July 6, 1999
ABROAD AT HOME / By ANTHONY LEWIS
Back to a Republican System
Related Articles
Op-Ed Column Archive
Forum
Join a Discussion on Anthony Lewis
hen Kenneth Starr's Whitewater
investigation ended in a lame plea
bargain last week, it was with an air
of unreality that we remembered
what Mr. Starr had put this country
through.
A year of prosecutorial inquisition
over the sexual antics of Monica
Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Impeachment of the President. A Senate trial.
It all seems fantastic now -- and
hard to believe that a single prosecutor could have so distorted our constitutional system.
What drove Kenneth Starr? Many
tried to puzzle out this bland figure
as he carried on his crusade. As good
an answer as any, I think, emerges
from Bob Woodward's new book,
"Shadow." When Mr. Starr announced in February 1997 that he
was quitting as independent counsel
to go to Pepperdine University, his
Republican friends savaged him. He
changed his mind -- and from then
on was determined to prove his mettle by getting President Clinton.
A few months after his change of
mind there was a revealing clue. A
Washington Post story by Mr. Woodward and Susan Schmidt said that
Starr prosecutors and investigators
were asking Arkansas state troopers
what they knew about any extramarital sex by Mr. Clinton while he was
Governor.
When the story appeared, I asked
Mr. Starr's Washington deputy, John
Bates, about it. He said it was distorted. The agents were just trolling, he
said, to find any acquaintances of
Governor Clinton who might know
about Whitewater. I believed that
representation by an official I
thought could be trusted -- and wrote
a column criticizing the story. I was
wrong.
In fact, as the book convincingly
shows, the Post account was an understatement of what Mr. Starr had
done. He had authorized his agents to
ask about sexual affairs -- even to
ask whether one woman had had a
child who looked like Mr. Clinton. He
was ready to use his extraordinary
prosecutorial power in that sleazy
way in order to destroy the President.
The same unbounded zealotry
showed up in the Lewinsky investigation. Mr. Starr's deputies broke Federal rules to keep Ms. Lewinsky from
her lawyer. They leaked lurid sexual
tales to the press. They questioned a
girlfriend of Ms. Lewinsky's about
what she knew of the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship -- and published irrelevant details of the friend's private correspondence with members
of her family.
Mr. Starr used the feeble excuse of
a grand juror's absence to videotape
the President's testimony so it could
be played to the country. Over his
deputies' objections, he insisted on
beginning his impeachment referral
to Congress with an extended pornographic narrative.
The aim of such abusive tactics
was to shame the President and
arouse public opinion against him in
the hope of driving him from office.
Fortunately for the future of our
political structure, the tactics failed.
The American public was more outraged by Kenneth Starr's abuses
than disgusted by Bill Clinton's follies and deceptions.
But there was damage to the system. Mr. Starr went to court and
established precedents that give a
President less privacy than any of us
would expect. He can no longer even
talk in confidence to a White House
lawyer without fear that an antagonistic prosecutor may some day
make that lawyer testify about it.
More broadly, our republican system of political accountability was
distorted out of recognition. Instead
of making a President pay for misdeeds politically -- in Congress or at
the polls -- we subjected him to
potentially mortal attack by an unelected and unelectable prosecutor.
The impeachment process itself
was dangerously distorted. The Constitution confides it to Congress. But
here an unaccountable prosecutor
with unlimited resources ($40 million spent so far) used his great
power to help one party in Congress
bring down a President of the other
party. Mr. Starr produced the witnesses, drafted the charges and
urged them on Congress.
The Independent Counsel Act reflected the delusion that the condign
process of the criminal law would
make our democracy more effective.
What we got was the criminalization
of our politics.
Now the act has expired, and nearly everyone is relieved to have it
gone -- though Mr. Starr and others
hang on as damaging ghosts. But the
work of restoring our constitutional
institutions remains to be done.
