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In fact, sex was a subject Starr tried to avoid last week. Scrubbed of all the details that made his original referral to Congress so sensational, the prepared testimony Starr delivered in his first 2 1/4 hours before the committee was remarkable mostly for its tortoise pace and its familiarity. The only surprise came when the prosecutor dropped the fact that he had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the President in two of Starr's long-running, pre-Monica investigations: the 1993 firing of White House travel-office employees and the improper collection of FBI files in 1996 by White House officials. But he got no credit for that revelation from Democrats. Instead, they quickly attacked him for waiting until after the recent midterm election before disclosing Clinton's innocence.
Once Starr started taking questions, it was easy to forget that Bill Clinton, and not the independent counsel, was the one facing impeachment. Democrats intended it that way. They sped past the facts of the case against the President without so much as a backward glance, using their time instead to machine-gun Starr with questions--or often just accusations--about his own conduct as prosecutor. For the most part Starr was able to deflect the attacks without losing his poise, but he was rattled a few times. One such moment came when California's Zoe Lofgren asked Starr whether, two months before he said he had first heard about Monica Lewinsky, he had discussed the existence of a tape recording "on which a woman claimed to have had sexual contact with President Clinton." The implication was that Starr might have lied when he told Attorney General Janet Reno in January that he had just stumbled across the Linda Tripp tapes. Seemingly stunned by the specificity of the question, Starr said he could not "recall that" and repeatedly promised to "search my recollection" for an answer.
Starr's memory lapses and semantic evasions would have been less noticeable if they weren't so Clintonian. More than half a dozen times, he answered a question by saying he couldn't remember, an unexpected fuzziness from a prosecutor who was nothing if not precise about the details in his 445-page impeachment referral to Congress. Perhaps most damning, he was asked whether his investigators, after they swooped down on Lewinsky on Jan. 16 at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Arlington, Va., had pressed her to wear a wire in order to tape conversations with Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan and even the President. Not so, Starr insisted to David Kendall, the President's attorney, whereupon Kendall calmly produced an FBI report from that night that suggested otherwise.
Kendall's 65-min. interrogation of Starr was the climax of a marathon day, a clash of two millionaire lawyers from prestigious firms in Washington with a knack for conveying much with the turn of the mouth and the raising of an eyebrow. After an opening exchange of first-name pleasantries, Kendall studiously called his sparring partner "Mr. Starr" even as the answers came back addressed to "David." Kendall was crisp and deliberate as he hammered away, accusing Starr's office of unlawfully leaking information to the press and mistreating witnesses. When Kendall suggested that Starr's agents had "held" Lewinsky against her will, Starr's face darkened, and he snapped, "That is false, and you know it to be false!"