Transcript
Leon Neyfakh (0:00)
The prosecutors in Ken Starr's office had a code name for their planned confrontation with Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. They called it Prom Night. As you may remember from episode one, this was the secret operation scheduled for January 16, 1998. The plan was to convince Lewinsky to wear wire in order to catch the President committing a crime. The prosecutors referred to it internally as Prom Night in the days leading up to it. I recently had the opportunity to ask Ken Starr in an interview what prom night meant. Here's what he said.
Ken Starr (0:31)
I didn't fashion that. It just kind of emerged out of our process of bantering and reflecting on it. But it has become, to my colleagues and comrades forever, known as by that name. But it could have been a very happy event. And it didn't turn out to be so happy, given the fact that she just said, no, I'm not going to make the deal, and the rest of the story had to unfold.
Leon Neyfakh (1:01)
I guess my curiosity was, who was the one who was going to prom? In the analogy or in the metaphor?
Ken Starr (1:08)
Well, she was being invited to be a part of our community. So welcome to the truth seeking party. So we're trying to get to the bottom of this. These are very serious allegations that the President had lied under oath.
Leon Neyfakh (1:22)
I was reminded of this explanation last week when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was answering questions in a congressional hearing about the meaning of phrases like Renata alumni and devil's triangle. Devil's triangle? Drinking game.
Walter Dellinger (1:38)
How's it played?
Leon Neyfakh (1:40)
Three glasses in a triangle and. You ever played quarters?
Walter Dellinger (1:48)
No.
Leon Neyfakh (1:48)
Okay. It's a quarters game. As many listeners probably know, Kavanaugh worked for Starr in the independent counsel's office as a prosecutor. In fact, Kavanaugh himself alluded to this when he said in his opening statement last Thursday that Democrats were opposing his nomination as revenge for the Clintons. I'm pretty certain Prom night was not Kavanaugh's coinage. He actually wasn't working in the independent counsel's office during the lead up to the January 16th confrontation. But there is something very Brett Kavanaugh about prom night, as well as Starr's flat rejection of its adolescent but sinister connotations. A truth seeking party. That's what prom night meant. Seems like it probably meant something else. As you may have noticed, I'm breaking the first rule of Slow Burn here by talking about the present. The reason I'm allowing myself this indulgence is that this is not a regular episode of Slow Burn. It's an episode meant to entice you into joining me in the expanded Slow Burn universe where there are no rules and which you can access by joining Slate's membership program, Slate Plus. The clip you heard from Kent Starr a moment ago is from an interview I did with him in September. He came to the Slate studios to promote his new memoir, Contempt. We talked for a full hour and we covered a lot of ground. And then I proceeded to use less than one minute of the interview on Slow Burn. The whole rest of the Buffalo was just left totally untouched. What if there was a way for the Slow Burn team to share stuff that, for one reason or another, we couldn't fit into any of the regular episodes? How much deeper could we go into the story of the Clinton impeachment if we had the ability to put up bonus material that only Slate plus members could hear? And what if we could make some money on it? This is Slow Burn. I'm your host Leon Naifak, and this is Secret Tracks, a special episode in which you'll hear a series of brief excerpts from interviews that we've released exclusively through Slate Plus. One thing we've learned from making Slow Burn Season two is that the Clinton saga is very rich. It's a story that rewards sustained attention and a willingness to duck into side streets. And that's what we do on Slate Plus. When I say we, I'm talking about myself and Mary Wilson, a Hall of Fame Slate producer who co hosts Slow Burn with me every week. We start out by Talking for about 10 minutes about behind the scenes stuff, how we worked around the fact that we didn't get to interview Monica Lewinsky, for example, what it was like to meet Linda Tripp. Mary and I also talk about details that were left out of the show, like the subplot of the Travelgate scandal involving Linda Bloodworth Thomason, the creator of Designing Women and the author of a recent viral column about Les Moonves. The main event on every episode of Slow Burn is the interview. If you do the Math, we've released seven episodes of Slow Burn Season 2 so far. We've got one more next week, and for every one of those episodes, we have also given Slate plus members a standalone interview with someone relevant to that specific part of the story. So, for instance, our long Ken Starr interview that appeared as a supplement to episode six. After episode three, we released an interview with Walter Dellinger, the lawyer who argued on the Clinton administration's behalf in front of the Supreme Court in Clinton v. Jones. We didn't get to spend much time on Clinton v. Jones in episode three, but you may remember that the administration's position was that if a president gets sued in civil court, he should be allowed to put a hold on it until after he's out of office. In our interview, Walter Dellinger explained how he felt about this argument and what happened the night before he made it.