Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [399]
Up until the final moment, Susan Carpenter-McMillan tried to talk her client out of the settlement, arguing, “Paula, if it was me, I’d go all the way with this. You’ve come so far, you have been maligned, your character has been assassinated and raped and pillaged, so I’d go on with it.” Paula replied, “Suzie, I’m too tired. I can’t.”
President Clinton was equally beaten up and drained of his will to fight. He later confessed that he “hated like hell” to pay a dime to Paula Jones. “I had to be dragged across the finish line,” Clinton admitted. “You know, we already had a summary judgment saying that the case was without [legal] merit.” He only agreed to settle the Jones case, Clinton insisted, because “I was not going to let any of this interfere with my being president.” His eyes flashing like a fighter’s, Bill Clinton concluded, “And so [Hillary and I] gave up over half our net worth in a case we had already won. And I never would have settled it if she [Judge Wright] hadn’t given us a [victory on] summary judgment. Never. I would never have admitted to that. It was never true.”
WITH the Jones case out of the way, Clinton’s advisers made a conscious decision to “lay off the gas,” hoping to “help [the House Republicans] figure out a graceful exit strategy.” In retrospect, this was a serious tactical blunder.
The Clinton team was gambling that most Republicans didn’t really want to throw Bill Clinton out of office. After all, this would hand Vice President Gore the presidency for two years, paving the way for him to run in 2000 as an incumbent. Yet the Clinton strategists underestimated the strength of the Republican Party’s “Hezbollah wing,” those who hated Clinton so viscerally that they believed their divine mission “was to end [his presidency] regardless of the consequences.”
As the White House made peace offerings, the House Republicans regrouped, girding themselves for a bloody battle. As their first move, Henry Hyde and his congressional troops decided to call Ken Starr before the Judiciary Committee. The Republicans desperately needed a game stopper. If anyone could drive home the seriousness of the charges in the Starr Report, they reasoned, it was the man whose name was on the cover. The independent counsel, they now agreed, needed to speak directly to the American people.
Four days before Ken Starr was set to make his historic appearance before the Judiciary Committee, he scheduled an appointment to meet with Attorney General Janet Reno. Starr’s ethics adviser, Sam Dash, was raising another stink, protesting that if Starr delivered his remarks to the House Committee as drafted, this would amount to advocating in favor of Clinton’s impeachment—an inappropriate move for any federal prosecutor. Dash was again threatening to resign. This time, Starr decided to nip the problem in the bud; he would tell the attorney general face-to-face exactly what he planned to say in the congressional hearing room.
Starr also saw this as a chance to come clean about certain facts, so that the six-foot attorney general was not blindsided by his testimony. He had never disclosed to Reno that he had briefly been involved with the Paula Jones case, both in providing legal advice to Jones’s lawyers and in tentatively agreeing to file two amicus briefs in that lawsuit, prior to his appointment as independent counsel. He hadn’t been hiding anything: These were relatively minor events in his professional life, he felt. Besides, they were matters of public record—he hadn’t outright deceived anyone. Yet prudence seemed to dictate