Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [7]
“None of this was a victory for Ken,” Alice later reflected. “He had never looked at it that way.”
Alice herself would admit to experiencing an odd sense of relief as she watched the impeachment votes tallied. She remembered feeling, “I think the House gets it, that this is a serious matter.… And it isn’t just about sex in the White House, and it isn’t a private matter. It happened in the Oval Office, and he [President Clinton] lied before Congress, he lied to his cabinet members, and he lied in a court of law in grand jury testimony.”
Ken Starr discussed none of these impressions with his wife. “I had very little to say or offer,” he would later admit. “So it was just a quiet time of watching. I don’t think I was much of a companion [for Alice]. I was just observing what I knew was something historic.” Starr did not gloat with his independent counsel prosecutorial team. He did not drive into Washington to join in a celebration with Republicans in the capital. It was comforting to know that the House had taken his much-maligned report seriously. Beyond that, Starr had mixed emotions as the votes were tallied.
On one hand, Starr believed that the president had cooked his own goose and needed to take responsibility for the mess in which the country now found itself. “How cruelly ironic,” the independent counsel said later, “that all of this could have been avoided if the president had settled this [Paula Jones] case.” Still, Starr did not believe this was “a cause for celebration and joy and so forth.” He would reflect: “It was a time that everyone should just repair to their own offices and thoughts and, if they were so inclined, to pray and hope that the nation would come through this okay.”
Sitting in his TV room watching the House of Representatives adjourn in chaos, the former independent counsel would identify his overriding emotion as one of puzzlement and frustration. He asked himself: “Why did all of this have to happen? Why did we get to where we are? This is all so unnecessary.”
MONICA Lewinsky, now twenty-five years old, whose sexual affair with Clinton during her stint as a White House intern had somehow entwined itself with the Paula Jones case and with Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation, was still reeling from the trauma. Holed up in an apartment in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, close to her father’s home, Lewinsky reacted with a mixture of “shock and fear” to Congress’s vote. She wasn’t consciously processing that this was the second time a president had been impeached by the House of Representatives in American history. “When you’re a part of something,” she said, “you don’t think of it in historical terms.” Mostly, Lewinsky felt “apprehensive” about where this impeachment mud slide might lead next. “Because there was this disconnect between the fact that everybody in the country—or it seemed most people in the country—didn’t want this to happen. And yet, somehow, Congress was going ahead and impeaching him. So, I found that to be very frustrating. And on a personal note, I didn’t know what the implications were going to be for me.”
Paula Jones, whose civil lawsuit had ensnared Bill Clinton, experienced a wholly different set of emotions. Watching television with her then-husband, Steve, in their small beachfront condominium in California, Jones felt disbelief mixed with exhilaration. The former Arkansas state employee, who had filed a lawsuit charging then-Governor Clinton with making lewd sexual advances toward her during a conference held at the Excelsior Hotel, was unable to speak. “I was so numb to the whole thing,” Jones would say with her heavy Arkansas drawl. “My mom would call me and say sometimes, ‘Paula, it just seems like a dream. That you’re the one who got this all going’—and this and that.” In Jones’s opinion,