"One may smile, and smile, and be a villain."
With only slight modification, the musings Hamlet applied to his murderous uncle can also be applied to independent counsel Kenneth Starr: One may drone, and drone, and be a villain.
In his appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Starr launched a carefully choreographed blandness blitz, a wild orgy of soft-spoken probity. But it was all too apparent that beneath his milquetoast Clark Kent exterior lay a fierce partisan. No matter how convincingly Starr tried to portray himself as a model of gentle and manly judiciousness, his actions spoke louder. And those are the actions of a man entrusted with virtually unlimited power who, through prosecutorial recklessness and an all-consuming desire to "win," has allowed himself to become a tool of political zealots.
The Starr who appeared on the witness stand Thursday is a fascinating study -- an obsessively legalistic man so steeped in a right-wing atmosphere where revulsion at President Clinton goes without saying, and so unconscious of that bias, that he may not even be aware that at some point he crossed a fatal line and began searching for a crime to attach to the man. Starr does not seem to be a liar -- he really believes that he is completely fair-minded, that he was simply after the facts. Hence his utterly plausible, utterly unflappable, even likable demeanor during his long ordeal. And hence his weird apparent obliviousness to the obviously partisan bias of his referral.
To take just one example, as Barney Frank acidly pointed out to him, Starr's referral conveniently neglected to state that his office had exonerated Clinton on Filegate -- it wasn't until after the election that Starr saw fit to make that piece of information known. Starr sees nothing wrong with that because his bias is so deep he is unaware of it -- or because he is possessed of a quasi-religious conviction that all tactics are valid when used in battle with the Evil One who holds forth, clenching a cigar between his cloven hooves, in the Oval Office. St. Ken vs. Beelzebubba.
Only an unconscious zealot -- or alternatively, a more consciously political agent who had grown soft and smug, whose warning systems had atrophied after years of right-wing domination -- could so easily and blandly ignore even a pretense of objectivity. It is easy to forget that the independent counsel is not an ordinary prosecutor -- more than a prosecutor, he is supposed to be a quasi-judge. He evaluates evidence, he does not slant it "his way" -- he is not supposed to have a "way." He is searching for the truth. From Archibald Cox to Lawrence Walsh, this is what this strange and soon-to-be-extinct creature has always done. But as Democrat after Democrat pointed out in their grilling of Starr, in every single case in his referral, Starr slanted -- or, to use his word, "interpreted" -- the evidence. Have we grown so cynically accustomed to the idea that Starr is a partisan that we've forgotten just how far he has departed from what his office is supposed to represent?
The most egregious example of Starr's slanting of evidence, cited by New York Sen.-elect Charles Schumer among others, was Starr's failure to include the verbatim transcript of Monica Lewinsky's famous statement to the grand jury that no one asked her to lie. Starr's explanation for his relegation of that statement to an appendix, and his paraphrasing of it in the body of the referral as "explicitly asked," is a smart bit of legal exegesis, and may well be true: Placed against the whole body of evidence, her one statement is misleading; conspirators (if we can dignify the desperate, furtive wrigglings of doomed interrupted-fellatio practitioners with that Brutuslike title) don't say to each other, "Now, remember to lie!" But the plausibility of Starr's interpretation isn't the point. Starr may be as astute a practitioner of hermeneutics as Harold Bloom, but his job was to deliver the facts -- not to decide what they meant. Particularly not when, in every instance, what they mean turns out to be unfavorable to his adversary.
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The day started out as if there would be major fireworks. Shortly after
10 a.m. EST, it looked like the whole carefully choreographed theater of
impeachment might blow up and keep on blowing, like an out-of-control
performance art piece where the actors beat up passersby and piss on each
other for the edification of the audience. Henry Hyde, the ringmaster of
the House Judiciary Committee who seems to control the animals with quips
rather than the lash, rolled up his sleeves and prepared to deliver his
"our-grave-constitutional-duty" speech. He was just getting going when
William Delahunt broke in and brought out the circus. The Democrat from
Massachusetts moved that Starr should be questioned by the White House for
two hours, rather than half an hour. Hyde denied the request and returned
partisan fire, rebuking Clinton for not answering the 81 questions
Republicans had sent to him. Delahunt went back on the attack, saying the
time limit was unfair. Then Democratic Rep. Melvin Watts barged in, saying, "We're disrupting a railroading."
Food fight! Rumble in the jungle! Democrats emboldened by election results assault Starr, Barr -- seven hospitalized in wild brawl on floor of House! Sensing pandemonium, Hyde chastised, "The gentleman will observe decorum." But before decorum had a chance to congeal upon the august members, Jerrold Nadler of New York piled on, followed by Sheila Jackson Lee. "Justice should be blind, but we've never argued that justice is gagged," Jackson Lee said. She actually invoked the Chicago Seven. "The chair doesn't intend to bind and gag anyone," said Hyde. In a no-holds-barred statement delivered in an amiable drawl, John Conyers called Starr a "federally paid sex policeman" and said "a sense of desperation is palpable." In the words of Beatrix Potter, "There were very extraordinary noises overhead, which disturbed the dignity and repose of the tea party." The angel of Bronx-cheer kookiness threatened to spread his wings over the proceedings, and that particular bird, in this case, is definitely a Democrat.
Alas, the mania passed. Starr read his leaked statement, which calmed everyone down to the point of deep sleep and convinced anyone not disconnected from higher brain functions that Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it under oath, but didn't convince a lot of people that he obstructed justice or misused the powers of his office. And then the ritual beatings and exaltations began.
The Democrats immediately attacked Starr everywhere they could hit him. They pummeled him for his association with Richard Mellon Scaife, his representation of tobacco firms antagonistic to Clinton, his leaks, his long ties with the Paula Jones camp. At first, as his Democratic interlocutors tried to press these points home, his bland, just-the-facts demeanor seemed to work. He was immeasurably aided by the five-minute time limit, which ended all interrogations before they got anywhere and allowed his Republican henchmen to jump into the ring like tag-team wrestlers, pull him off the mat, call him "Judge" to the point of honorary-title sensory overload and pretend the previous unpleasant exchanges hadn't taken place.
Minority counsel Abbe Lowell asked Starr why he didn't tell the Justice Department about his previous ties to Jones when asking for expanded jurisdiction to investigate Lewinsky. Draping himself in the lofty robes of constitutional scholarship, Starr pooh-poohed his amicus brief on behalf of Jones as completely irrelevant and explained that his involvement was so well-known he didn't think to bring it up. As for bullying Lewinsky and keeping her from calling her lawyer, those were all well-known prosecutorial tactics. And so on.
It was all so reasonable and vanilla-tasting, and interposed with so many other adulatory and accusatory episodes -- to which Starr responded in the same calm, helpful-but-firm way -- that whatever Starr might have done wrong began to seem beside the point. The man with the well-modulated voice and the squishy-lipped, vaguely menacing mouth began to seem like a rock of judicial reasonableness in a sea of squabbling political hacks. The stage managing was working the Republicans' way. But then, once you got used to this peculiar type of theater, Starr's "I'm just trying to do my job" act began to wear thin. The cuts began to mount up: The failure to include the Filegate exculpation. The unadmitted Jones contacts. The tendentious referral. The harassment of Lewinsky (Starr stumbled badly in his defense of his misleading press release, bringing down the house when he said, "Let me explain what press releases are designed to do"). As a TV personality, Starr continued to play his role impeccably -- he didn't start sweating and acting Nixonian (or Clintonian). But the gulf between his super-judicious demeanor and his actual judicial actions began to become uncomfortably apparent.
Finally, Democrat Zoe Lofgren drew real blood. She asked Starr if he first learned in November of the existence of tapes concerning a woman who had a sexual relationship with Clinton -- a crucial question, because it cut to the heart of his murky relationship with Linda Tripp and the Jones lawyers and raised the specter of improper collusion and the secret creation of a perjury trap. Starr's lofty rhetoric about the seriousness of perjury as a high crime and misdemeanor would begin to smell a bit off-color if there were reason to think he helped engineer that perjury. Shockingly, Starr couldn't answer. He mumbled something about not having a clear recollection. Suddenly we were back in the days of old owl-face Adm. Poindexter saying, "I did not micromanage Oliver North" and "to the best of my recollection, I can't recall" and Clinton's immortal excursion into Jesuitical ontology, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' means."
Starr may have proved to the world, as his defenders were saying in advance, that he doesn't have horns. But he may yet be shown to be a prosecutor who didn't play by the rules. If that turns out to be the case, all the bland geniality in the world won't help him.
