Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [453]
Yet President Clinton would never fully grasp how close he came to being indicted and having to face the ordeal of a criminal trial. Interviews with sources close to Robert Ray, who requested anonymity, now confirm that Ray was ready to “pull the trigger” if the conditions he imposed were not satisfied. “This wasn’t a bluff,” stated one source. “He was prepared to seek an indictment.” Indeed, Ray had to be “cajoled” by his deputy, Julie Thomas, to sign off on the final deal. The new special prosecutor had misgivings up until the final moment about signing a document that let Clinton off the hook. “He agreed after talking with his deputy that the time was right and the conditions he had set had been adequately met,” said the source.
RAY’S secretary tracked down Ken Starr on the morning of January 19, 2001—the day before George W. Bush’s inauguration—and asked if he could come immediately to the OIC offices. At first Starr begged off, requesting, “Can we make it another time?” and explaining that he was busy with house hold chores. Ray’s secretary replied, “It’s important to be here.” So the former special prosecutor drove into the district, joining the reconstituted prosecution team and staff in the OIC conference room, where he had presided over hundreds of meetings linked to the Clinton scandals. Here, Starr was among the first to learn that a deal had been struck that would allow Bill Clinton to go free; the seven-year battle, Ray told Starr personally, was now over.
Ray observed that Starr and his original prosecutors “had a difficult time at first—it took them some time to get their arms around the fact that I had resolved this short of bringing charges.” Quickly enough, however, Starr came around. “Both outwardly and inwardly, he came to feel that it was the best decision,” recalled Ray. “It was good for him, too. It allowed him to have closure, like the rest of the country.”
Among OIC prosecutors and staffers, generally, the announcement produced a snarl of conflicted emotions. Ray received one fax, which he surmised was from a member of his own staff, telling him: “You’ll rot in hell. Allowing Bill Clinton to get off is terrible for the country.” Yet most OIC prosecutors softened as they realized that a new chapter of the nation’s history would begin the next day with the inauguration of President-elect George W. Bush. Forcing the new president to deal with the criminal trial of his predecessor, the hard-liners whispered among themselves, would vastly complicate the new Bush administration’s important agenda. Some compromises, they reluctantly conceded, had their virtues.
As Ken Starr stood silently in the conference room where he had presided over one of the longest and most divisive investigations of a sitting president in American history, he thought to himself, “This is right. This is the right disposition, and we were finally closing the matter.”
IN the White House, during his last frenetic twenty-four-hour blitz in office, President William Jefferson Clinton agonized over the towering stack of pardon applications on his desk, a pile that included requests on behalf of Susan McDougal and Webb Hubbell. In a decision that he would forever regret, the sleep-deprived Clinton signed one of those pardon applications but not the other. The outgoing president also scribbled out signatures on a final blizzard of paperwork dealing with miscellaneous executive matters, then penned a note of good wishes to incoming President George W. Bush, a modern-day tradition for departing chief executives.
His final act on Saturday, January 20, however, dealt neither with pardons nor executive orders nor transmitting perfunctory greetings to a new president.
Bill Clinton’s last piece of presidential correspondence was a handwritten note addressed to Marge Mitchell in Arkansas, his mother’s close friend of fifty years, the