RALPH HOAR
IN MEMORIAM

Raging Hoar Moans
Shooting Starr is Only Part of the Story

Revised

So Kenneth Starr stands accused of obstructing justice. Isn't that sweet irony. The prospect of the President's Starr persecutor himself being hauled before a grand jury accused of obstructing justice is an irony so delicious that it must be fattening. However, focusing on Starr's dilemma would be to focus on the dessert and miss the entree. The danger is that it obscures the fact that he was only one in a gaggle of GM lawyers--in house and out house--who collectively seem to have spent the better part of a decade and a half creating, encouraging and/or concealing perjury by GM engineer Edward Ivey. 

The main course here is that Starr is only one of many attorneys either employed by or hired guns of General Motors who (if you believe GM documents and statements recently made public in Florida) helped Ivey with his selective amnesia around the purpose and distribution of his 1973 fuel tank cost/benefit analysis and/or vigorously argued that anything that had crossed their consciousness deserved the protection of attorney client privilege, no matter how felonious. 

Some would have these revelations be part of a White-House-coordinated effort to "get Starr" as though that addresses the charges. The White House had nothing to do with it and saying it did doesn't make the charges go away. "Saving the President's butt," in the delicate words of my daughter the lovely and talented Miss Adrienne is not the purpose of blowing the whistle on the misdeeds of those who would seek to wrap themselves in a mantle of righteousness while they defend those who would callously burn and maim our children. Blushing doesn't show in print so I suppose that GM, Starr and the others truly believe, as GM told The Wall Street Journal, that their behavior "was proper in every regard." It's no wonder they're scrambling for protection from the harsh light of litigation that reveals the truth of their behavior. 

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OPTSF393

3/17/98