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Starr wars
Jeffrey Toobin revisits the Lewinsky affair
By Adam Cohen
January 17, 2000
Web posted at: 12:34 p.m. EST (1734 GMT)
There's a reason the Lewinsky scandal was so riveting: it was a
true story that was better scripted than fiction. It began as
John Grisham, with big-haired, twangy-voiced Paula Jones alleging
sexual improprieties in a Little Rock hotel room. It ended as
Shakespeare, with a powerful leader nearly felled by a tragic
flaw. And it was propelled by characters a Hollywood screenwriter
would kill to have dreamed up: the giggling intern, the
treacherous best friend.
In A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That
Nearly Brought Down a President (Random House; 422 pages;
$25.95), New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin retells the whole tale
with gusto and adds some fresh details. One example: a moist-eyed
Clinton hails the Travelgate-embattled Hillary in his 1996 State
of the Union Address as a "wonderful wife [and] magnificent
mother"--and then autographs a copy of the speech as a gift for
Monica Lewinsky. Toobin doesn't shy away from the story's
tawdriest moments--like the Jones camp's suggestion that Clinton
may have undergone surgery to remove the "distinguishing
characteristics" on his penis that Jones claims to have seen.
The book offers up strong opinions about the key players, some
expected (book agent Lucianne Goldberg is Mephistophelian), some
not (much lampooned Lewinsky lawyer William Ginsburg didn't do
too badly). But as a former prosecutor, Toobin reserves his
greatest scorn for Kenneth Starr, whom he portrays as
unqualified, unprincipled, politically biased and lacking in
common sense. Toobin's thesis is that the real vast conspiracy
wasn't the right-wing one Hillary famously charged was behind the
scandal, but a more subtle attempt by the legal system to
circumvent the political process through an "after the fact
election." That may be true, but the fuller explanation lies in
Toobin's damning portrait of Starr. There was no need, the book
suggests, for a conspiracy to throw the republic off course. One
recklessly unrestrained special prosecutor can do it almost
single-handedly.
--By Adam Cohen
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