By Michael Miner
PHONE SEX
Clinton has disgraced himself, O’Toole acknowledged. But who in this affair, he wondered, has not? Normally a scandal finds its heroes, its dauntless reporter and “heroic whistle-blower,” its sympathetic victim and “steely, incorruptible investigator.” But who have we here? he wondered. For a whistle-blower, Linda Tripp; for a victim, a young woman who promptly put herself on display in a preposterous Vanity Fair photo spread; for an investigator, Kenneth Starr, the “Smutfinder General” whose methods, O’Toole told his Irish readers, “have at times bordered on the maniacal” and whose associates encompass “the most virulent members of the Christian Fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party.”
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And for a reporter? O’Toole wrote that David Brock, whose 1993 article on Clinton’s sex life in the American Spectator set the wheels in motion, confessed last April in Esquire, “I wasn’t hot for this story in the interest of good government or serious journalism. I wanted to pop [Clinton] right between the eyes.”
“I’ve been giving the Starr report a close read,” said the editor in chief. “Looks to me like the squalid tale of a middle-aged man in a fishbowl making a pathetic bid to split the difference between marital fidelity and a harmless fling.”
He reached into his briefcase and brought out a Bible. His editors shifted uneasily in their chairs. Ever since winning that ethics award the chief had acted a little balmy. But this was the first time he’d brought the Good Book to a news conference.
“That would have made a pretty good sidebar,” said the ME. “Job blessed with new issue. Old issue still dead.”
