Eyewitness to a witch hunt

Like a lot of Americans, my wife Marie McCaffrey and I were appalled at the news footage of Susan McDougal being dragged in chains to testify before Ken Starr's Whitewater grand jury in the spring of 1998. By then, her silence had earned her nearly a year and a half in some of America's roughest prisons—including eight months in solitary confinement.

Being a writer-designer team, we filed our protest by printing buttons with a black star bisected by a red slash and reading "Free Susan McDougal/No Starr Chamber." Jean Godden wrote a squib on the buttons, which Pat Harris, Susan McDougal's fianc頡nd co-counsel, came across on the Internet. He tracked us down, and frequent contact led to our hosting them at a Seattle fund-raiser in late February.

Susan and Pat were bracing for their next ordeal by OIC (Office of the Independent Counsel), which was to begin on March 8 in Little Rock, Arkansas. She faced two charges of "criminal" contempt and one count of obstruction of justice for refusing to testify before Ken Starr's Whitewater grand jury.

She had already served 18 months for "civil" contempt for the same acts of silence, but that sentence was intended to coerce her cooperation; the new charges were intended to punish her non-cooperation.

If not the "trial of the century," Susan's next date in court at least qualified as the trial of the last year of the century. So we decided to catch the final arguments and, we hoped, the verdict. The following account is excerpted (with selected amplifications) from my notebook of the unfolding endgame of Susan McDougal's final duel with Ken Starr.

April 6

Leave Sea-Tac 6am. Touch down in Boise and Las Vegas, change planes in Phoenix, pass through DallasFort Worth. Land in Little Rock 5pm local time (3pm Seattle).

Arrive at Capital Hotel, a block off the Arkansas River. Gleaming white Victorian pile, dating from 1877. Phone Pat Harris in Suite 308. "You're here, great! Get down here quick, we've got some work for you." Not thrilled but how can we refuse?

Arrive at "War Room." Unfortunately, it looks like it belongs to the losing side. Pat sits at a large dining table amid the rubble of banker's boxes and random piles of papers. Normally laid back and cheerful, Pat is clearly exhausted but reaches into his reserves of good humor to greet us warmly.

Susan's lead lawyer, Mark Geragos, (rhymes with "asparagus") arrives soon after with wife Paulette and their two young kids. It's our first meeting. Mark is tall and lankily graceful as a giraffe. With his hawk nose and swept-back hair, he looks like he's constantly leaning into an oncoming gale, which, in a legal sense, he is.

Susan is last to appear. A strikingly handsome, charismatic woman, with thin, parabolic eyebrows that give her wide-set eyes an expression of perpetual surprise. Big hugs and a brave smile cannot conceal her anxiety tonight. Earlier that day, Judge George Howard Jr. had crippled her defense with his instructions to the jury.

McDougal faces three charges: two counts of "criminal" contempt for refusing to testify before Starr's Whitewater grand jury, and a count of obstruction of justice for being generally "uncooperative." The indictments were issued during the grand jury's last days (the OIC cannot level charges on its own), and seemed gratuitously vindictive after the farce of President Clinton's impeachment—but the show must go on.

Judge Howard had initially allowed Mark to essentially put the Starr Chamber on trial, including Julie Hyatt Steele's explosive testimony on her own mistreatment. It came as a complete shock, then, when the judge told the jury that it could acquit Susan on the two contempt charges only if it found she had failed to testify to the grand jury by dint of "accident, mistake, or other innocent reason," not because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Those last three words, "other innocent reason," defined the eye of the needle through which Mark had to guide the heavily laden camel of his defense. The odds were not promising as Mark and Pat struggled to construct a persuasive closing argument for the next day.

Mark and Pat have a job for us, mostly for Marie: create four large posters to illustrate key points in Mark's closing argument. The first includes a photo of Ken Starr testifying before Congress and his statement that he had "devised a plan" to "develop" Jim and Susan McDougal, among others, as witnesses against the Clintons by charging them with federal crimes. Two other posters show Starr henchmen Hickman Ewing and Ray Jahn with snippets of their testimony at the McDougal trial. The last depicts the steep ladder of confidence that the jury would have to climb in order to find Susan guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt."

Seems kind of flaky, but who are we to try to out-lawyer Susan's defense team? After a trip to Kinko's and working on a borrowed Mac, we finish by 1am. Our 20-hour day is now over.

April 7

Ride to Federal Court House with Pat and Susan. Large gaggle of reporters and videographers penned inside a steel fence by the main entrance. Not a crazed paparazzi scene, but actually quite cordial. Observers and observed are old friends by now. We all do the "perp walk."