Nonfiction review: The Death of American Virtue

NONFICTION

More than a decade passed since the impeachment trial of William Jefferson Clinton. Neither terrorism attacks, recessions nor the passage of time has diminished America's obsession with the Clinton administration and the scandals that plagued it.

All right, everyone. Take a deep breath. It's time to open up "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr," by historian Ken Gormley. This mammoth, comprehensive account of the 1990s' favorite soap opera reassembles the quirky characters we either love or loathe -- among them: a president who wags his finger and lies to the American public; a first lady who discovers "lost" billing records by accident in the White House living quarters; a zealous band of prosecutors skirting the bounds of legal ethics, and, of course, Monica Lewinsky.

Gormley provides a refreshingly even-handed approach to the battle between Clinton and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Other than the book's title and its implied conclusion that such a national distraction should never recur, Gormley allows no political bias or editorializing to cloud the story. He doesn't need to; his interviews of key players provide enough color and rancor to amuse and shock.

Paula Jones, who sued Clinton for sexual harassment when he was governor of Arkansas, told Gormley that people thought Starr and his cohorts were dragging the president through the mud. "He drug his own self though the mud, by doing what he did," she said. Jones eventually settled for $850,000.

Lewinsky, the White House intern who dallied with "the Big Creep" and had a blue dress to prove it, told Gormley that Clinton lied under oath during grand jury testimony. What upset her most, though, was his failure to apologize to her. She's living in New York and pursuing a master's degree in social psychology.

Clinton's interviews with Gormley offered little news. The former president refused to discuss his relationship with Lewinsky. (His testimony denying their affair ultimately formed the basis for the House's impeachment vote.) Instead, he carped about the right-wing conspiracy of Starr and congressional Republicans.

He described his accusers as "a group of people [who] didn't care about the Constitution, the law, the personal hypocrisy. It wasn't about telling the truth . . . it was just about power." He called Starr the Republicans' "errand boy" who "danced to their tune, just as hard as he could dance."

Clinton's chief antagonist was less acrid. Starr insisted that his Office of Independent Counsel "acted with zero partisan influence" and that he merely followed the law in his investigations of the Clintons. As he told the House Judiciary Committee: "The truth is sacred. The oath, both of office and of witnesses, is sacred. The law must be obeyed."

In a book short on heroes, Starr makes the courageous admission that, perhaps, his office should not have taken over the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation.

Starr did not escape unscathed, however. A Justice Department inquiry into his office's conduct found ethics violations in its handling of witness Lewinsky. Gormley's meticulous reporting confirms that Starr's deputies questioned the young woman for hours, despite her repeated requests to contact her attorney.

"The Death of American Virtue" has a few flaws. Gormley allows Starr's wife, Alice, to describe the prosecutor's emotional turmoil for him. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a key figure in the Whitewater development scandal, is not interviewed. Dozens of pages are consumed by side issues, such as Walter Cronkite's impressions of media reporting, legal issues involving the Secret Service and comments by Clinton's mentor at Oxford University in the late 1960s ("There was no suggestion that he was a romping 'sexo' then").

Nonetheless, Gormley has produced a Pulitzer-worthy book by perfecting the genre of contemporary history. His decade-long journey through the back roads of Arkansas to the inner sanctums of American politics, his extraordinary access to presidents and to common people swept into their wake, and his consummate objectivity in reporting what was equal parts Shakespearean tragedy and Woody Allen comedy is a literary achievement.

Brian Weakland is a Richmond-based attorney and author.