Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [6]
The biggest source of shame was that she had believed so many of Bill’s denials about “other women” over the years. She had passed these fibs and excuses along to the gullible public. “So I just felt so lied to,” Wright would say. Now she was haunted by the fact that “I had lied to the country on his behalf.”
The Lewinsky affair and the Starr Report had literally pushed her over the edge. “I was a basket case,” Wright confided. “I went into a depression. I had to go see the doctor about getting antidepressants. It was awful.… There wasn’t anything I could do. And I was so angry at Bill. The anger was killing me. I did eventually work through the ability to separate out his policies and performance as president from his personal behavior. And that was very good for me, and very healthy for me. I stopped being ashamed of the role I played in getting him there, because I think he did a good job as president and with his policies. Then I merely had to work through the anger at him. And I had to deal with [the question] ‘What is forgiveness?’ He was out of the White House before I got rid of my anger.”
In response to those who predicted Clinton would be forced to resign after the House voted to impeach him, Wright would laugh at their inanity. “God, they don’t know him. The guy doesn’t resign. He doesn’t give up. He fights to the bitter end.” She could see into the future, on that cold Saturday in December. She knew that “it would be a lot messier than that.”
Wright was filled with an equal measure of anger and contempt for the Republican-driven House of Representatives and for Independent Counsel Ken Starr, who had brought the country to this horrible day: “It was like a tornado that was out of control. And there is no way to control a tornado. It had been on that path for some time.… You kept hoping that something was left from the wreckage of it.”
IN Texas, just one state away, other folks were worrying about the personal toll on Independent Counsel Ken Starr, whose investigation of the Whitewater scandal and the Monica Lewinsky affair had triggered the impeachment vote. In San Antonio, where Starr had grown up in a tiny white house that had been a World War II army barracks before it had been hauled up the road and deposited in a cow pasture, there was a palpable sense of sadness. In this quiet town—where Vannie Starr had raised her family to understand right from wrong and where “Willie” Starr had worked as a preacher on weekends and as a barber during the week—the world now appeared topsy-turvy. Those who had watched young Ken Starr grow up in a hardworking Christian family knew that he was scrupulously honest and dedicated to the truth. The ugly caricatures of Ken Starr whipped up by the national media, during this investigation of a corrupt president, seemed downright sinful.
Liz Green, who had lived next to the Starrs since the early 1960s, felt the whole picture was warped. “I just believe he [Ken] was anointed to do the job he did,” she said, standing in her front yard clutching a rake. “Some people say Ken was wrong and Clinton was the best president we ever had. It’s sad to hear that. It’s as if good is evil and evil is good.”
Kathleen Cavoli, who had attended Sam Houston High School several years behind Ken Starr in the early 1960s, felt that Ken was only doing his job, as distasteful as this whole seamy sex scandal might be. “I mean, it was proven that he [President Clinton] had lied under oath,” Cavoli said. “If he [Clinton] had been forthright in the beginning, taken care of business with his family first, and then just come out and said that this is what had happened instead of kicking and screaming all the way,” she added, there would have been no need to hire a special prosecutor. As far as Cavoli was concerned, it was Bill Clinton himself who deserved blame for this entire impeachment mess.
Ken Starr, for