My life

Besides plugging my new initiatives, I spent time working for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which the Senate Republicans killed at the end of the month; swearing in a new surgeon general, Dr. David Satcher, the director of the Centers for Disease Control; touring tornado damage in central Florida; announcing the first grants to help communities strengthen their efforts to prevent violence against women; and raising funds to help Democrats in the coming election. In late January and in February, several White House staffers were called before the grand jury. I felt terrible that they had been caught up in all this, especially Betty Currie, who had tried to befriend Monica Lewinsky and was now being punished for it. I also felt bad that Vernon Jordan had been caught up in the maelstrom. We had been close friends for so long, and time and again I had seen him help people who needed it. Now he was being targeted because of me. I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong and hoped someday he would be able to forgive me for the mess I had gotten him into. Starr also subpoenaed Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and old friend of Hillary’s and mine who had come to work in the White House in July 1997. According to the Washington Post, Starr was exploring whether Sid’s criticism of him amounted to an obstruction of justice. It was a chilling indication of how thin-skinned Starr was, and how willing to use the power of his office against anyone who criticized him. Starr also subpoenaed two private investigators who had been hired by the National Enquirer to run down a rumor that he had been having an affair with a woman in Little Rock. The rumor was false, apparently a case of mistaken identity, but again, it reflected a double standard. He was using FBI agents and private investigators to look into my life. When a tabloid looked at his, he went after them. Starr’s tactics were beginning to draw the attention of the press. Newsweek published a two-page chart,

“Conspiracy or Coincidence,” which traced the connections of more than twenty conservative activists and organizations that had promoted and financed the “scandals” Starr was investigating. The Washington Post ran a story in which a number of former federal prosecutors expressed discomfort not just with Starr’s new focus on my private conduct, “but with the arsenal of weapons he has deployed to try to make his case against the president.”

Starr was particularly criticized for forcing Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify against her will. Federal guidelines, which Starr was supposed to follow, said that family members should ordinarily not be forced to testify unless they were part of the criminal activity being investigated, or there were

“overriding prosecutorial concerns.” By early February, according to an NBC News poll, only 26

percent of the American people thought Starr was conducting an impartial inquiry. The saga continued into March. My deposition in the Jones case was leaked, obviously by someone on the Jones side. Although the judge had repeatedly warned the Rutherford Institute lawyers not to leak it, no one was ever sanctioned. On the eighth, Jim McDougal died in a federal prison in Texas, a sad and ironic end to his long downward slide. According to Susan McDougal, Jim had changed his story to suit Starr and Hick Ewing because he desperately wanted to avoid dying in jail. In mid-month, 60 Minutes ran an interview with a woman named Kathleen Willey, who claimed I had made an unwanted advance toward her while she was working in the White House. It wasn’t true. We had evidence that cast doubt on her story, including the affidavit of her friend Julie Hiatt Steele, who said Willey had asked her to lie by saying she had told Steele about the alleged episode shortly after it happened, when in fact she hadn’t.

Willey’s husband had killed himself, leaving her responsible for more than $200,000 of outstanding debt. Within a week, news stories reported that after I called her to offer my condolences on her husband’s death, she had told people I was coming to his funeral; this was after the alleged incident. Eventually we released about a dozen letters Willey had written to me, again after the alleged encounter, saying things like she was my “number one fan” and that she wanted to help me “in any way that I can.”

After a report that she had sought $300,000 to tell her story to a tabloid or in a book, the story faded away.

I mention Willey’s sad tale here because of what Starr did with it. First, in a highly unusual move, he gave her “transactional immunity”—complete protection against any kind of criminal prosecution—