A Vast Conspiracy Page 25

  Before she parted with the president’s gifts, Lewinsky scrawled in big letters on the box she gave to Betty Currie: “Please do not throw away!!!”

  All of these events—Lewinsky’s panic over the subpoena, the gifts, Tripp’s conversations with Goldberg and Isikoff, the elves’ talent search for a new lawyer for Tripp—combined with the fast-approaching date of the president’s deposition to make it feel as if the barometer were dropping in political Washington. So many people knew parts of the story that some leakage was inevitable. Rumors about women had swirled around Clinton for so long that his allies instinctively discounted them. But this was different. Something bad was happening for him—and to him. In light of all this, what was perhaps most extraordinary was that Clinton never suggested to Bennett that he find a way to settle the Jones case and make all these issues go away. The president sprinted heedless into the abyss. (The president and first lady spent a quiet New Year’s vacation on a secluded estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was in keeping with the spirit of the moment that after they were photographed doing a romantic dance on the beach, a robust debate ensued about whether their embrace was staged for the camera.)

  As 1998 began, the president had one thing going for him. In the three great crises of this moment in his presidency—the Jones case, the Lewinsky relationship, and the Starr investigation—only two of them, Jones and Lewinsky, had so far merged. But then, at the end of the year, Lucianne Goldberg’s talent hunt for the right new lawyer for Linda Tripp succeeded. George Conway, the New York elf, remembered an old friend in Washington who would be just right for the job. He’s a little strange, Conway said, but all the elves agreed that Jim Moody’s heart was in the right place.

  11

  Revenge of the “Peace Corps”

  James Moody embodied the transformation of “public interest” law from a left-wing to a right-wing obsession. For this reason, it was fitting that he played a critical, if largely unsung, role in the transformation of the president’s Lewinsky problem from a civil to a criminal concern—and from a potential embarrassment to a matter of political life and death.

  Moody had been born forty-five years earlier, in Kansas City. He was a premature baby, and as was relatively common in those days, too much oxygen was pumped into his incubator. As a result, Moody became virtually blind. He could never drive and he read only large print, but he never let his disability interfere with his considerable academic gifts. At MIT, in the mid-seventies, he became a prototype of the mischievous nerd—he once schemed to blow up the Harvard football field—and after graduating, he came to Washington to work on arms control issues.

  Disillusioned with the ability of government to accomplish much of anything, Moody became a committed libertarian and, after law school, devoted himself to making social change through the filing of lawsuits. He worked on his own, as a freelance activist and lawyer, dedicated mostly to pushing deregulation in the airline and agriculture industries. Big, lumbering, with a distracted personal style, Moody lived by himself and appeared to work all the time. He had a zealot’s devotion, forswearing money and status in the name of fomenting political change. “This is the Peace Corps part of my life,” he said, referring to this legal work. His social life, to the extent he had one, consisted of attending meetings of conservative legal organizations, like the Federalist Society, and Grateful Dead concerts.

  In the first week in January, Tripp hadn’t yet fired Kirby Behre, but that was just a matter of time. At the end of the week, Tripp went back to Behre’s office and brought him a copy of her December 22 tape with Lewinsky. Behre was furious that his client had continued to break the law by taping the phone calls, and he again insisted on calling Bob Bennett to prompt a settlement in the Jones case. Instead, Tripp had a new idea. She now wanted to wear a body wire and tape-record more of Lewinsky’s conversations. She had plans to meet Monica at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in suburban Virginia on the following Tuesday. There, Tripp told Behre, she would record Lewinsky urging her to lie about her knowledge of the relationship with the president. Behre briefly considered this strange notion; in an even odder touch, Behre even had the man for the job. Behre’s firm had worked with the private investigator for the defense in sportscaster Marv Albert’s trial—which was, in a typically bizarre connection in this case, based on an assault that took place in the same Ritz-Carlton Hotel where Tripp and Lewinsky were planning to meet. Behre decided to think about Tripp’s body-wire idea over the weekend of January 10 and 11.

  That was not what Tripp wanted to hear. She wanted action. So, on that Friday, Goldberg gave Jim Moody’s name to Tripp, and she called him at about five in the afternoon. Their conversation went on until practically eleven, interrupted only when Moody requested bathroom breaks. It was a measure of Moody’s enthusiasm for the anti-Clinton cause that he scared even Linda Tripp. He was willing to work for free and willing to wire her up; as Tripp later testified, Moody “seemed to me to be someone with clearly a political agenda as opposed to just an attorney’s advocacy role.” Tripp called Goldberg and said, “This man sounds nutty to me over the phone.”

  On Monday, January 12, Tripp had a final meeting with Kirby Behre, who said he would not wire her up for her conversation with Lewinsky the following day. That sealed it for Tripp. Moody would be her new lawyer, and he had an important first piece of advice. Jim Moody told his client to place a call to the office of independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

  Even if Tripp wanted to contact law enforcement, it was by no means clear that Starr would be the right person to call. If one believed that Lewinsky, Jordan, and possibly Clinton were obstructing justice in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case, why was that any business of Kenneth Starr’s? At that point, Starr had jurisdiction over the Whitewater case, as well as Filegate and Travelgate. The Jones case had nothing to do with those subjects. Later, Starr’s lawyers would conjure up a connection between Jones v. Clinton and the rest of the prosecutor’s jurisdiction. But that purported link never even occurred to Moody when he first suggested that Tripp reach out to Starr.

  Moody went to Starr because he despised Democrats in general—and Clinton’s Justice Department in particular. Most of his law practice consisted of “whistle-blower” and “false claims act” suits against the government. He later said, “I think they are a bunch of lazy crooks at the Justice Department.” Moody told his new client to go to the independent counsel not because he thought he had jurisdiction over her case, but because Jim Moody regarded Ken Starr as an ideological kindred spirit and Bill Clinton as their shared enemy.

  During the crucial first two weeks in January, Moody wasn’t the only conservative who had the notion of linking the Jones case to the Starr investigation. The story was converging on Starr’s office from another direction as well. On the previous Thursday, January 8, Jerome Marcus, the Philadelphia elf, was scheduled to have dinner with an old friend from out of town, Paul Rosenzweig. Marcus and Rosenzweig had graduated from the University of Chicago together, in the same class as Richard Porter, the Chicago elf, who happened to be in Philadelphia that night as well. George Conway, the New York elf, decided to take a train down from New York to join the party. Of course, by this point, Marcus, Porter, and Conway had been working together for several years, providing surreptitious assistance on the Paula Jones case. Indeed, Porter had even tried to recruit the fourth member of their dinner party, Rosenzweig, to the Jones cause as well, but Rosenzweig had made other career plans: he joined the staff of independent counsel Kenneth Starr (who was, simultaneously, Porter’s law partner at Kirkland & Ellis).

  Over dinner at Deux Cheminées, a fancy French restaurant, Marcus told Rosenzweig about Monica Lewinsky—and about how, as he understood it, Vernon Jordan had asked her to lie about her relationship with the president in her upcoming deposition in the Paula Jones case. Marcus said there was a witness, Linda Tripp, who had tapes of Lewinsky making admissions. Shouldn’t Starr be investigating this? Rosenzweig said he would pass the story back
to his superiors.

  On Friday, January 9, Rosenzweig told his boss in Starr’s office, the prosecutor Jackie Bennett, about the approach from Marcus. Bennett was interested, but he would have to check with Starr, who was out of town until Monday. On Monday, January 12, Starr gave Bennett the go-ahead to receive any information that the witness might want to provide. Bennett told Rosenzweig to pass the news to Marcus. From Marcus the word went to Lucianne Goldberg and then on to Jim Moody and finally to the person who was the focus of all these fevered communications—Linda Tripp.

  It was late on Monday night, January 12, when Goldberg finally reached Tripp at home. “You need to call Jackie Bennett at the Office of Independent Counsel and bring your entire story and evidence to him,” she said. Bennett had stayed late to wait for Tripp’s call.

  At that moment, Kenneth Starr had been the independent counsel for three years and five months. It had been nearly a year since Starr announced, and then recanted, his plans to step down and move to Pepperdine University. The office, as a whole, was stuck in a kind of netherworld—neither beginning nor ending investigations, neither expanding nor contracting, neither prosecuting nor exonerating, but instead living out the bureaucratic imperative that work expands to fill the time available. Because Starr, like all independent counsels, operated without restrictions on either the cost or the duration of his labors, the staff always took the long route.

  Starr’s office had been in operation for so long that there were distinct eras in its history, and though the machinations were largely invisible to the outside world, the cast had changed a great deal since 1994. Starr began with the same kind of staff that Robert Fiske had assembled—experienced, thoughtful lawyers who had worked as defense attorneys as well as prosecutors. But every one of Starr’s first group of top deputies—Mark Tuohey, Roger Adelman, John Bates, Ray and LeRoy Jahn, Bradley Lerman, Amy St. Eve—had left the staff by 1998. This group had managed the investigation in the time-honored professional manner: begin by prosecuting the mid-level players, in the hope that they will turn against the top people. They had convicted Jim and Susan McDougal, won a guilty plea from Webster Hubbell, and pushed them to flip.

  Jim McDougal did change his testimony and incriminate the president on the obscure matter of the single loan relating to the Whitewater development, but his ex-wife and Hubbell never changed their stories. In the face of powerful inducements, both Susan and Hubbell continued to insist that they knew of no illegal activities by the Clintons. Hubbell stuck to this story in the face of two subsequent reindictments on other charges. Susan McDougal, who was sentenced to two years in the Madison Guaranty case, chose to serve an additional eighteen months in jail for civil contempt rather than testify before Starr’s grand jury. In time, the experienced prosecutors on Starr’s staff did what veterans usually do in such circumstances. They gave up—or, to put it another way, they moved on. Because of their professional reputations and experience, the original Starr group had job opportunities in the private sector; they knew when it was time to quit. For better or worse, the case against the Clintons, they recognized, was over.

  Those who stayed on with Starr generally fell into one (or both) of two categories—the unemployable and the obsessed. The investigation of Vincent Foster’s suicide provided a tragicomic example of the perversity of the Starr office. Foster, a deputy White House counsel, died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 20, 1993, in Fort Marcy Park, in suburban Virginia. About a month later, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Park Police jointly announced the results of their investigation into his death: he had committed suicide. But, in part because Foster had left a note containing references to the Clintons’ financial troubles, Fiske, the first Whitewater prosecutor, decided to reexamine the case. On June 30, 1994, Fiske released a report in which he agreed that Foster had killed himself. But that wasn’t enough for some in Congress, so the House Committee on Government Operations opened its own investigation, only to come to the same conclusion on August 12, 1994. The Senate Banking Committee did the same, filing its report on January 3, 1995.

  What did Starr do, after these four separate investigations were concluded? He devoted nearly three more years to studying Foster’s death, and on October 10, 1997, he, too, released a report stating that Vincent Foster had killed himself. Through such follies, year after year of the Starr investigation slipped away.

  But the Starr veterans had produced something more than just accumulated frustrations. They couldn’t make their case in court, but by 1998, Starr’s core group of survivors had developed what amounted to a private narrative of the Clinton scandals—an overarching explanation for what had happened and why. Its principal author was a man named W. Hickman Ewing, Jr., and its principal subject was sex.

  Hick Ewing was one of the first prosecutors that Starr hired, in 1994. Ewing quickly impressed—and occasionally surprised—his new colleagues with his approach to law enforcement. One former Starr prosecutor recalled, “Most prosecutors at least say that they come to things with open minds, but Hick says that he presumes that a crime has been committed and his job is to proceed as if there is criminal conduct and then be convinced otherwise. Hick doesn’t undertake an investigation with the supposition that the people are innocent. It struck me when he said it.” Ewing’s attitude might have been less surprising in a United States Attorney’s Office, where prosecutors are often presented with known crimes to solve. But independent counsels were assigned, in the first instance, to determine whether a crime had occurred. Ewing once said, “After you’ve been doing this kind of work for ten, fifteen, twenty years, it doesn’t take too long to determine whether somebody has committed a crime. You draw your preliminary conclusions, and then you shut this down or you proceed. We proceeded.”

  The Starr investigation was often portrayed as a personal contest between the independent counsel and the president, but Hickman Ewing may have been the one who really took it personally. He and Clinton resembled opposite generational archetypes in the culture war that defined so much of this story. If Clinton was the Ivy League–educated, draft-avoiding, philandering liberal who found success on the national stage, Ewing was the born-again Vietnam-vet conservative whose assignment in Little Rock represented his first legal job outside Memphis, Tennessee. Ewing’s distinctive history, and worldview, shaped the independent counsel’s investigation.

  The prosecutor’s father, William Hickman Ewing, Sr., was a legendary sports figure in Shelby County, the longtime football and baseball coach at South Side High School in Memphis. Ewing, who played football for his dad, attended Vanderbilt on a Navy ROTC scholarship and, after he graduated in 1964, served on active duty for five years, commanding a small patrol boat that ran along the coast of Vietnam. While young Hickman was in the Navy, his father’s life turned sour. In late 1964, he was indicted for embezzlement, and he pleaded guilty the following year to stealing about $43,000 from the county government. He spent eighteen months in prison while his son was at war. His father’s problems began after he got mixed up with politics; Hick’s adversaries often suggested that Ewing’s career represented a form of revenge against politicians.

  In his boyhood and college days, Ewing shared the typical preoccupations of a Memphis youth—sports, beer, and Elvis. But Ewing had a spiritual awakening in 1977, a few years after he became a prosecutor, and he joined the First Evangelical Church, one of the largest and most conservative congregations in Memphis. Ewing left that church in the mid-eighties, and he and a small group of friends founded the Fellowship Evangelical Church, over which he usually presided as a lay minister. With his conversion, Ewing began to set aside time for prayer when he rose each morning, and he stopped drinking. He and his wife, Mary, had three children, and they sent all three to the Evangelical Christian School, in Memphis. Ewing’s conversion came with a commitment to service as well as a habit of piety. Nearly every year, he traveled to rural Mexico to work with the Tlapaneco Indians. While Ewing rose through the ranks
to become the United States attorney in Memphis, his wife volunteered as an antiabortion sidewalk counselor outside clinics in Tennessee.

  When Ewing was replaced as United States attorney in 1991, his friends held a testimonial in his honor at a Memphis restaurant. Few politicians were present, but there were several representatives of Christian-right organizations, including the Reverend Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, and FLARE (Family, Life, America, and Responsible Education Under God). “I feel like I’ve just been an instrument over these years, and God should get the glory,” Ewing told the group. “I’m trusting the Lord for the next step. I don’t know what the next step is.”

  Shortly after he left the government, Ewing told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that he had considered going to work at a place like the Rutherford Institute—the Christian-right organization that helped to underwrite Paula Jones’s lawsuit against Clinton. He ultimately decided to open a one-man private law practice, with his wife as his secretary and sole employee until his daughter went to work for him, too. But less than three years after he left the government, Starr called him back to prosecuting. He made the three-hour drive from Little Rock to Memphis almost every weekend, to see his family and to go to church. In his car he had two cassette tapes: the Book of Deuteronomy and The Comeback Kid Tour, by Paul Shanklin, who performed anti-Clinton parodies on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program.