After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The Atlantic Monthly

  December 1976

  DECODING THE STARR REPORT

  THE SIX-VOLUME Report by Kenneth W. Starr to the U.S. House of Representatives—which consists, so far, of the single-volume Referral and five volumes of Appendices and Supplemental Materials—is, in many ways, an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt. What it is textually is a voluminous work of demented pornography, with many fascinating characters and several largely hidden story lines. What it is politically is an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure.

  Less obvious at first, and then altogether unmistakable, is the author’s scorn for the House of Representatives. The power to prosecute an impeachment is the only important power that the Constitution grants solely to the House. Before the Communication from the Office of the Independent Counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, as the document is called, it was unthinkable that any official, of any branch of government, would presume to set forth, in a document submitted to the House, in the course of an impeachment inquiry, such conclusions as that the President “lied,” or “attempted to obstruct justice,” or any of the other judgments that the Report presumes to make on the very first page of its introduction—let alone include on its cover and as part of its title the name of its primary author. On the cover of this document the name of Henry J. Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, does not appear. The words “United States House of Representatives” appear in letters about half the size of “Kenneth W. Starr.”

  From the moment Chairman Hyde permitted Mr. Starr thus to interpose his views between the committee and the evidence, and authorized the publication of these documents under the congressional seal, he set in motion an unprecedented process, in which the House is nearly powerless. On October 9, 1998, the chairman said he would permit his committee to call Mr. Starr, but that he saw “no need” to call, for example, Monica Lewinsky. Other members of the panel said they could rely, for the testimony of witnesses, on Mr. Starr’s Report. Apart from the obvious implications of a proceeding in which the judge’s major witness is the prosecutor—and other witnesses are neither cross-examined nor even called—this decision limits the power of the House to approving or disapproving the recommendations of the Independent Counsel. For the purposes of impeachment, the Independent Counsel has become the House.

  There are signs that the document was never intended to be understood, or even read, by anyone. The absence of dates, tables of contents, index, chronology, context, accurate headings, and logic of any sort from the five supplementary volumes is almost the least of it. So are the distortions and misrepresentations in the Report itself of what the record actually shows. Documents published by the Government Printing Office are often a marvel of information and legibility, printed with great speed and under pressure. In the 7,793 pages that constitute just the Appendices and Supplemental Materials, however, there are embedded thousands of smaller pages (sometimes four, often six tiny pages, compressed within a single larger page) in type so minuscule that, quite apart from the time constraints on reporters and other citizens, visual constraints—the eyesight, for example, of aging congressmen—absolutely preclude the reading of vast portions of the text.

  There are also countless redactions, blackings-out, excisions by the House Judiciary Committee, which add to the general disorder. The dates of birth of all but a few witnesses, for example, are blacked out—an attempt, presumably, to spare these witnesses (whose privacy is not just violated but mocked in these documents by the prosecutors’ constant assurances that their testimony is “secret,” and that “there are no unauthorized persons present”) the embarrassment of having their ages widely known. Other deletions are inexplicable. Names are blacked out in one place only to appear, in precisely the same context, in another. Relatively mild and perfectly obvious four-letter words are blacked out while other words, traditionally regarded as stronger and more offensive, are left in. Variants of the word “shit,” for example, are deleted, but Linda Tripp’s remark to Monica Lewinsky “You never, ever realized whose dick you were sucking” is unedited.

  There are printed invitations to parties, accompanied by the guest lists. The names of the hosts, on the invitations, are blacked out. These might be mere examples of work done innocently or in haste. It soon becomes clear, however, that a fundamental strategy of the authors is unintelligibility.

  To submit a massive document in which it is literally impossible to find information by title, date, alphabetical or chronological sequence, or context of any kind makes it difficult to check whether any particular conclusion is warranted—whether there is evidence for the opposite conclusion, or another conclusion altogether. As a series of anecdotes, of prurient gossip raised, for the first time, to the level of constitutional crisis, the story the Office of the Independent Counsel wants to tell is by now widely known. People seem to have made up their minds about it. Underneath that story, however, scattered in almost incomprehensible pieces throughout the text, are at least two other stories, which the authors go to considerable lengths to hide.

  The setting is the White House—a peculiar, almost farcically disordered place of rumor, envy, spite, betrayal, birthday parties. Everyone, from the President’s secretary, Betty Currie, through the Uniformed Secret Service guards and the stewards in the Oval Office pantry, seems to think nothing of accepting presents—ties, Godiva chocolates, pocket handkerchiefs, body lotions, gift certificates for manicures and pedicures at Georgette Klinger—from Monica Lewinsky, a young woman who is regarded, almost universally and, as it turns out, with astonishing understatement, as a “stalker,” a “hall surfer,” a “cling on,” and a “clutch.” One of the pantry stewards, Bayani Nelvis, has dinners with Ms. Lewinsky, exchanges gifts and confidences with her, offers her the President’s cigars, and, according to Ms. Lewinsky, calls her from a presidential vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to invite her to come and share a house with him. Mr. Nelvis denies the invitation to stay with him on the Vineyard. On many other matters he is mum.

  Another staff member, rumored to be a “graduate,” or former intimate of the President’s, “clomps” through the corridors wearing the President’s shoes. Young people offend older staff members by spilling Coke on White House carpets and putting their feet up on White House chairs. The uniformed Secret Service guards at the White House feel free to spread scurrilous gossip—among themselves and to other people. On one occasion they tell Ms. Lewinsky, who is trying to enter the White House, that the President already has a female visitor in the Oval Office. Ms. Lewinsky flies into a rage—although she has not visited the President in weeks and was not invited this time. She berates Betty Currie for lying to her about the President’s whereabouts. Ms. Currie scolds the guards for their indiscretion. The guards are miffed.

  In the summer of 1995, Ms. Lewinsky, who frequently describes herself as “insecure,” comes to the White House, as an unpaid intern. She repeatedly approaches the President and “introduces” herself. On November 15, 1995, Ms. Lewinsky says, she flashes her thong underwear at him, tells him she has a crush on him, and accompanies him to a secluded corridor. He asks if he may kiss her. Later that evening, when they meet again, she grabs his crotch and performs oral sex on him—an approach she tries to repeat at virtually every subsequent opportunity.

  According to the testimony of Ms. Lewinsky—and she is not one to understate—there are, in all, nine incidents of these, as the Report calls them, “in-person” sexual encounters: three in 1995, four in 1996, and two in 1997. In January 1996, Ms. Lewinsky says, she and the President have phone sex. He does not call her for a week. Feeling “a little bit insecure about whether he had liked it or didn’t like it” and wondering “if this was sort of developing into some kind of a longer-term relationship than what I thought it initially might have been,” s
he goes to the Oval Office and asks him whether this is “just about sex,” or whether he has some interest in trying to get to know her as a person. He assures her that he “cherishes” his time with her.

  On February 19, 1996, the President tells Ms. Lewinsky that their physical relationship must end. He does not feel right about it. Their friendship, however, can continue. This is not an entirely unusual thing for one person to say to another. It is not often misunderstood. Ms. Lewinsky perseveres. Wherever the President is—in the Oval Office, at staff birthday parties, jogging, attending church, at fund-raisers, departing on journeys and returning from them—Ms. Lewinsky contrives to “position” herself there. This does not go unremarked.

  On April 5, 1996, the Friday before Easter, Ms. Lewinsky learns that she has been dismissed from her White House job and transferred—with a considerable rise in rank and salary—to the Pentagon. On that Sunday, which is Easter, she goes to the President to complain. He tells her that “after the election” he will be able to find her another White House job. Another young woman might have noticed, and been deterred by, the prospect of so long a separation. Not Ms. Lewinsky. She performs oral sex and departs. She renews her efforts, calling, writing, sending presents.

  The President now wards off any private visits from her for nearly eleven months—from April 7, 1996, until February 28, 1997. Ms. Lewinsky hates her job at the Pentagon. She is bored by it. The job entails transcription. She has no typing skills and cannot spell. From her desk, by telephone, by email, and in person, she complains. She sends cards, ties, other presents, importuning letters. She harangues Ms. Currie with incessant calls. She wants to talk to the President, in person and by phone. She wants the White House job she feels she has been promised. The President and Ms. Currie say that they will try. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no White House job for her. She still manages to position herself in the President’s path. She keeps informed of his schedule through Betty Currie and the pantry steward Bayani Nelvis.

  Finally, on February 28, 1997, she manages to visit the President again. He gives her a hatpin and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. “I wanted to perform oral sex on him,” Ms. Lewinsky testifies, “and so I did.” On every prior occasion the President has insisted that Ms. Lewinsky stop before what she tends to call completion. On this day she persuades the President to let her continue. “It’s important to me,” she says. Afterward, Ms. Lewinsky finds—perhaps this was always her intention—semen on her dress. On March 29, 1997, according to Ms. Lewinsky, there is a similar event. The in-person sexual encounters are at an end.

  On May 24, 1997, the President calls Ms. Lewinsky in. He says again that their affair, such as it is, is over. He tells her that she is “a great person” and that they will still be friends. He is determined to be good. Ms. Lewinsky attributes the breakup to the President’s “wanting to do the right thing in God’s eyes.” Three days later, the Supreme Court announces its decision in the Paula Jones case. The Jones suit, which accuses him of sexual harassment, can proceed while he is still in office—without “distract[ing him] from his public duties.” The decision is surely one of the worst in the Court’s history. For now it is the law.

  Ms. Lewinsky has never been reticent or soft-spoken. Now she becomes ever more implacable and wild. She phones and pages Ms. Currie at all hours, later even visits her at home. It would not be quite accurate to say that this is just a particularly intense love story. Ms. Lewinsky has too many other interests—shopping, M&M’s, finding a good job—one that pays well, with a good title, and that will “intrigue” her—new men: an Australian, a “health nut,” an employee of the Pentagon, a former lover, married, with whom she resumes an affair and whom she had blackmailed some years before, by threatening to disclose the affair to his wife if he did not see her again.

  Meanwhile, Ms. Lewinsky has made friends with a third major character, Linda Tripp—a colleague, who has also been transferred, under murky circumstances, from the White House to the Pentagon. Ms. Tripp says that Ms. Lewinsky did not confide in her about the “affair” until late September or early October 1996. In January 1997, Ms. Tripp begins to advise Ms. Lewinsky about strategies for getting a new White House job and also for regaining the affection of the President. She edits Ms. Lewinsky’s letters and helps her compose audiotapes to send to him. Within a month of this collaboration, Ms. Lewinsky manages to visit the President for the first time in a year, and this visit produces Mr. Starr’s most famous piece of “evidence,” the blue dress.

  Sometime in May or June of 1997, Ms. Tripp begins (at Ms. Lewinsky’s request, she claims) to keep a notebook of the history of Ms. Lewinsky’s encounters with the President—in order, she says, to analyze them, and look for a “pattern.” At approximately the same time, Ms. Lewinsky uses her computer at the Pentagon to create (at Ms. Tripp’s suggestion, she says) a “matrix,” or spreadsheet, detailing her meetings with the President. Ms. Tripp preserves her notebook. Ms. Lewinsky soon becomes as persistent with her new confidante—calling her at all hours, at home and at the office, leaving messages, interrupting meetings, visiting her at her desk several times a day—as she is with Ms. Currie or the President.

  In November, Ms. Tripp testifies, she sees, for the second time, the dress in Ms. Lewinsky’s closet, the dress Ms. Lewinsky wore during her visit to the President on February 28, 1997. Ms. Tripp is adamant in her insistence that the stain on the dress be preserved.

  MS. TRIPP: Hey, listen, my cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit . . . . He said that [if a rape victim] has preserved a pinprick size of crusted semen 10 years from that time . . . they can match the DNA . . . .

  MS. LEWINSKY: So why can’t I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?

  MS. TRIPP: . . . [P]ack it in with your treasures . . . . It could be your only insurance policy down the road.

  Tripp told the grand jury: “I wanted some way for there to be proof of what he was doing with Monica.” Of course, by the time Ms. Tripp sees the dress, the President has not been “doing” anything with Monica—except trying to avoid her—for more than eight months.

  In October 1997, Ms. Tripp, for whatever reason, begins to tape her phone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky. The prosecutors subsequently lead her through a vast amount of testimony, before the grand jury, about her own life and motives, as well as what she claims to know about Ms. Lewinsky. Fairly late in Ms. Tripp’s testimony, a juror speaks up. The jury has a question. Nothing could be clearer than that the prosecutors do not want Ms. Tripp to answer it.

  A JUROR: Why did you decide to document?

  MR. EMMICK [associate independent counsel]: Can I interrupt, ma’am? I’m sorry. Just to clarify.

  MR. SUSANIN [associate independent counsel]: So to clarify this grand juror’s question—

  A JUROR: Hold on. Can I get an answer to my question?

  Apparently not.

  MR. SUSANIN: Can I ask a question, ma’am. Just to clarify?

  Forty confusing lines later, the juror tries again.

  A JUROR: Ms. Tripp, why were you documenting?

  THE WITNESS: Why was I documenting?

  A JUROR: . . . documenting other than the notebook?

  THE WITNESS: Oh, the notebook—well, maybe I should say different words so it doesn’t sound contradictory at all because it wasn’t. The notebook was something Monica asked me to do in my head to understand cause and effect of all the ups and downs of her relationship in intimate detail.

  The jurors keep trying to find out why Ms. Tripp was constantly eliciting and making tapes of Ms. Lewinsky’s confidences. None of Ms. Tripp’s explanations of why she taped make any sense. To “arm myself with a record” so that she could testify about Monica Lewinsky, truthfully, under oath in the Jones case, without fear of being defamed, she says, by the President’s lawyers or destroyed by others in the White House. She was “scared,” she says many times, but her “integrity” required her to tell the truth. There was, however, no reason whatever, during the
months when Ms. Tripp was taping, to imagine that she could possibly be subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case. All her testimony would have been inadmissable, as hearsay and on other grounds. It took a great deal of work, on Ms. Tripp’s part and the Special Counsel’s, to enable her to intrude herself in the case at all.

  In March 1997, Michael Isikoff, a reporter from Newsweek, came to Ms. Tripp’s desk in the Pentagon. He told her that Kathleen Willey claimed that the President had once subjected her to sexual harassment. Mr. Isikoff said Ms. Willey had given him Ms. Tripp’s name as a confirming witness. Ms. Tripp told Mr. Isikoff she recalled the incident in question, but that Ms. Willey had actually solicited, welcomed, and subsequently boasted about the President’s embrace. In August 1997, Newsweek published Mr. Isikoff’s story—citing Ms. Tripp as a source. A lot has since been said—by Ms. Tripp and in the press—about the matter. What has gradually become clear is this: Ms. Tripp tried to persuade Mr. Isikoff to write not about Ms. Willey but about a former White House intern, “M,” who was now working at the Pentagon. Ms. Tripp’s testimony varies about when, and by what means, she conveyed Ms. Lewinsky’s full name to Mr. Isikoff. She admits he knew it by October, the month when she began to tape.