JOE CONASON, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, JUNE 12, 2000:

 

“Starr’s Boswells Owe Ex-Judge an Apology.”

 

In journalistic circles, much has been made of alleged errors in A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin’s excellent account of the Clinton impeachment follies.  Certain people rejoiced after Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff recently demanded and won a few corrections in future editions of the Toobin book.

 

Next came Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post, who was quite peeved by Mr. Toobin’s criticism of her and her leak-driven reporting during the Monica Lewinsky crisis.  She, too, dispatched a letter seeking revisions, but her complaints were rejected by Random House.  As co-author with Time reporter Michael Weisskopf of a new book more sympathetic to former independent counsel Kenneth Starr than was Mr. Toobin’s, she has powerful motives to discredit A Vast Conspiracy. 

 

Authors make errors.  Unlike many, Mr. Toobin was quite good-natured about correcting his mistakes, minor and arguable as they mostly appear to be.  We are about to discover whether Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Weisskopf will behavewith similar grace in confronting a very serious and damaging inaccuracy in their own book, Truth At Any Cost.

 

The title implies some deep purity of purpose in Mr. Starr’s appallingly partisan conduct as independent counsel, and the authors seem to identify with him in some respects.  Rather pompously, they promote themselves as “objective” reporters who—unlike Mr. Starr’s “polemical” critics—are qualified to assess the events leading up to impeachment without bias.  Actually, they are somewhat less impartial toward the former independent counsel and his aides than Charlie McCarthy would be in writing a biography of Edgar Bergen.

 

Consistenly faither to the Starr agend, Truth At Any Cost slants heavily against the Clintons.  Still worse, however, is the authors’ cavalier trashing of William Watt, a relatively obscure victim of their hero’s inquisition.

 

On page 10, they refer obliquely to a Starr witness who “met with the Clintons’ Washington lawyer, David Kendall, who was offering legal assistance and informal advice to witnesses interested in resisting Starr’s probe.”  The explanatory footnote goes on to identify this witness as Mr. Watt, who, despite this supposed intervention by the President’s attorney, “ultimately pled guilty and cooperated with Starr’s investigation.”

 

That sentence is inexcusably inaccurate.  As Mr. Watt himself says, it is “a complete and total falsehood.  That is a lie.  I didn’t plead guilty to anything because I wasn’t charged with anything.”  Although the former Little Rock judge was a target of Mr. Starr’s investigation, he was never indicted by the independent counsel or anyone else.

 

Moreover, neither he nor his attorney ever colluded in any way with Mr. Kendall, since they have had not the slightest contact with him.  “That too is inaccurate,” said Mr. Watt.  “I’ve never met David Kendall.  Mark Hampton, my lawyer, has never met David Kendall.”  The Clintons’ counsel agreed.  “That’s simply false.  I never met or spoke with William Watt or his lawyer.”

 

The real story of Mr. Watt’s harsh encounter with the Office of the Independent Counsel is complicated and revealing.  When Mr. Starr’s deputies found him unwilling to bolster the testimony of David Hale, their chief Whitewater witness against the President, they threatened indictment.  “They tried to intimidate me, bankrupt me,” he recalled.  As the Starr prosecutors knew, however, he was innocent of wrongdoing despite his dealings with Mr. Hale.  Indeed, he had tried to expose Mr. Hale’s $2 million fraud against the federal government several years before the crooked businessman was finally indicted in 1993.  Unable to indict Mr. Watt, the O.I.C. eventually immunized him.

 

But later the prosecutors found him recalcitrant on the witness stand, and smeared him in open court as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”  That ridiculous accusation appears nowhere in court papers filed by the O.I.C., says Mr. Watt, but it was sufficiently damaging to force his resignation from the bench and the forfeiture of his pension.  Today he suffers the fresh indignity of being depicted as a conniving felon, in a book widely hailed by conservative commentators as the hones corrective to White House spin.

 

No doubt the O.I.C. would have liked to convict Mr. Watt of some offense.  Like so much of Truth At Any Cost, the passage about him may merely reflect the wishful thinking of Mr. Starr and his deputies.

 

Mr. Watt, who is now practicing law in Little Rock, Ark. is quite angry that the authors didn’t bother to contact him or his attorney.  He intends to demand a retraction and apology and apology from Ms. Schmidt, Mr. Weisskopf and their publisher, HarperCollins.  “We will pursue it,” he said.

 

So before they point to the alleged errors in anybody else’s journalism, Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Weisskopf should sit down and compose a suitably abject public apology to Bill Watt.  He’s got it coming, and so do they.

 

 

LETTERS, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, JUNE 19, 2000:

 

“Offended Objectors.”

 

To the Editor:

 

Last week Joe Conason wrote a column demanding to know whether we would be “gracious” enough to acknowledge that there is an error in our book, Truth At Any Cost:  Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton.  We responded in writing to him the afternoon he queried us, acknowledging that there was, in fact, an error, albeit in a footnote, which we intend to correct in future printings.  Mr. Conason, rushing to get his latest diatribe into print, did not quite have time to include our response.  So, we offer it here.

 

William Watt, a witness in Starr’s Whitewater investigation, testified under a grant of immunity, not after a guilty plea as our footnote said.  We relied on Watt’s testimony in the Tucker-McDougal trial to describe how the president’s lawyer David Kendall offered help to Watt and others.  (Watt testified he told another witness that “Mr. Kendall is representing some of the Clinton interests out of Washington and on at least one occasion that we had been in contact with them.”  Watt said he told the other witness if he wanted to resist Starr’s lawyers, he could get “some legal assistance and informal advice from Mr. Kendall’s office.”  Kendall declined to be interviewed for our book, so we do not know whether he takes issue with Watt’s testimony.

 

Of course we regret this unintentional error.  Nevertheless, we think it is unethical and unseemly for Mr. Conason to use his newspaper column to vent his spleen on journalists who have written a book that competes with his.  Mr. Conason’s column doesn’t ever mention that he has a rival book, one we note was publicly endorsed by the president a few weeks ago.  Furthermore, Mr. Conason has made wholly false statements recently, including to the Hartford Courant, suggesting that Susan Schmidt was an “informant” to Ken Starr, and that her name may be on a redacted list of such informants filed in a legal proceeding.  We challenge him to produce evidence that such a list exists—redacted or otherwise—and that her name is on it.  We are certain it is not and that his accusation, like so much of what he write, is unfounded and scurrilous.

 

We wonder why Joe Conason seems so threatened by our book.  He ignores dozens of critical revelations in the test [sic?] to pick at a footnote.  Every period of history results in varying accounts.  It is puzzling why Mr. Conason can’t tolerate any but his own.

 

Susan Schmidt

Michael Weisskopf

Washington, D.C.

 

Joe Conason replies:

 

All errors are by definition “unintentional,” and I suppose Bill Watt will have to be satisfied by this casual expression of regret from Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Weisskopf.  Still, it is hard to think of anything more “unfounded” or “scurrilous” than saying that an innocent man pled guilty to a felony.

 

But the authors are too eager to indict me to waste any space on apologies or explanations to Mr. Watt.  This letter echoes their book’s tendentious style, omitting pertinent facts in favor of self-serving rhetoric.

 

For example, they don’t mention that well before I filed my column, I called both Mr. Weisskopf aand Ms. Schmidt for comments.  He didn’t bother to call back at all; she quickly hung up on me.  It was several hours later when they apparently reconsidered their response and faxed a page almost identical to the above—which, as an Observer editor informed them, arrived too late to be included last week.  For my part, I would have been perfectly happy to include their admission of error.

 

They gloss over the fact that their book claims Mr. Watt “met” with attorney Kendall, an event which only occurred in their imagination.  Probably Mr. Watt would have enlightened them regarding those matters if they had called him (and surely he would have dispelled their illusions concerning his supposed “guilty plea” as well.)

 

My book, The Hunting of the President (written with Gene Lyons), is yet another red herring.  I somehow suspect that Observer readers are aware of its existence, but in any case my editors here didn’t seem to feel I was under any ethical obligation to ignore the shortcomings of Mr. Weisskopf’s and Ms. Schmidt’s work, and neither do I.

 

As to whether Ms. Schmidt was an O.I.C. informant—a term first used by Mr. Starr to avoid testifying about the copious leaks from his operation—my only remark on that subject was in response to an inquiry from a Hartford Courant writer.  He asked me to suggest questions for the authors of Truth At Any Cost.  I replied that I wondered whether Ms. Schmidt, whose stories in The Washington Post had so obviously depended on leaks from the O.I.C., was included on Mr. Starr’s roster of journalistic informants.  We will have no way of knowing which reporters appear on that peculiar list, unless and until it is released by the U.S. District Court in Washington.