A Vast Conspiracy (38 page)

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.

Ewing and other veterans of the Starr hard core made a conceptual breakthrough early in their investigation. At first, they had thought Bill and Hillary Clinton were motivated by greed, which was what usually drove corrupt politicians in their experience. But they decided that theory was wrong. Instead, they said, it was sex and politics that drove the president and first lady.

The subject first came up in connection with the suicide of Vince Foster. Like both Mrs. Clinton and Webb Hubbell, Foster was a partner in the Rose Law Firm who had come to Washington to work in the new administration. Foster’s suicide, on July 20, 1993, unsettled the White House; investigators began attempting to learn more about documents, including the Clintons’ personal legal papers, that had been taken from Foster’s office soon after his death. There was much speculation in the news media that loyal White House aides had removed documents relating to Whitewater, but the Starr staff developed another theory. It was no secret that Mrs. Clinton regarded Foster as a trusted friend, and some prosecutors came to believe the extraordinary—and entirely unproven—theory that Mrs. Clinton had had an affair with Foster, and that her chief concern was keeping it secret. According to this scenario, the Clinton aides were worried that Foster had left behind something about his relationship with Hillary, such as a suicide note saying something like “We can’t sleep together anymore.” This sort of fanciful speculation had surfaced previously, but mostly in the more extreme elements of the Clinton-hating press.

That was only the beginning of the sex-driven theory underlying the Starr investigation. Some asserted that Clinton became involved in the fraudulent loan to Susan McDougal in the Madison Guaranty case because he was having an affair with her—something both she and the president denied. Ewing was convinced that the Clintons’ friend deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey was the designated keeper of the secrets about the president’s personal life, and the prosecutor undertook an elaborate effort to persuade Lindsey to flip. In 1996, Ewing led the prosecution of two Arkansas bankers—Herby Branscum, Jr., and Robert M. Hill—on charges that they misapplied bank funds and concealed cash transactions related to the Clinton gubernatorial campaign in 1990. In that case, Starr named
Lindsey as an unindicted co-conspirator. The hope was that Branscum and Hill would be convicted, and then inform on Lindsey, who would, in turn, testify against the president. But Ewing’s plan fell apart when the jury failed to convict the two bankers.

This failure, of course, exemplified the central problem with the Ewing thesis: he could never make it stick. As with the financial issues at the heart of the Whitewater case, neither Ewing nor anyone in Starr’s office could tie the president or first lady to any criminal activity related to sex or anything else. It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. As late as 1997, FBI agents working for Starr’s Little Rock office—which Ewing ran—started questioning Clinton’s friends and associates about the then governor’s relationships with women in Arkansas. They were the same sorts of questions Mike Isikoff had been asking three years earlier. In a demonstration of the endless circularity of the pursuit of Clinton, the FBI paid particular attention to his former bodyguards with the Arkansas state police—the same people, of course, who were David Brock’s sources on the story that began the Paula Jones case. The Trooper Project, as it was known in Starr’s office, also came to naught.

So when Linda Tripp called Jackie Bennett on the night of January 12, 1998, she found an audience primed to hear her tale of sexual misconduct and cover-up by the president. Bennett himself represented the hardest of the hard core. Though he had tried without success for some time to find a job with a private firm in Washington, Bennett was as committed as anyone to bringing Clinton down. Before joining Starr, he had spent much of the previous decade as a prosecutor in the public integrity section of the Justice Department, on a rough-and-tumble crusade against Democratic politicians in south Texas. There Bennett had mixed results. He won a conviction of former representative Albert Bustamante (as well as the Justice Department’s John Marshall Award for the top prosecutors in the nation), but he also lost a case against Doug Jaffe, a businessman in San Antonio who was a big Democratic contributor. After Bennett lost one case, the trial judge delivered an unusual rebuke, saying, “I really wish you’d take a message back to [the Justice Department] that we’re not interested in wasting our time on rinky-dink cases.” Because of episodes like this, Bennett was known to some colleagues as “the thug.”

To many people, then, including some veterans of the Starr office itself, the story of Monica Lewinsky seemed awfully far afield from the Whitewater-based jurisdiction of the independent counsel. But to the true
believers who remained on Starr’s staff, it was as if they had spent three years and five months waiting for Tripp’s call.

As Jackie Bennett recalled the conversation for Michael Isikoff, Tripp initially pretended that she had “a friend” who was being asked to lie under oath in her deposition in the Paula Jones case. But she soon dropped the fiction, identified herself, and asked a question that had been haunting her since her conversations with Kirby Behre. Could Starr’s prosecutors give her immunity if she had made illegal tapes? Bennett told her yes. He was intrigued to hear that Tripp had been interviewed by the Starr office in connection with the Foster suicide. Quickly, he had heard enough to want to meet Linda Tripp. He found Steve Irons, an FBI agent assigned to Starr, and two other prosecutors, Sol Wisenberg and Steve Binhak, and they piled into a car for the forty-minute drive to Tripp’s home in Columbia, Maryland.