Capital Shrink Rap nytimes.com
Then, we have another comparison between current grand inquisitor Ken Starr and other Presidential investigations of the past. I know, it's all irrelevant, but interesting never the less.
The patient in this case is Monica Lewinsky, who, not without reason, sought the help of two different therapists during her adventures with the two big creeps, Clinton and Tripp. As part of the bargain Kenneth Starr drove in his immunity negotiations with Ms. Lewinsky, she agreed to grant a limited waiver freeing both her therapists to corroborate her accounts of Presidential sex in interviews with his investigators. One of the therapists, Irene Kassorla, specifically asked, however, that "the details of her interview not be made public" -- a doomed, almost poignant, request in our Salem of 1998. Both her interview and that of the other therapist, Kathleen Estep, became part of the latest Judiciary Committee document dump last Friday, with minimal redactions.
Since there was no information in either interview remotely germane to the investigation that hadn't already been summarized in the previously released Starr report and documents, there was no need to release the complete interviews; there was no previously unmined news in them at all, as witness their scant press coverage over the weekend. What was added to the record, though, were her therapists' diagnostic speculations about Ms. Lewinsky's possible clinical ailments and their connection to her "relationship with her father." Ho-hum stuff, perhaps, but surely the patient's private business and utterly irrelevant to an impeachment investigation.
In his posthumously published memoir, Arthur Liman, the chief counsel in the Iran-contra hearings, recalls that "suggestions in the press that [Oliver] North had undergone psychiatric treatment at a military facility" prompted him to "subpoena those records." But after soul-searching, he concluded that Colonel North "was entitled to the same privacy as an ordinary citizen." Such concern for the niceties of privacy sound absolutely quaint now.
I wonder if today's Washington would even muster the same outrage once provoked by one of the most unsavory incidents of Watergate -- the White House "plumbers" break-in to the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsberg's therapist in a failed effort to burglarize his psychiatric files.
When the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was sentenced to prison for his role in this incident, the judge, Gerhard A. Gesell, called it "a shameful episode in the history of this country." When last Friday Congress blithely released psychiatric musings on a private citizen, posting them on a government Web site for all the world to see, it was simply business as usual.
Well, there's this thing floating around about people having no shame, but that's a different context.
Cheers, Dan. |
