Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [62]
“There is no way to minimize in those early days the extent to which the mainstream news coverage was totally polluted by whatever David Hale and those other guys were telling [reporters],” the former president said, shaking his head. “And by [the media’s] own desperate desire to restore their own greatness by finding another scandal.
“It wasn’t about the truth. But I was so naive, I went along with it.”
Bernie Nussbaum, reflecting on that day when he followed orders by delivering the letter to Attorney General Reno requesting that she appoint a special prosecutor, gazed out over the New York skyline from his Manhattan law office and said that if he could have one minute back in his professional career, he would return to 1994 and commit insubordination by refusing to sign that letter.
“At that time, Monica Lewinsky was a junior in college,” he explained. “What a shame.” Nussbaum leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “If he [Clinton] didn’t do that and didn’t appoint a special prosecutor, whatever happened with Lewinsky would have happened in private, as it did with every other president.”
This ill-considered decision, he said, “changed the course of history.”
THE independent counsel law, enacted by Congress in the aftermath of Watergate, had been a response to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard Nixon had fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in an effort to abort the Watergate investigation. When President Jimmy Carter signed the bill in 1978, it was viewed as a step toward good government and restoring the faith of the public. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Republicans in Congress (who had detested the statute from the start) were smarting from what they perceived to be abuses of the law by Democrats. In their view, the Iran-Contra investigation headed by Lawrence Walsh was a blatant political attack aimed at President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. Stung by these experiences, the Republican-dominated Congress had allowed the statute to lapse before the presidential election in 1992. Now, with a Democrat in the White House, it was payback time.
President Clinton had campaigned in favor of reauthorizing the law; it was politically awkward for him to resist it. Attorney General Reno, wary of being caught in the political cross fire, threw up her hands and agreed to search for an independent counsel—it had to be someone with impeccable nonpartisan credentials whom neither political party could accuse of rigging the investigation.
Reno quickly zeroed in on Robert B. Fiske, Jr., a lean, gravelly voiced sixty-three-year-old lawyer from New York. Fiske had first been appointed U.S. Attorney in Manhattan by President Gerald Ford, a Republican, yet he had been retained by President Jimmy Carter (a Democrat) because of the lawyer’s reputation for integrity. The New York prosecutor had handled hundreds of high-profile criminal cases. Now a partner in the prestigious Davis Polk firm in New York, his hair turned silvery, and his professional résumé glittering from top to bottom, Fiske was a quintessential lawyer’s lawyer.
Deputy Attorney General Phil Heymann, who had worked alongside special prosecutor Archibald Cox during Watergate, assembled a list with a handful of additional names: Warren Rudman (a former Republican senator from New Hampshire), Dan Webb (a former U.S. attorney from Chicago), Donald B. Ayer (who had served as deputy attorney general in the Bush administration), and President Bush’s former solicitor general—Ken Starr.
A number of accounts would later suggest that Starr had been one of Attorney General Reno’s “finalists” for the Whitewater special counsel position. This portrayal was not exactly accurate. Heymann did include Starr on his initial list and contacted Starr to determine his level of interest. Yet Heymann would later divulge that he had scratched Starr’s name from contention almost immediately. He made several discreet inquiries and was advised that Starr would be a problematic selection. “I was told that he [Starr] was honorable