Me
and Mr. Starr
Richard
Grayson
In the fall of 1998, soon after the Starr Report
was released, I awoke on a Sunday morning in suburban Fort Lauderdale,
where I was living with my parents, to hear a report on National
Public Radio that the Independent Counsel’s office was
preparing to indict first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The report
would turn out to be false, but it so enraged me that I decided
to send a postcard to Kenneth Starr’s wife Alice in their
suburban Washington home, whose address I found by searching
on the Lexis/Nexis database to which I had access as an adjunct
instructor of writing courses at a nearby university.
I got the postcard from a display outside the
bathrooms of a restaurant in Miami Beach. On one side was a
photo of a South Beach hotel I had never heard of. On the other
side, I addressed the card to Alice Starr, whom I did not like
after reading the catty comments she made about Mrs. Clinton
– they related to the First Lady’s hair –
in an interview with a women’s magazine.
I wrote, using printed letters:
Dear Mrs. Starr,
Your husband is out of control. You must try
to stop him because his reckless actions will end up hurting
many people – including people you love.
Sincerely,
Richard Grayson
Below my name I wrote my address at the time,
my parents’ home.
Eleven days later, I was in my parents’
kitchen eating lunch, having changed into shorts and a t-shirt
after teaching a class in freshman composition, when the doorbell
rang.
My father, who had answered the door, came in,
visibly shaken, to tell me that there were two men from the
FBI outside who wanted to talk to me.
Of course I knew what it was about.
The two special agents from the Miami office of
the FBI introduced themselves. Both were large men in their
thirties. They mentioned that they had been driving around for
half an hour trying to find the cul-de-sac the house was on,
a street that had three different names as it wound around the
subdivision, Oak Knoll Estates.
“Well, we’ve made this hideout hard
to find,” I said sarcastically. Hadn’t they ever
heard of Mapquest?
“I suppose you know why we’re here,”
the white agent said.
“I haven’t the vaguest idea,”
I said.
He took out a photocopy of both sides of my postcard.
“Did you send this postcard?” he asked me.
I looked at it carefully. “Oh, yes.”
“Are you aware that this could be considered
a threat?”
To my surprise, I did not feel scared. I was angry.
“So now they’re sending the FBI to investigate people
who are criticizing Ken Starr?”
The black agent spoke up. “This seems like
more than criticism. You’re threatening Mr. Starr’s
family.”
“No,” I said. “I said that he
and his investigation are hurting people and that if he didn’t
stop, he and his family would get hurt too – emotionally,
politically.”
“Don’t you think this could be considered
a threat by someone who read it?”
“No,” I said. My father stepped out
in front of the door – I didn’t want the agents
in the house, and they hadn’t asked to come in. They showed
my father the photocopy of my postcard and asked him if he thought
this sounded like a threat.
“I could see where someone could think that,”
my father said.
The agents asked me if I had any guns or other
weapons in the house.
“No, I don’t believe in the Second
Amendment,” I said, and then realized how stupid that
sounded.
The agents exchanged a look. “And have you
made any plans to travel to Washington?”
“No.”
“So you don’t think what you wrote
was threatening?”
“I’m a writer,” I told him.
“I use words carefully. I wasn’t threatening anyone.
I know about federal laws regarding threats through the mail
– I went to law school.”
“Did you graduate?”
“Yes, with high honors. But I never practiced
or took the bar exam. I was just interested in the intellectual
part of it.”
The black agent smiled.
Their next questions were about the postcard.
Had I been staying at the hotel pictured on it and where was
that hotel? I explained to them the concept of postcards as
advertisements placed in racks outside the bathrooms of restaurants,
bookstores, and cafes.
They asked me my age and what I did for a living.
I told them the university where I taught four
writing courses. “But, you know, it’s just adjunct
work,” I said.
The white agent nodded as if he thought this comment
came from an insane person. After a few more questions, they
let me go with the “strong suggestion” that if I
want to express my views, I should write letters to newspapers.
I told them that I often did and that I’d
published a number of op-ed articles in newspapers, including
the New York Times, in recent years. The black agent smiled
again, this time almost sympathetically.
I went back to lunch while they talked to my father.
When he came in, my father said they had wanted
to know the name of my psychiatrist.
“You’re lucky they thought you were
crazy,” he yelled, and then started in about how I was
going to lose my job because of this – as if I cared –
and I guess I did get a little crazy because I tried to call
the Miami Herald so it would be in the paper, and then my father
really started screaming, and my mother, who worshipped the
Clintons, started yelling that someone actually should
kill Kenneth Starr, and that only made my father more hysterical
A few months later, a legal studies professor
at the university where I taught adjunct writing courses suddenly
retired. I was asked if I could fill in and teach legal studies
courses like constitutional history as a visiting professor
for the next academic year. Of course I would – I’d
been teaching college classes at a dozen schools from the time
I’d gotten my MFA – and this would only be my second
full-time, if temporary, position.
When I was teaching undergrads Constitutional
History the following spring, in March 2000, I got an invitation
to attend a special class at the university’s law school.
The class, Constitutional Decision-Making, taught by former
ABC Supreme Court correspondent Tim O’Brien, would feature
Kenneth Starr as the guest speaker. The invitation stated there
would be a luncheon afterwards in the law schools’ faculty
study.
I told my friend Dave, who taught the philosophy
of law, that I would go if he would. He wanted to. He hated
Kenneth Starr.
The class was fairly interesting, even though
Dave and I stood in the nosebleed section of a large lecture
hall with tiered seating. Starr took questions, and I got to
ask how he felt about the Supreme Court’s decision in
Morrison v. Olsen, in which they upheld the independent
counsel law. He said he agreed with Justice Scalia’s dissent,
which said that the office of independent counsel violated the
separation of powers because the office was in the executive
branch but was appointed by a panel of three judges. Starr didn’t
explain why he accepted being the Whitewater independent counsel
if he thought the office was unconstitutional.
I felt a little funny going to the faculty study
since I wasn’t familiar with anyone at the law school,
and I felt kind of intimidated by the law professors. I tried
to stick close to Dave. The luncheon was a buffet of cold cuts,
and you could sit anywhere you wanted. Dave and I put together
our sandwiches, got drinks, and picked a table.
As soon as I sat down, I had this strange feeling
I’ve had a few times in my life – that I knew exactly
what was going to happen in the next minute. In this case, I
knew that Kenneth Starr was going to choose, of all the fifty
or so seats he could have taken, the chair next to mine.
And he did.
Tim O’Brien was at the table, and Dave and
I introduced ourselves and that’s how I found myself eating
a turkey sandwich next to the former public official against
whom the FBI thought I had made deadly threats. Ken Starr had
roast beef on rye.
It’s always odd to see in person celebrities
you’ve seen only on TV or films or in magazine and newspaper
photos. You’re amazed that they look and sound almost
exactly like they do in the media. Anyway, we all steered away
from talking about Clinton and Whitewater and Monica.
Ken Starr said he hoped to write a book about
the Supreme Court, and we talked about my course in Constitutional
History. A law professor brought up legal issues involving cyberspace,
and I mentioned that my parents had recently voted by Internet
in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary in Arizona, where
they’d moved.
Ken Starr seemed mildly interested in that, but
soon he started asking Tim O’Brien and the law professors
where the good bars in Fort Lauderdale were. I was surprised
that he drank, actually. I myself don’t drink.
He seemed quite amiable, even charming. He told
a joke, neither political or offensive, but the sort of mildly
amusing joke you hear from a decent keynote speaker at a convention,
half-chuckle at, and immediately forget.
We shook hands as the luncheon ended.
“It was a pleasure to meet you,” Ken
Starr told me.
I decided I was definitely glad that I had never
been able to reach the Miami Herald to tell them about my being
investigated for making threats against him. It’s a good
thing that never was in the paper.
As we walked back towards the undergraduate building,
I told Dave, “You know, when you’re with him, you
can almost forget that you hate him.”
“Yeah,” Dave said, “but now
I’m starting to hate him again.”
“Me too,” I said, and I really was.
In December 2001, I was hired as director of the academic resource
program at that law school, and I’ve met Ken Starr twice
since then. He is always very friendly and I am always very
polite. Unless he reads this, he’ll never know the FBI
thought I was going to kill him.
....
Full name: RICHARD GRAYSON
Party: WRITE-IN
Residence: DAVIE, FL
Marital status: SINGLE
Prev. occupation: PROFESSOR
Prev. political experience: NO PRIOR ELECTED OFFICE
Education: JD UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1994
Birth date: JUNE 04, 1951
Birthplace: BROOKLYN, NY
Religion: ATHEIST
