The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr by Ken Gormley

Author:Ken Gormley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Governmental Investigations - United States, Lawyers & Judges, Whitewater Inquiry, Political, Political Ethics, Starr, Monica S, Misconduct in Office - United States, Misconduct in Office, Women, Lewinski, Bill, United States, Bill - Relations With Women, Clinton, Special Prosecutors, History, Governmental Investigations, Kenneth, Presidents & Heads of State, Political Ethics - United States, 1993-2000, General, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780307409447
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2010-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE final weeks of January, after the Lewinsky story erupted in the media, were among the most fast-moving in American political history. On the same day that “Unabomber” Theodore J. Kaczynski earned life in prison by pleading guilty to a spree of mail bombings that killed three victims and maimed others, Vernon Jordan issued his first public comment in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Dressed in a gray suit and speaking into a bank of microphones, the six-foot-four Jordan told journalists at the Park Hyatt Hotel that he was prepared to speak the truth. “I want to say absolutely and unequivocally that Ms. Lewinsky told me in no uncertain terms that she did not have a sexual relationship with the President,” Jordan stated with his classic smooth delivery. “At no time did I ever say, suggest or intimate to her that she should lie.”

Judge Susan Webber Wright postponed Monica Lewinsky’s Jones deposition, to keep the beleaguered young woman away from the salivating media. Starr and his staff used the time to issue a spray of subpoenas to the president’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, and other potential witnesses in the White House. They also filed a subpoena duces tecum requesting entry logs that would show how often, and when, Lewinsky visited the White House after her employment in the executive mansion ceased in April 1996.

The American public, if ever it was glued to a story involving the personal life of a president, was stuck fast to this one. By Sunday, the Washington Post was already recapping “Washington’s Extraordinary Week.” One article called the twenty-four-year-old Lewinsky “an ebullient, vulnerable ‘child’ infatuated with the president,” and a “despairing, ravaged woman who in tape-recorded conversations describes him as ‘the creep’ and ‘Dear Schmucko.’” A group of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s close friends, including high-ranking White House aides, offered the baffling explanation to reporters that the president had become “emotionally close” with Lewinsky during the time she worked in the West Wing, but that their relationship “never became sexual.” The spin machine now began weaving stories on “deep-background” that Lewinsky’s prattle about a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world was either “fantasy or untruthful boasting.”

As photographers captured the president and the First Lady leaving Sunday services at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, with psalm books clasped firmly in their hands, a series of weekend polls revealed wildly fluctuating numbers for the president, swinging from enthusiastic approval to outrage. Public opinion was bouncing around like unstable atoms in a nuclear reactor. A survey conducted by ABC News/Washington Post found that 63 percent of Americans believed that Clinton “should voluntarily resign if he lied in sworn testimony” or if he “suggested [Lewinsky] lie.” At the same time, the president’s job approval remained solid, with 56 percent of those polled saying that the alleged affair with the former intern “was not an important issue.” As one journalist wrote, this was “a crisis with no parallel.” The news media previously had given presidents a “free pass” when it came to their personal lives.

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