My life

Starr’s coddling of McDougal and Hale was in sharp contrast to his treatment of Susan McDougal, who was still being held in prison for contempt because of her refusal to answer Starr’s questions before the grand jury. After a brief period in an Arkansas county jail, to which she was led in handcuffs, leg manacles, and a waist chain, Susan was transferred to a federal facility, where she was kept apart from the other prisoners in a medical unit for a few months. She was then taken to a Los Angeles jail to answer charges there that she had embezzled funds from a former employer. When newly discovered documentary evidence shredded the prosecution’s case, she was acquitted. Meanwhile, she was forced to spend twenty-three hours a day in a windowless cell block usually inhabited by convicted murderers. She was also forced to wear a red dress, normally worn only by murderers and child molesters. After a few months of that, she was put in a Plexiglas cell in the middle of a jail pod; she couldn’t talk to other inmates, watch television, or even hear outside sounds. On the prison bus to her court appearances, she was put in a separate cage otherwise reserved for dangerous criminals. Her Hannibal Lecter–like confinement finally came to an end on July 30, after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit alleging that McDougal was being held in “barbaric” conditions at Starr’s request, in an attempt to coerce her to testify.

Years later, when I read McDougal’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk, it sent chills up my spine. She could have ended her suffering at any time, and made a lot of money to boot, just by telling the lies Starr and Hick Ewing wanted her to tell. How she stood up to them I’ll never know, but the sight of her in chains finally began to penetrate the shield the Whitewater reporters had erected around Starr and his staff.

Late in the spring, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Paula Jones suit could go forward while I was still in the White House, dismissing my attorneys’ arguments that the work of the presidency should not be interrupted by the suit, since it could be litigated at the end of my term. The Court’s previous decisions had indicated that a sitting President could not be the subject of a civil suit arising out of his official actions while President because the defense would be too distracting and time-consuming. The Court said that adopting a principle of delay in involving a President’s unofficial acts could cause harm to the other party in the suit, so Jones’s suit should not be delayed. Besides, the Court said, defending the suit wouldn’t be unduly burdensome or time-consuming for me. It was one of the most politically naïve decisions the Supreme Court had made in a long time. On June 25 the Washington Post reported that Kenneth Starr was investigating rumors that twelve to fifteen women, including Jones, had been involved with me. He said he had no interest in my sex life; he just wanted to question anyone with whom I might have had a conversation about Whitewater. Eventually Starr would deploy scores of FBI agents, as well as taxpayer-funded private investigators, to look into the subject in which he professed no interest.

By the end of July, I was getting concerned about the FBI, for reasons far more important than the bureau’s sex inquiries for Ken Starr. There had been a whole series of missteps on Louis Freeh’s watch: botched reports from the FBI forensic laboratory that threatened several pending criminal cases; large cost overruns on two computer systems designed to upgrade the National Crime Information Center and to provide quick fingerprint checks to police officers all across the country; the release of FBI files on Republican officials to the White House; and the naming and apparent attempted entrapment of Richard Jewell, a suspect in the Olympic bombing case who was subsequently cleared. There was also a criminal inquiry under way into the conduct of Freeh’s deputy, Larry Potts, in the deadly standoff at Ruby Ridge in 1992, for which the FBI had been heavily criticized and Potts had been censured before Freeh appointed him.