Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [8]
Jones knew that Bill Clinton, if removed as president, could end up back in Arkansas, where he might haunt her and her family. Yet Jones was prepared to face that risk, for the sake of seeing him booted out of office. “I thought he was going to be gone,” she said, sipping a Diet Coke. “I was excited about that. I thought he was going to be out of the White House.”
Susan McDougal, having spent eighteen months in federal prisons for criminal contempt after refusing to answer questions propounded by Ken Starr’s prosecutors, was prepared to return to jail rather than aid and abet this presidential witch hunt. For McDougal, the pictures appearing on the television screen as the impeachment proceedings steamed forward evoked images of malevolence and depravity. “I started watching the House Republicans and knowing that so much of what they were saying had been woven by David Hale and [ex-husband] Jim McDougal. And it just—it made me sick. It appeared to me that it was evil. That Henry Hyde was evil.”
Susan McDougal had never viewed herself as a central player in the Whitewater business deal. Yet here she was, a convicted felon whose life had been wrecked and who had been housed in penitentiaries in seven states along with “rats and roaches.” Her father had suffered a stroke while she was in jail; her mother had endured multiple heart bypasses. Her former husband, Jim McDougal, had lost his real estate fortune and had met his end in federal prison in Texas, suffering from bipolar disorder and dying a pauper’s death in solitary confinement. Every person who had been swept into this maelstrom, it seemed, was faced with ruination, including President Clinton himself. The sole cause of this catastrophe, she believed, was Ken Starr.
“I think he’s a horrible man,” Susan McDougal said. “I think he’s Satan. I really do believe that he is an incarnate evil because he is so bland and because he is so uncaring of what devastations happened under his watch, whether or not he himself had anything to do with it. It was wrought by his hand. And I can’t forgive it, that Jim McDougal died naked on a floor begging for his medicine and begging the OIC [Office of the Independent Counsel] to help him after they promised to put him in a medical facility. In fact, I can’t talk of [Jim] McDougal hardly without crying that he sold his soul to them and they cared so little for [him] while they talked about Christianity. It makes me physically sick.”
Susan McDougal would never be shaken from her belief that this endless parade of scandals and investigations was driven by a fervent desire—on the part of extremist Republicans (especially Ken Starr)—to destroy Bill Clinton personally and everything his administration stood for, regardless of whom they crushed in the process. On that dark Saturday in December, it all seemed to fall into place with frightening efficacy.
The Reverend Tony Campolo, a Baptist minister who had counseled Clinton after the president confessed to an adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky, had spent the afternoon holding a prayer session with the president in his private study inside the White House. After the vote in the House of Representatives, the minister emerged and told reporters: “I think he [President Clinton] is tired. He’s very upbeat and confident that things will work out, but he’s very tired.”
CHAPTER
2
BILL CLINTON AND KEN STARR
Former President Bill Clinton, seated in a Philadelphia hotel suite shortly after recovering from quadruple-bypass heart surgery in 2004, was remarkably calm and reflective in discussing the scandals that engulfed him in the White House. When Ken Starr’s name was mentioned, however, his eyes flashed with anger.
“I always thought I understood him,” said