Truth at Any Cost

...After all, Clinton proved iust as determined to prevent Start from finding out the truth, and the record teems with instances in which he opposed the independent counsel-public lying ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"), delay in complying with lawful requests for information, and litigation on behalf of plainly dubious positions, most importantly the ultimately vain litigation on support of the newfangled "protective function privilege" claimed by the Secret Service...

...His referral set forth the results of his investigation of the matters involving Clinton's illicit relationship with the unforgettable Monica Lewinsky...

...Another Justice official told a dif2 ferent Start aide that he feared the departmcnt's advocacy of this position ~, on]d be seen as a political excrdse...

...That--not prurient interest-explains why, when the Lewinsky matter was assigned to Starr in early 1998, he so doggedly pursued the truth about what happened between Clinton and the z4-yearold White House intern...

...They operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests...

...For example, Clinton allies--including the Democratic National Committee--made unfounded allegations about members of Staff's staff...

...The issues they stirred up concerned work Starr's prosecutors previously did while serving in the department...

...Our continuing campaign to destroy Ken Starr'-a chapter title in the bookis the way an anonymous White House aide put it to the New York Times...

...He has clearly been a careful reader in the world of politico-environmental debates --he knows that Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were wrong about population necessarily outstripping resources...

...It was "an avalanche of lies," as Starr finally protested, but Justice did not speak out in their defense or at least tell the White House to call offthe dogs...

...The authors do not draw the conclusion they fairly could have--that it was naive for the authors of the independent counsel law (which, happily, expired last year) to assume that the independence of such counsels from the political system is a singular asset...

...The lawyers sought to put Starr in legal jeopardy, accusing him even ofprosecutorial misconduct...

...Cowardly deferral it was, many times over...

...whom gave multiple interviews...

...Depub...

...t is that rhetorical distinction between Hard and Soft Green that comprises Huber's original contribution to the debate about the environment in this book...

...Start had mostly concluded that investigation by the end of 1997, and though he did not believe he had cases to bring against Clinton, he had come to regard the president as appallingly loose in his attitude toward the law...

...Starr's office not unreasonably thought it might be supported in its investigative efforts by the Justice Department...

...At the end of what Starr thought was a courtesy call, Reno informed him that she had a duty to investigate numerous complaints against his office alleging prosecutorial misconduct, and that Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility would be following up...

...he knows that the United States isn't adding to any greenhouse gas problem...

...This is perhaps a little less than a reader would hope for from Huber, a Manhattan Institute policy wizard with both MIT engineering and Harvard Law degrees in his illustrious background, who has previously written insightfully and penetratingly on cyberspace law, the fnture of telecommunications, liability law, and junk science...

...Soft Green is exemplified in its most politically dangerous form these days by the socalled Precautionary Principle, an idea rising in intellectual and political prominence among the enviro-left which says that no action or technological breakthrough that cannot be proven to be without long-term or unexpected deleterious consequence should be allowed to be adopted...

...but it is not entirely fair to fault him for the wounds he endured...

...So it was that Starr was ripped by the likes of James Carville, who mocked the independent counsel as a hymn-singing, moralizing preacher who 86 J~ly/A~gus t 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator had come to Washington "to wash all the sodomites and fornicators out of town...

...To the Soft Green the model is everything," because it is only in models, not in reality, that the harm it fears and promises to evade seems real...

...The book's dearth of footnotes-- only 26 for over zoo pages of text-- is a political and rhetorical mistake in a field as rife with vicious disagreement over the bare facts of the matter as politico-environmentalism...

...Career attorneys saw the department's po:dtion as \; rongheaded...

...Here Huber is moving into a turf that has not previously been his field of expertise, and this book is unlikely to convince someone not already steeped in the world of anti-left environmentalism...

...Without enough information, Starr did not believe he could fairly assess whether the president had committed perjury and obstructed justice...

...He moved to the right, but, write Schmidt and Weisskopf, "he was never the hard-right ideologue later portrayed by Clinton allies...

...They are not uncritical of Starr, finding that he wounded himself in the process of unmaking Bill Clinton...

...But Justice's advocacy during this period helped delay crucial evidence-gathering...

...Green is hard for conservatives because, in the modem political context, it has come to mean more federal micro-management, more federal encroachment on private property, more federal (and now often extrafederal) control in the pursuit of chimeriBRIAN DOHERTY is an associate editor at Reason magazine...

...This is the kind of Green that Teddy Roosevelt, Huber's beloved father of conservative environmentalism, believed in and advanced...

...N Green Both Hard and Difficult Hard Green: Saving the Environment From the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto Peter Huber Basic Books / ~4 pages / $~5 REVIEWED BY Brian Doherty T he title of Peter Huber's new book has a double-meaning he probably didn't intend, though he may well agree with its spirit: "Green" is indeed a "hard" thing for a conservative, in the modern context...

...Because of this new reporting, we now have a far better idea of what went on within the Office of Independent Counsel during 1998...

...As the events ofl998 demonstrated, such independence also can mean serious weakness in the face of furious attack...

...In the peculiar context of the statute under which he operated, he believed that meant finding out the truth, regardless of whether the truth might lead to prosecution, non-prosecution--or impeachment--and regardless of the factual context in which crimes might be alleged...

...In the early 197o's Starr was appalled by President NLxon's corruption, and, as counselor to Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, he disagreed with the deparl3nent's decision to switch sides in the Bob Jones case and support the racially discriminatory school's effort to preserve its tax exemption...

...The rules under which they worked limited the kind of responses Starr could make, and the office itself was not staffed even for the little public affairs work it might do until Start hired a spokesman midway through the investigation...

...As it happened, while Start was still in the room the leak had occurred--Newsweek had it--and obviously the leaker(s) could not have been Start or his aides...

...The public affairs types-the attack dogs-aimed to try Starr in the court of public opinion...

...The authors' interest in Starr is reflected in their decision to place the independent counsel and his office at the center of their narrative...

...Because of the incorrigibility he saw in the Clintons during the Whitewater probe, Starr became more and more determined to enforce the law in the jurisdictions he was assigned...

...One is hard pressed to read this wellinformed and well-written book and come to any other conclusion about Reno's, and her department's, performance...

...Justice Is Done Truth at Any Cost: Ken Start and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf HarperCollins ~326pages / $26 REVIEWED BY TerryEastland ~ n case you've forgotten: Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives in Iate 1998 and then acquitted by the Senate in early 1999 . Independent Counsel Kenneth Start made the impeachment referral to the House in September 1998 that led to these outcomes...

...Knowing that the fact of an OPR investigation would be used against him in his House appearance, Starr warned Reno against a leak...

...Reno assured Starr that her decision to investigate the complaints "had nothing to do with your tesThe American Spectator - ] ~ I j / A ~ g v s t 2ooo 87 timony" and that she had formed no conclusions about them...

...Justice did so despite its awareness of the weakness of the Service's position...

...Truth atAny Cost is the story of those ten months...

...Start was "furious, unable to comprehend how an attorney general could launch an investigation of the author of the impeachment referral just as Congress was getting ready to act on it...

...What that means in practical terms is a great expansion of federal ownership of wilderness lands...

...More seriously', Justice supported the Secret Service's effort to prevent its officers from testi~,ing...

...Of course, the very purpose of Huber's book is to recontextualize Green...

...chmidt and Weisskopf show how hard it was for Starr, whom they view as politically naive, to respond effectively to the war waged against him and his office...

...Indeed, Justice could have told the Service in no uncertain terms that its position was a loser and to withdraw it...

...Huber wants to revive for environmentalism a meaning now a century old, one more Teddy Roosevelt than A1 Gore, more conservationist than chemophobic...

...But Glinton's defensive positions served a larger, offensive purpose, the point of which was, as this book plainly shows, to undermine Starr...

...Indeed, none of the authors of the previous books had access to the (now former) independent counsel, who sat for ten sessions of several hours each, or to his assistants, many of TERRY EASTLAND is publisher and president of The American Spectator...

...The authors emphasize Starr's commitment to the rule of law...

...The interviewees also included Starr and no fewer than 2 5 of his aides...

...Attorney General Eric Holder, write Schmidt and \Veisskopf, conceded to a Start aide that the odds of the Senice's prevailing in its elrgnment for a testimonial privilege were no Better than five percent...

...He explains all those issues well enough in his relatively short space, but adds little original to the body of observation, statistic, or argument over the environment...

...But the Starr they offer readers is far more complicated than the simplistic one still routinely found in media portrayals...

...That's not the sort of Green Huber is here to defend...

...he knows that creating markets for pollution rights can lessen pollution faster than command and control can...

...cal perfect environmental health, with statistical constructs standing in for real agents of disease...

...It is this Soft Green that frets over dioxin and global warming, over MTBE and pesticides, over phantom and faraway risks...

...88 Ju ly/Augus t 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator...

...This sort of Green fights new advances in biotech and simultaneously wants to ban tl~e pesticides that biotech could do away with, without causing diminution in the quality or quantity of human foodstuffs...

...Starr is seen here as politically conservative and a committed Christian, but not the far right-wing, sex-obsessed religious zealot of White House imaginings...

...That is why the story of the unmaking of Bill Clinton was also a story, about a great department of government compromised...

...This campaign enlisted Clinton's lawyers, on the one hand, and his spinmeisters on the other...

...Indeed, in one wry passage where he blithely and openly makes up figures to demonstrate that neo-Malthusians are wrong, he seems somewhat contemptuous of bean-counting in the defense of his intellectual principles...

...Other books (of wildly varying quality) have been published on the LewinskyClinton mess, but none has benefited from so many new interviews of so many key players, Starr most notably...

...Starr and his aides, write Schmidt and Weisskopf, believed "that the Clintons were ruthless...

...For his pursuit of the truth, Start was bloodied, again and again...

...Soft Green is the Green of the invisible, the Green of the highly-dispersed or the far future...

...Schmidt and Weisskopf end their book by telling the story- until now unknown-about a meeting at the Justice Department between Starr and Attorney General Janet Reno that took place shortly before his House testimony...

...Huber thinks that tile modern right could both do the right thing and earn political capital by emulating him...

...In wTiting it, Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf, veteran investigative reporters of the Washington Post and Time, respectively, interviewed people "on all sides," more than 15o in all...

...Indeed, it was his "nearly religious reverence" for the law that enabled Starr to overcome his own disagreement with the independent counsel statute, which he long had thought was unconstitutional but which the Supreme Court had sustained in 1988, and accept appointment in 1994 as such a counsel, originally to probe Whitewater...

...If it's public," Reno replied, "the only person madder than you is me...

...Ultimatci?,, of co u, rsc, the courts rejected the prix ilege, al~d Starr, once again having out-L~w)ered )~is oppoo nents, was able to get the testimony he needed...

...The interviewees included fourteen of Clinton's lawyers, nine Justice Department officials, and four Secret Service officials, in addition to lawyers and advisers to Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, and Lewinsky, among others...

...The dismaying t r u t h - p u t in clearer focus by Truth at Any Cost--is that Justice by inaction and action alike supported the White House's "continuing campaign...

...In contrast, Huber's "Hard Green" is concerned with the huge, the physically observable, the beautiful: wilderness, ocean, rivers, lakes, shores...

...Starr's childhood hero was John F. Kennedy...

...It is, the authors say, a second draft of that history (news organizations providing the proverbial "first draft...

...After serving as President Bush's solicitor general, Starr considered challenging Oliver North in Virginia's Republican primary for the Senate because he thought North "an unscrupulous lawbreaker and a disgrace to the Reagan administration...

...Starr began the investigation in January" 1998 and effectively concluded it with his lengthy appearance some ten months later before the House Judiciary Committee...

...Who leaked aside - a n d the culprit has never been identified-the important issue here concerns Reno's willingness to take as seriously as she did, and when she did, so close to the impeachment debate in the House, wispy allegations pressed by Clinton's allies as part of their "continuing campaign" Write Schmidt and Weisskopf: "Starr saw only one explanation [for what Reno had don@ a cowardly deferral to the interests of the president...

...He condemns it as "Soft Green"--"the realm of huge populations (molecules, particles) paired with very weak (low-probability) or slow (long time frame) effects...