Word: washingtonization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...preoccupation with resume, intellect and reputation. As a young man fresh out of Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas, Starr spent two years at Harding College in Arkansas and eventually came to realize that he and this charismatic Clinton fellow had moved along the same track to Washington--except that Clinton was always ahead. Clinton was at Georgetown when Starr was at George Washington University; Clinton was a Senate aide when Starr was a House aide; Clinton landed a Rhodes scholarship, Starr missed a Marshall. "So there were sort of remarkable and I guess, in retrospect, noteworthy coincidences...
...snaps out of it, perhaps realizing that he's just made the kind of comparison he had boasted about avoiding. He savors these small imaginative flights. In trying to explain himself in the past year, he has invoked such figures as Joe Friday, Atticus Finch, the Lone Ranger, George Washington and Christ in the garden at Gethsemane on the night before the Crucifixion ("Let this cup passeth from me"). The roster suggests that Starr needs to place himself in the company of heroes and saviors. "I can't be the judge in my own case," he says, and maybe...
...position for him since he'd always enjoyed being the Democrats' favorite Republican--a lawyer trusted enough to be asked to review Senator Bob Packwood's private diaries, a conservative judge with serious credentials as a defender of the First Amendment. He had even ruled in favor of the Washington Post in a big libel suit. "[When] the attacks began," Starr says, "I started saying, 'Well, how do you respond?' And one of the things I said was, 'I will try to bring the qualities of the judge [to the investigation]...eschew political considerations and personal predilections...
...values to the far harsher world of criminal prosecution. He says he modeled his decision-making process on "the way judges on a collegial court operate," a consensual, deliberative style that was alien to most of his prosecutors. Every afternoon at 5 o'clock when he was in Washington, he and his 30 lawyers and 10 investigators crowded around a 30-ft.-long conference table to hear the daily report and discuss strategy. Starr previewed the agenda but had Bittman run the meetings so Starr could absorb more of the discussion. For major decisions, he assigned a prosecutor to summarize...
That line of thought is now embedded in the national psyche. If people flinched at impeachment this year, it was partly a sign that Washington has been more effectively delegitimized than anybody, left or right, ever dreamed possible. When it came time to decide what institution should judge the cross-eyed blunderings of Bill Clinton, who was left to say government was up to the job? And because of the way that both the Starr investigation and impeachment went forward--sometimes a legal process, sometimes just politics where the rules of prosecution didn't apply--it was also hard...