Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [63]
So Heymann killed the idea of appointing Starr before it ever got out of the gate. Jo Ann Harris, who headed the Criminal Division and assisted Heymann in the selection process, seconded this decision. She felt that a former judge like Ken Starr was the worst possible candidate for an independent counsel appointment. Judges tended to mediate cases instead of conducting investigations and making tough decisions in the trenches like true prosecutors. Starr completely lacked any experience in this line of work. “As much as I like Ken Starr as a person,” Harris would later confess, “I just wrote him off.”
Robert Fiske, on the other hand, was “as highly regarded a prosecutor personally as there was in the country.” He was a moderate Republican who had voted for George Bush in 1992, which was extra frosting on the cake—it meant that people “wouldn’t say it was a Democratic fix.”
On Wednesday, January 19, 1994, as Washington recovered from a crippling ice storm, Robert Fiske exited a cab and slid, unnoticed, into the Justice Department building. Upstairs, Janet Reno’s top advisers whisked him into a conference room, handing him a draft charter that spelled out his prosecutorial power and telling him to “mark it up” however he wished. Fiske sat alone, scratching notes on a yellow legal pad, until he finalized a document that would give him broad authority to investigate Whitewater, Madison Guaranty, David Hale’s Capital Management Services, and a swath of related subjects.
Standing behind her desk, in her magnificent attorney general’s conference room, Janet Reno stood taller than Fiske by several inches. Neither lawyer was known for being particularly garrulous. Reno read over the proposed charter, with Fiske’s handwritten notations. “Are you satisfied that you have all the authority and all the independence that you need?” she asked. The New York lawyer replied, “Yes, I am.” Reno handed the charter back to him and said, “Well, you’re not going to talk to me again until this is all over.”
On Thursday, January 20, Attorney General Reno braved the icy streets and building shutdowns to announce Fiske’s appointment, telling the bundled-up reporters that she had searched for someone who would be “the epitome of what a prosecutor should be,” and that Robert Fiske “fits that description to a ‘t.’” Reno blew warmth onto her hands, then concluded: “I expect him to report to the American people, and I do not expect to monitor him.”
The White House reaction to Fiske’s appointment was guardedly optimistic. President Clinton would later say that he had checked out Fiske’s credentials and was satisfied: “All I wanted was a career prosecutor who didn’t presume I was a local ax murderer, but was just trying to find the truth.” Clinton realized that Republican partisans might try to stretch out the work of this special prosecutor, but how much harm could they really do? Clinton’s thought was, “Well, maybe they’ll drag it out through 1996, but it will be over.”
Among Republicans, Fiske’s appointment prompted universal praise. Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburg, who had served in the Bush administration, lauded Fiske as a “first-rate lawyer” and a “solid performer.” Representative Jim Leach (R-Iowa), one of Congress’s most vociferous advocates of an aggressive Whitewater investigation, told the New York Times: “The Attorney General has made a quality appointment, an individual of appropriate background and integrity.”
This view, however, would change soon enough.
THREE days after his appointment, Robert Fiske took an indefinite leave from his law firm and caught a plane to Little Rock. Julie O’Sullivan, who had worked with Fiske at Davis Polk