Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [96]
Days later, Judge Sentelle transmitted a second memo to his colleagues, informing them that prominent attorneys William Webster and Warren B. Rudman had withdrawn their names from consideration. Sentelle now decided to move forward with Starr; he had telephoned Starr and confirmed that he was still interested. Sentelle wrote to tell his colleagues: “I have arranged for an interview with Ken Starr in my chambers on Monday, August 1, 1994 at 1:00.”
Around the capital, conservative Republicans and their allies were turning up the heat in opposition to reappointing Robert Fiske. Floyd G. Brown, chairman of the conservative watchdog group Citizens United, wrote directly to the three-judge panel on August 3, railing against Fiske for his report on the death of Vince Foster and asserting that a multitude of “discrepancies” needed to be examined by a fresh, untainted independent counsel.
The newsletter Clinton Watch, published by Citizens United, declared in a headline: “The report released by Special Counsel Robert Fiske may not be worth the paper it’s printed on.” Fiske, the conservative newsletter charged, “has steam-rolled over a significant number of inconsistencies” in the Foster death matter. He was doing nothing but “trying to protect Bill Clinton” and his “liberal agenda.”
Most media accounts that would seek to explain the surprise termination of Fiske, and his replacement by Starr, would assume that Judge Sentelle was the prime mover behind Starr’s appointment. Certainly, Sentelle was a fan of Starr’s. Both were Southerners, both of them had been mentored by the great conservative jurist Robert Bork. Both were anchor tenants of the conservative lawyers’ confrere, the Federalist Society. They had served on the federal appeals court together.
Yet Senior Judge Joseph Sneed in San Francisco, it turned out, championed Starr’s appointment and pushed the hardest, for reasons the press would never detect. A strong conservative who had worked in the Nixon Justice Department, Sneed had served from 1971 through 1973 as tax professor and dean at Duke Law School. There, one of his star students had been an earnest young man named Kenneth Winston Starr. Sneed, speaking from his San Francisco judicial chambers, where he still reported to work after turning eighty, would later reflect that Starr had made a brilliant impression on him. “Just personally, I really like him, and he was smart,” said Sneed. He also appreciated the fact that Starr hailed from Texas. Sneed’s own great-granddaddy had been a preacher who settled in Calvert, Texas, and then struck it rich in oil. The Ninth Circuit judge would later joke that Starr’s Texas roots boosted his credentials as independent counsel. “Yes, that’s true,” the elderly judge chuckled. “That’s not a negative.”
Ken Starr, forty-eight years old with a perpetually youthful smile, was summoned to the fifth floor of the U.S. Court house in Washington for an informal meeting with the three-judge panel. Starr’s chambers had been in this building when he sat on the Court of Appeals. It was comfortable terrain. Now he settled into a chair in Judge Sentelle’s private office, one of the best spots in the building for watching presidential inaugural parades. With Judges Sentelle and Butzner seated on a black leather couch, the three men had a perfect view of the Capitol dome rising up on the Hill. (Because of his advanced age and shaky health, Judge Sneed participated by speakerphone from San Francisco.) Sentelle, who wore large aviator glasses and sported fat, graying sideburns, settled back comfortably, his big Stetson hat parked on a nearby table. Here, the walls and shelves displayed all of the badges and symbols of Southern conservatism. These included a Federalist Society certificate confirming that Sentelle was a charter member, a personally inscribed photo of his mentor Judge Robert Bork, and a beautiful cane hand-carved by a North Carolina Freemason. (Senate Democrats had tried to block Sentelle’s confirmation because of his membership in that group;