My life

On August 5, Sentelle’s panel fired Robert Fiske and replaced him with Kenneth Starr, who had been a court of appeals judge and solicitor general in the Bush administration. Unlike Fiske, Starr had no prosecutorial experience, but he had something far more important: he was much more conservative and partisan than Fiske. In a terse statement Judge Sentelle said he was replacing Fiske with Starr to guarantee the “appearance of independence,” a test Fiske could not meet because he was “affiliated with the incumbent administration.” It was an absurd argument. Fiske was a Republican whose only affiliation with the administration was that Janet Reno had appointed him to a job he did not seek. Had the Special Division reappointed him, there would have been no more affiliation. In his place, Judge Sentelle’s panel appointed someone with not an apparent but a real and blatant conflict of interest. Starr had been an outspoken proponent of the Paula Jones lawsuit, appearing on TV

and even offering to write a friend-of-the-court brief on her behalf. Five former presidents of the American Bar Association criticized the Starr appointment because of its apparent political bias. So did the New York Times, after it emerged that Judge Sentelle had had lunch with Fiske’s biggest critic, Senator Lauch Faircloth, and Jesse Helms just a couple of weeks before the Fiske-Starr switch. The three said they were just discussing prostate problems.

Of course, Starr had no intention of stepping aside. His bias against me was the very reason he was chosen and why he took the job. We now had a bizarre definition of an “independent” counsel: he had to be independent of me, but it was fine to be closely tied to my political enemies and legal adversaries. The Starr appointment was unprecedented. In the past, there had been an effort to ensure that special prosecutors would be not only independent but also fair and respectful of the institution of the presidency. Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, was a conservative Democrat who had supported President Nixon for reelection in 1972. Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra prosecutor, was an Oklahoma Republican who had supported President Reagan. I had never wanted the Whitewater inquiry to be a “home game,” in Doug Sosnik’s words, but I thought I was at least entitled to a neutral field. It was not to be. Since there was nothing to Whitewater, the only way to use the investigation against me was to turn it into one long “away game.” Robert Fiske was too fair and too fast for that job. He had to go.

Lloyd Cutler didn’t eat his hat, but less than a week after the Starr appointment he left, too, having fulfilled his commitment to serve a brief stint in the counsel’s office. I replaced him with Abner Mikva, a former Illinois congressman and court of appeals judge with an impeccable reputation and a clearheaded view of the forces we were up against. I was sorry that, after such a long and distinguished career, Lloyd had to learn that people he thought he knew and could trust were playing by different rules than he was.

When Congress left town, we took off for Martha’s Vineyard again. Hillary and I needed some time off. So did Al Gore. A few days earlier he had ruptured his Achilles tendon in a basketball game. It was a painful injury, requiring a prolonged recovery. Al would come back stronger than before, using his forced immobility to work out with weights. In the meantime, on crutches, he traveled to forty states and four foreign countries, including Egypt, where he brokered a compromise on the sensitive issue of population control at the Cairo Conference on Sustainable Development. He also continued overseeing the Reinventing Government Initiative. By mid-September, we had already achieved savings of $47

billion, enough to pay for the entire crime bill; begun a competitive venture with the automakers to develop a “clean car”; cut the application form for an SBA loan from a hundred pages to one; reformed FEMA so that it was no longer the least popular federal agency but the most admired one, thanks to James Lee Witt; and saved more than $1 billion through cancellations of unneeded construction projects under Roger Johnson’s leadership at the General Services Administration. Al Gore was doing a lot on one good leg.

Our week on the Vineyard was interesting for several reasons. Vernon Jordan set up a golf game with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, America’s wealthiest men. I liked them both, and was particularly impressed that Buffett was a die-hard Democrat who believed in civil rights, fair taxation, and a woman’s right to choose.