Strictly Hush-Hush

Ken Starr wants Secret Service agents to testify about Clinton. Should they be alowed to say no?

From the first years that Treasury Department agents were assigned full time to protect an American President--Theodore Roosevelt--discretion has been a working principle. Early in the century one of them wrote that unless they ignored presidential confidences that they saw or heard on the job, the Commander in Chief would never let them close enough to provide protection, and so a Secret Service agent, he wrote, must be "deaf, dumb and blind."

No agent has ever testified against a President in court. But no President has ever been pursued by anyone quite like Kenneth Starr, who wants to question agents about...

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