Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [403]
ALICE Starr sat in the congressional hearing room two rows behind her husband. She tried to remain calm despite the bright lights aimed at Ken. “I thought it was something he had to do,” she later said. “Sounds like something if he refused to do it, there would have been really bad PR press.” Alice was accompanied by her parents, who sat motionless in the hearing chamber alongside OIC prosecutors Sol Wisenberg and Bob Bittman. “I saw the back of [Ken’s] head the entire time,” Alice recalled, replaying the scene. “So I could just listen. I couldn’t see his facial expressions.” She at least found comfort in the fact that Ken was carrying notes in his suit-coat pocket from their three children, who had written the messages to tell their dad that “they love him and support him and just wanted him to know that they thought he was doing the right thing.”
Dressed in a dark suit and red-striped tie, Starr arranged his fifty-eight pages of remarks with supreme concentration, as if he were preparing for the Supreme Court argument of his life. In one draft of his remarks, the special prosecutor had tried his hand at explaining his mission in near-poetic terms: “The truth is sacred. The oath, both of office and of witnesses, is sacred. The law must be obeyed. There is right. There is wrong.” That theme was now running through his head.
Rows of Judiciary Committee members took their seats in the ornate hearing room, leaning forward in their chairs. On the wall, a portrait of Congressman Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), famed Judiciary Committee chair who had successfully guided the difficult Nixon impeachment proceedings by appealing to the loftiest virtues of colleagues of both parties, seemed to watch over the room in silence. Today, the spirit of bipartisanship seemed to be conspicuously absent. Even before Starr delivered the first word of his typed script, Representative John Conyers, Jr., from Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, claimed the microphone and called Starr a “federally paid sex policeman.” This unexpected attack appeared to rattle Starr. Not until he got a few minutes into his prepared statement, which would last nearly two hours and fifteen minutes, did the independent counsel’s voice become stronger and more confident.
OIC prosecutors watching on a television monitor noticed that Sol Wisenberg was falling asleep in the seat directly behind Starr, creating an impression on national television that their boss’s remarks were deadly boring. They scribbled out a bold-lettered note and passed it down the row, instructing the slouching deputy to snap out of it. Wisenberg later took the blame like a man: “I was fat, out of shape; it was hot in the room, and I was hungry. It’s hard to stay awake in those chairs. You basically have to be rigid and immobile.… So you’re sitting there sweating like a pig, and you have no circulation, and I probably didn’t have a lot of sleep.”
The moment Ken Starr concluded his scripted remarks, Democrats on the committee pounced, forcing the fifty-two-year-old independent counsel to admit that he had no additional evidence relating to Whitewater, Travelgate, File-gate or any other aspect of his investigation, even though he had hinted that these matters were still in play. Henry Hyde himself later confessed that Starr’s revelation knocked him for a loop: “We were really surprised at his testimony—that he did not have more material on any of these other matters.” When Starr confessed that he had reached this conclusion months earlier, Democrats nearly went berserk—why had the independent counsel