urge to push harder. Starr, he believed, seemed to be buckling to his staff’s wishes.
Additionally, Cox believed that a simple road map of possible impeachable offenses, of the sort his successor Leon Jaworski had turned over to Congress under seal, would have been much more in keeping with the prosecutor’s role of remaining divorced from politics. It was true that both sides were behaving terribly, with the White House and Starr’s office taking turns leaking information and throwing mud at the opponent. Yet Cox believed that the special prosecutor had a duty to rise above such political mud slinging. “Ken Starr’s investigation was carried on as an attack on the White House from beginning to end,” Cox said, seated in a stiff chair at his farm house in Maine. “And that is a very questionable spirit in which to perform such an assignment.”
THE issuance of the Starr Report, ironically, caused Clinton fans and detractors alike to lash out at Ken Starr with a newfound fervor. Particularly appalling to some readers was the report’s inclusion of facts that seemed to purposely rub the affair in the face of First Lady Hillary Clinton, flagging down her whereabouts (often far away from Washington) when her husband’s extramarital dalliances with Lewinsky were taking place. “Talk about something that flies in the face of family values,” said Joe Purvis, a friend of Bill’s since kindergarten. “It smacked of being a prurient document put out by voyeur is tic sick people, if you want to know the truth.” He also scoffed at the notion that Congress—not Starr himself—was responsible for releasing this material worldwide. In Purvis’s estimation, Starr was merely “[doing] the Pontius Pilate number, where he washed his hands of the whole matter.” Purvis mocked the independent counsel: “It was those Jews—the Congressmen—that ordered Jesus’ crucifixion.”
Betsey Wright, who had already sunk into a deep depression over the revelation that Bill Clinton had lied (again) about his inability to curb his sexual appetites, was blown away by the issuance of Starr’s missive. Hiding in a remote area of the Ozark Mountains and humiliated