New book sheds some light on Clintons' scandals

A searing draft indictment of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was prepared by federal prosecutors alleging that she lied about her legal work in a corrupt Arkansas land deal, a new book asserts.

Nearly 30 years after some of the events, the book details that prosecutors dropped the case because they feared it was not winnable and because it would distract from the criminal probe of her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Kenneth G. Gormley, a Duquesne University law school professor, writes that lead Whitewater prosecutor Hickman Ewing Jr. urged the indictment of Clinton, now U.S. secretary of state, for denying in sworn statements she had done legal work for a series of corrupt real estate transactions.

Those deals helped drive an Arkansas savings and loan into bankruptcy, costing the federal government $72 million. They also created the jumping-off point for independent counsel Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation and eventually led to former President Bill Clinton's impeachment by the House on Dec. 19, 1998, and his Senate acquittal two months later.

The book is a sweeping history of the Whitewater investigation and related illegal land transactions in Arkansas in the 1980s that morphed into a criminal probe of the president's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

It also recalls some of the lesser members of the high-drama cast that transfixed the American public for several years: Linda Tripp, James McDougal, and Vince Foster.

To be published by Crown on Feb. 16, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr relies heavily on long interviews with the former president, Starr and members of his staff, Lewinsky, and many other players in the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals.

It includes a series of new disclosures that add to the portrait of an investigation fueled by political hysteria and poor judgment by the Clintons and Starr that left dozens of shattered careers and lives in its wake.

Among the disclosures:

A prison psychologist asserts that a key Whitewater witness who was cooperating with Starr, imprisoned Arkansas political operative and businessman James McDougal, likely died because he was improperly confined in a prison isolation unit without medication needed to control his heart ailment.

Lewinsky was considered a suicide risk by her doctor once news broke of her affair with the president. She was kept for a time under 24-hour surveillance in her apartment, and pumped up with antidepressants.

Lewinsky said she considered washing the blue dress stained with Clinton's DNA even as Starr's prosecutors searched her Washington apartment. But she decided against it, fearing she would be charged with obstruction of justice. Her attorney eventually turned the dress over to Starr's office.

Former Vice President Al Gore ordered his staff to avoid all discussion of succession planning as Starr's investigation intensified in 1998, fearing that word of such plans would fuel calls for Clinton's resignation within his own party. Gore and his staff knew that defending Clinton during that period could have ruined his own political career. Many political analysts concluded that Gore's 2000 presidential race was harmed by his association with Clinton and the public's distaste for the entire matter.

Starr and his staff came to suspect that Tripp, who tipped off the independent counsel's office to Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, had deleted portions of the tape recordings she had made of her phone conversations with Lewinsky.

That discovery fueled distrust of Tripp in Starr's office and caused Starr to remove the tape-recorded evidence from his investigative report to the House Judiciary Committee as it moved to consider Clinton's impeachment.

Starr told the author he regretted taking on the Lewinsky matter and probably should have handed it off to the Justice Department.

Gormley, a Harvard law school graduate, is a constitutional law professor at Duquesne University law school in Pittsburgh, where he is interim dean. He is a nationally recognized expert on independent-counsel statutes and is of counsel to the Philadelphia law firm Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis L.L.P., advising it on appellate matters.

The independent-counsel investigations of the Clintons began in April 1994 after disclosures that they were partners with McDougal in the Whitewater real estate venture, and that his failing savings and loan association had helped prop up the financially troubled project.

Those transactions emerged as an issue in Clinton's 1992 presidential run and never entirely quieted down after he took office. With the suicide of White House lawyer Vince Foster, a close Clinton friend and ally who had provided legal advice to the Clintons on their Arkansas transactions, the political furor intensified, and Clinton agreed to the appointment of a special prosecutor.

In the book, Bill Clinton tells the author that asking then-Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent counsel was the worst decision of his career because it gave political enemies a vehicle to pursue him throughout his presidency.

Gormley's book does give some credence to the Clintons' claim that the multiple investigations were fueled to an extent by their political enemies.

It notes, for example, that the conservative federal appeals court judge David Sentelle had advocated for the appointment of Starr, also a Southern conservative and an ideological soulmate, as special counsel. And in a new disclosure, the book asserts that Sentelle joined with fellow conservative jurist Joseph Sneed to appoint Starr over the objections of the third jurist on the panel, its lone Democrat, John D. Butzner of Richmond, Va.

Butzner was concerned that Starr had no experience as a prosecutor and was too much of a fixture in Republican circles in Washington to be deemed impartial.

Despite his misgivings, Gormley reports, Butzner voted with Sentelle and Sneed to appoint Starr so as not to undercut the independent-counsel investigation.

At the time, in 1994, the selection came under sharp attack for its seemingly partisan cast. To some, it also seemed to breach the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, giving the judiciary undue authority over the executive branch.

"That is what created the problem; when you don't have one branch of government checking the other," said Richard Semiatin, an assistant professor of political science at American University.

Starr is portrayed in the book as fair-minded but too academic and thus out of his element in the rough-and-tumble world of law enforcement.

In one of the book's most disturbing revelations, Gormley writes that McDougal's prison psychologist concluded that McDougal likely died as a result of mistreatment in the Texas federal prison where he was serving time on his Whitewater conviction.

Psychologist Richard Clark told Gormley that McDougal had been improperly put in an isolation unit for refusing to submit to a drug test. The stress of that confinement, and the fact that he had been sent there without his heart medication, probably resulted in his death from sudden cardiac arrest, Clark wrote.

Three key figures from the book

Linda Tripp

A White House employee whose secretly tape-recorded conversations with Monica Lewinsky formed the basis for the independent counsel's investigation of former President Bill Clinton's affair with the intern. Prosecutors eventually became suspicious of Tripp when they learned that portions of the tapes had been erased. They decided not to rely on her information in the prosecution.

James McDougal

His friendship with Clinton dated to the late 1960s, when the two worked together on the election campaign of Sen. William Fulbright. McDougal and the Clintons later became partners in the Whitewater real estate project, which became the focus of criminal investigations. McDougal eventually became a cooperating witness. He died in federal prison in 1998 under what his psychologist determined were questionable circumstances.

Ken Starr

The independent counsel appointed to take over the Whitewater investigation from Robert Fiske in August 1994. After Clinton's impeachment, Starr said that he came to regret taking on the Lewinsky investigation because he had become a political lightning rod. Starr said he should have turned it over to the Justice Department for the appointment of another independent counsel to focus on that case.

- Paraphrased from the book