Word: schmidts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Experience, not ideology, deepened Starr's mistrust of the Clinton White House. The Lewinsky scandal followed years of Executive Branch stonewalling in several other investigations. Some of it, Starr's team believed, was criminal. Prosecutors closed their Whitewater grand jury inquiry in 1998, Schmidt and Weisskopf report, convinced that Hillary Clinton had lied to investigators, though they lacked sufficient evidence to indict her. Later, as the Lewinsky scandal progressed, the stonewalling included the Secret Service's "protective function privilege," a fanciful legal gambit designed by Justice Department lawyers to prevent agents from testifying. Starr had reason to believe that this...
Last week the literature of Lewinsky expanded considerably with the publication of Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton (HarperCollins; 326 pages), by Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf. Both were reporters on the scene: Schmidt broke the Lewinsky story in the Washington Post, and Weisskopf followed its every twist for TIME. Starr is at the center of their narrative, a more complicated figure--not quite sympathetic, but more comprehensible--than the Torquemada caricature of Clintonite nightmares...
There are surprising incongruities to that caricature. His own family is not picture perfect (his brother was convicted of fraud), and according to Weisskopf and Schmidt, he "was never the hard-right ideologue later portrayed by Clinton allies." His childhood hero was John Kennedy. When Starr considered running for the Senate in Virginia, it was to derail the campaign of Oliver North, the right-wing poster boy whom he considered "a disgrace...
Such efforts helped make Starr's name a popular watchword for prosecutorial excess. But as Schmidt and Weisskopf make plain, Starr bears blame as well. His rigidity and self-righteousness compounded his native ineptitude in public relations. He was unable to resolve quickly the intra-office battles among the factions that split his staff. Inherently overcautious, he and his team let prosecutorial opportunities slip by at key moments, most notably in their failure to gain Lewinsky's cooperation as the scandal broke...
...That was the first time I had heard of it, when discussing my thesis in the fall of my senior year." Schmidt says...