LITTLE ROCK — The investigation and impeachment of President Bill Clinton cut a partisan rift in America that lingers today, the author of a new book said in Little Rock on Friday.
Ken Gormley, author of The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, said at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service that the episode was a watershed event in an “intensely negative way” for modern American politics.
“If you look in the mirror and examine the facts honestly, both sides share some blame. I’m not just talking about Ken Starr, the man, and Bill Clinton, the man. I’m talking about the angry cohorts that grew up around them in Washington, in Little Rock ... in every part of the country,” Gormley said.
“We lost our compass, folks,” he said. “And this was the beginning, in my view, of the red states and the blue states, and the separate television channels for liberals and conservatives.”
Gormley spoke Friday as part of the Arkansas Literary Festival, which runs through this weekend.
Gormley, newly appointed dean of Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, traces the breadth of Clinton’s legal troubles beginning with his Whitewater real estate dealings in Arkansas in the 1970s.
Gormley spent a decade working on the nearly 800-page book. He started by sitting in on the first day of Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999.
Gormley’s interviews included all the key players involved, including Clinton, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, White House intern Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Arkansas woman who accused Clinton of sexual harassment while he was governor.
The book’s evenhandedness and thoroughness has been roundly praised in reviews.
Gormley avoids portraying Starr as a conservative political zealot out to ruin Clinton, instead writing that he was a man focused on doing a job. But he also concludes that Starr went too far in expanding his investigation beyond Whitewater into the Lewinsky affair.
Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford - a Clinton friend who appears in the book - said Friday that the text is a “very definitive and very fair account.”
“Its a fascinating story. It’s a part of American history,” Rutherford said. “I would add there were parts in it that were very painful to read because many of our friends were involved.”
During his research, Gormley said, he was continually amazed by how often the course of the history could have been changed.
An example he gave was the American Spectator articlethat claimed Clinton propositioned Paula Jones inside a Little Rock hotel.
Gormley said the magazine’s editor told him that it was actually a mistake that Jones’ name was printed. Her naming in the article helped spark Jones’ lawsuit.
“There are a hundred moments in this story where even the change of one single fact could have changed everything so the tumblers of history wouldn’t have fallen into place,” Gormley said.
Gormley said Lewinsky was the most difficult of all his interviews.
He described her as extremely smart but extremely wary after feeling “burned so many times” by writers.
But she was forthcoming about her role in the scandal.
Gormley said he ended up feeling sympathy for her and her family.
“It’s true that you know if you are engaging in an extramarital affair with a married man, who also happens to be president of the United States, that your picture could end up on the cover of a tabloid magazine,” he said. “But you would never, ever imagine that you could be surrounded by FBI agents and prosecutors and told you are going to go to jail, and that your parents might go to jail, and that the president of the United States might be impeached.”
Gormley called the scandal a “tragedy of epic proportion” in the history of American politics.
He said he hopes future generations learn that restraint is an indispensable part of the political process.
“Sometimes, if we fight to the bitter end in the name of our own version of American virtue, we end up damaging or destroying the very institutions of government that we’ve sworn to protect,” he said.
More information about other speakers to be featured during the festival is available at www.
arkansasliteraryfestival.org.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 04/10/2010