The Electronic Telegraph   Sunday 28 January 1996   World News

Hillary gives masterful display in prosecutor's Whitewater 'show'
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

COOL as a cucumber, you have to hand her that. Hillary Clinton did not show a flicker of concern as she stopped to chat with reporters on her way into the grand jury. And she was just as self-composed on her way back out, four and a half hours later, after making her mark yet again as a very unusual First Lady.

One is almost tempted to join the cynics in suspecting that her appearance at the US District Court House was a show, a piece of political theatre staged by the special prosecutor to salvage his own reputation.

The prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, has taken some knocks lately. The Senate Whitewater Committee has made his investigation look sluggish, some would say incompetent. He had to do something dramatic to prevent losing all credibility after it emerged that the White House had withheld documents he subpoenaed in 1994. But whether he really intends to get to the bottom of Whitewater is another matter.

The last witness to appear before this grand jury can tell us a thing or two about the real character of the Starr investigation. Patrick Knowlton, who was subpoenaed four days after his name was first revealed to the world by The Sunday Telegraph, says that Mr Starr's prosecutors were more interested in trying to destroy his credibility than in finding out what he could contribute as a witness.

He says they made a gratuitous attempt to portray him as a homosexual. They also mocked claims, substantiated by two other witnesses, that he was intimidated after being called to testify before the grand jury. Disgusted by his treatment, Knowlton is now considering a civil rights suit against the government.

WHO is Anonymous, author of a tell-tale novel called Primary Colors about the Clinton presidential campaign? My own pet theory is that the savage deconstruction of the First Couple is the revenge of Lani Guinier, the woman who was tossed to the wolves in 1993 when her nomination for a post at the Justice Department was shot down by the Republicans. Ms Guinier, of mixed black and Jewish background, is rather liberal, and that week President Clinton happened to be veering to the Right.

There is a little clue in the book about a place called Oak Bluffs. It rang a bell because this is where Bill and Hillary Clinton went in 1986 to attend Guinier's wedding. (They were at Yale Law School together).

It is a cracking novel. Brutal too. Jack and Susan Stanton, the ambitious Governor and First Lady of an obscure southern state who make it to the White House, are both exposed as shameless frauds. Susan has a lesbian lover, and describes her husband as a "faithless, thoughtless, disorganised, undisciplined shit". Governor Jack is a touchy-feely, over-expressive charlatan who seduces the 15-year-old daughter of a friend.

Primary Colors is a good lark but it does not tell us anything we did not know already. The next novel coming down the pike is a different matter. Purposes of the Heart is far from anonymous. It is written by Dolly Kyle, a Dallas lawyer, who first met Bill Clinton in 1959, fell in love with him, manoeuvred her way into his class at Hot Springs High School, and carried on a sexual relationship with him for nearly 30 years. This woman really can spill the beans.

Dolly has kept quiet until now. But she has given a full interview to Publisher's Weekly which is due to come out in February. In her novel the Governor is called Cameron Coulter, and his icy wife, Malary Cheatham, is a woman who will do anything for political power.

The Clinton coterie have been worried about Dolly Kyle for a long time. During the campaign she was told she would be "destroyed" if she breathed a word about her relationship with Clinton. She says that the White House aide Bruce Lindsey mysteriously acquired a copy of her manuscript in 1994 and let it be known that "we don't want it published".

Interestingly, it was Clinton, who first encouraged her to write the novel. At a High School reunion in 1994 he said: "Don't ever censor anything you would write because of me."

She says he is a sensitive man, bursting with generous qualities but also fatally flawed. "Poor Billy, he showed such promise, he could have been somebody," she said, "and he's ended up wasting his life."

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