- The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk
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 against 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, McDougal's dignity and courage that brought Starr's 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.
You can buy Susan's book here.