Everybody remembers
the slapstick scene at the end where Bill Clinton's pants fell down.
But now that it's receeding into history,
it'd be surprising to find one American in ten who can recall
exactly what Kenneth Starr's ballyhooed
Whitewater investigation was alleged to be all about.
It simply defies credibility that the United
States government frittered away $60 million and
squandered the energies of upwards of 100
FBI agents for seven years investigating a failed
$200,000 dirt road real estate project
before admitting it found no credible evidence of wrongdoing
by President Clinton or his wife Hillary.
According to Susan
McDougal's engrossing, often funny new book The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk,
she did her best to warn Starr's investigators
that they'd embarked on a fool's errand. She describes
a March, 1995 meeting during which OIC
prosecutors made it clear that all she needed to do to secure
a grant of immunity was to drop a dime
on the President.The problem was, she kept telling them, that
"I didn't know of anything the Clintons
had done that was even remotely illegal."
She remembers thinking
"what a dumb system...there was no obvious way to prevent a guilty
person from simply telling grandiose lies
against another person-one who might well be innocent
- in order to save his own skin."
Unfortunately,
the whole system turns upon the competence and integrity of prosecutors,
and
the abstemious Mr. Starr turned out not
to have any. It still drives her crazy that "despite abundant
evidence to the contrary, [Starr] is almost
always described as an honest man, indeed as a man of
real integrity." She speculates that her
pious antagonist got the benefit of the doubt from the press
simply "because he was so quick to assure
us over and over or his reputation for honesty. Whether
comparing himself to Joe Friday or quoting
scripture, Starr made sure to constantly talk about his
integrity....[But] the simple truth is
that Kenneth Starr had absolutely no compunctions about telling
outright lies if they suited his purposes."
True to her generous
nature, McDougal doesn't quite grasp how deeply the Washington press
establishment had bought into the Whitewater
delusion, nor how willing it was to abandon its own
ethical standards in the quest to bring
down a Democratic president. Shoot, she's still upset that lazy
journalists bought into the premise that
"Madison Guaranty [Savings & Loan] was a criminal enterprise,"
smearing many innocent, hardworking employees,
although virtually all of the real crimes Starr's team
found centered around their star witness,
embezzler David Hale.
She ought to read
Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf's book Truth at Any Cost. They
blame the
entire state. In darkest Arkansas, see,
Starr "was up against an infernal system...everything seemed
geared to protect the former governor and
his wife--from the local courts and prosecutor's offices to the
federal judiciary." Infernal, no less,
which my dictionary defines as "of or relating to hell."
Schmidt glorified
Starr for the Washington Post; Weisskopf for Time. Having staked their
careers
on OIC leaks, their book is the journalistic
equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages
come to identify with their captors. But
they did get one thing half right: "Exhibit A&" in their explanation
of why Starr failed to bring indictments
agains the Clinton "crime family," for example, is Susan McDougal.
"Clinton," the authors contend "would not
ask her to break her silence. She never talked."
In reality, of
course, Susan did testify for several days during her 1999 criminal contempt
trial, and was
cross-examined by OIC prosecutors more
than a year before Truth at Any Cost was published. Her account
of that trial, and the deep satisfaction
it gave her to confront Starr's bully boy prosecutors in open court, as
opposed to a grand jury room where prosecutors
have virtually unlimited power, makes a satisfying conclusion
to a deeply humane account of one woman's
unlikely heroism.
But it was, indeed,
McDougals dignity and courage that brought Starrs operation to a standstill.
She served
18 months in jail on a civil contempt citation
imposed by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright because
she refused to testify before a federal
grand jury.
Starr's attempt
to add criminal contempt charges failed when the trial jury deadlocked
in favor of acquittal
and a mistrial was declared. The jury found
her innocent of an obstruction of justice charge, apparently because
she convinced jurors of what she'd realized
three years earlier when, after convicting her of crimes she insists
they knew she hadn't committed, OIC prosecutors
paraded her in chains before a national TV audience: They
had never been interested in the truth,
only in getting the Clintons.
Maybe exhibiting
her like Hannibal Lecter wasn't the dumbest thing Starr ever did. He did
so many dumb
things. But in retrospect, the image of
Susan McDougal in her simple checked skirt and black stockings, draped
in shackles and shuffling off to prison
with her chin held high, told millions of Americans all they needed to
know
about the prissy Torquemada who ordered
it done.