Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

Treasury Department, which oversees the Service, asked the court to deny Starr’s request, and former President Bush wrote letters opposing Starr’s attempt to force agents to testify. But Starr pressed with his subpoenas. The conditions under which the agents worked and the unique role of the Secret Service counted for little in his calculus. In July, he compelled testimony from Larry Cockell, the head of PPD, and filed motions to compel others to testify. Ultimately the courts sided with Starr on the legal grounds that agents and protectees, unlike lawyers and clients or doctors and patients, could not assert “privilege”

within a confidential relationship. Before the end of the year, Starr had forced more than two dozen agents on the White House detail to testify.

By early spring of 1998, the public seemed to be tiring of Starr’s investigation. Many Americans took offense at the prurient, sensational disclosures from the Office of the Independent Counsel and recognized that even if Bill had made mistakes in his personal life, his transgressions hadn’t interfered with his ability to carry out his presidential responsibilities.

The media began to pursue the possibility that there was some organized effort against us. On February 9, Newsweek magazine published a two-page chart entitled “Conspiracy or Coincidence?” It traced the connections linking twenty-three conservative politicians, contributors, media executives, authors, lawyers, organizations and others who fueled and funded the various scandals investigated by Starr.

Then, in the April issue of Esquire magazine, David Brock wrote an open letter to the President, apologizing for his Troopergate story, which had been published in the American Spectator in 1994 and which led to the Paula Jones lawsuit. It was the beginning of Brock’s crisis of conscience. His book Blinded by the Right fully documents his own complicity in the organized efforts to destroy Bill and his administration and the determination, tactics and objectives of the rightwing movement in America.

We took the offensive on the legal front. The Office of the Independent Counsel was prohibited by federal law from disclosing secret grand jury information. Yet grand jury information routinely leaked from Starr’s office, usually to a select group of reporters whose stories were favorable to the independent counsel. David Kendall filed a contempt order and held a press conference to announce that he was asking that the judge supervising the Whitewater grand jury, Norma Holloway Johnson, prohibit the disclosure of such information. This action had the desired effect. For awhile, the leaks stopped.

On April 1, while Bill and I were overseas on the final leg of his presidential trip to Africa, Bob Bennett phoned with an important message for the President: Judge Susan Webber Wright had decided to throw out the Paula Jones lawsuit, finding that it lacked factual or legal merit.

During the spring, Starr hired Charles Bakaly, a public relations guru, to improve his image. Perhaps guided by Bakaly, Starr gave a speech to a bar association in North Carolina in June in which he com pared himself to Atticus Finch, the courageous white Southern lawyer in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, Finch takes on the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman in his small Alabama town. Finch, in an act of moral courage and heroism, opposed the unfettered power of a prosecutor who twisted evidence to serve his own purposes. I had always seen a lot of Atticus Finch in Vince Foster, and the character’s appropriation by Starr, a man whose sense of moral superiority justified overlooking rules, procedures and decency, was more than David or I could bear. David fired off an op-ed piece that ran in The New York Times on June 3.

“Like Atticus,” Kendall wrote, “public officials need to be skeptical-about their own motives, about their opponents’ motives and even about their version of the ‘truth.’”

By mid June, Judge Johnson ruled that there was “probable cause” to believe the OIC

was leaking information illegally and that David could subpoena Starr and his deputies to find the source of the leaks. Grand jury secrecy is vitally important because a federal grand jury has, quite properly, broad powers to investigate. The law is strict that grand jury proceedings must be kept secret out of fairness to those people who are investigated but never charged. Judge Johnson found that the leaks to the media about the OIC’s investigation had been “serious and repetitive” and that the OIC’s definition of “confidentiality”

was too narrow. It was ironic that her decision, which was in our favor but delivered “under seal” because it related to grand jury proceedings, was one of the few facts about Starr’s investigation at the time that did not leak to the press.

Against this backdrop, Bill forged ahead with his agenda throughout the first half of 1998, battling with the “gang of three”―Gingrich, DeLay and Dick Armey. I marshaled opposition to their plan to kill the Administration’s budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities and to sap federal support for cultural activities throughout the country.

I had written an op-ed in The New York Times in 1995 about the importance of federal support for the arts. I also championed public television and brought Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters to the White House for a press conference. The puppets were saved, but we continued to fight to preserve the limited but vital support the federal government provided to all the arts.

Bill had a new nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, whom Senate Republicans were in no mood to confirm. Holbrooke had negotiated the Dayton Peace Accords and served as Bill’s Ambassador to Germany and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs in the Administration’s first term. Dick had also acquired fervent enemies, generally for reasons to his credit. He was ferociously intelligent, strong, often blunt and fearless. During his negotiations to end the war in Bosnia, Dick occasionally called me to discuss an idea or ask me to convey information to Bill. When Bill nominated Dick to be Ambassador in June