Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [454]
“Marge—I am on the way out the door!… How I wish Mother could have seen this whole ride. Best, Bill.”
CHAPTER
52
AFTERMATH
The legacy of the Clinton-Starr scandal, in all of its broken pieces, was interpreted different ways by different witnesses using their own field glasses to view the wreckage.
Ken Starr and his deputies had hoped that they would clean up corruption in Arkansas and return home as unsung heroes, having achieved justice. Instead, Bill Clinton’s escape act had left them frustrated and foiled, with a large swath of Americans now viewing the OIC prosecutors as dangerously unbalanced zealots.
Ken Starr himself, having been appointed dean at his beloved Pepperdine Law School in Malibu after a false start, did his best to reflect calmly upon his Clinton-related investigations. His neat hair turning white, his spectacles gleaming to give him the look of an academic, Starr made no apologies about the work of his dedicated team of prosecutors. “We just had a nasty, unpleasant task to do, and we simply had to do it,” he said. “It was being portrayed for political reasons as essentially some sort of religious-inspired jihad, as part of the culture wars and an assault on individual privacy and autonomy.” Starr shook his head and lamented: “I understood that there was literally nothing I could do about it.”
Despite the notion—fueled by the White House and hostile media sources—that his pursuit of President Bill Clinton was driven by his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, Dean Starr set the record straight by noting that his own staff would have rebelled if he had pursued this investigation like a Bible-thumping preacher. “If [my prosecutors] felt that I was on some sort of messianic holy war, people would have resigned and I should have been fired,” he said. His faith was admittedly “a great source of strength and comfort in a time of adversity.” Yet Starr quickly added that his Christian moorings had nothing to do with his indefatigable pursuit of Bill Clinton: “My sense of duty was a professional sense of duty.”
For Starr, the worst part of looking back on this unsettling experience related to Bill Clinton’s attitude. “He’s been treating the whole thing very smugly,” the former special prosecutor said. As Starr perceived it, the former president took every opportunity to belittle OIC’s efforts by saying “there was nothing to Whitewater. The whole investigation was bogus and everybody knows it.” Said Starr, removing his gold-rimmed glasses and blinking, “I mean, it’s the most un-repenting kind of [behavior].”
Starr himself believed that the proper way for Clinton to have brought closure to this national scandal was for him to fess up by saying, “‘I recognize that I have made some pretty serious mistakes.’” Starr added with a grimace, “And that’s never been forthcoming.” Even in Clinton’s bestselling memoir, which Starr had delayed reading for some time, partly due to new duties at Pepperdine, the president had resorted to blaming the special prosecutor and OIC for all his downfalls rather than taking a good look in the mirror. The independent counsel remarked, “And everybody’s been saying, ‘Stop it, stop it. Admit it. Get it behind you.’ And he will not do it.”
Starr paused before adding: “It is shocking that the president of the United States would conduct himself as a witness in such a way to essentially ‘lie till he dies.’ We all know the truth. And yet here he is [still] mocking the system.”
In 2002, Starr’s successor, Robert Ray, issued a multivolume final report that vindicated many aspects of Starr’s exhaustive six-year probe. Yet there was little joy in OIC-ville, even after copies of this thick document were shelved in library repositories. The report raised serious questions about the testimony provided by both Bill