The Hunting of the President

In late March of this year, the Office of the Independent Counsel for the Whitewater matter quietly shuttered its D.C. operation. All told, Kenneth Starr waged the most expensive independent counsel inquiry in the nation's history: Ten years after it began its witch hunt against Bill and Hillary Clinton, the office had spent $80 million in taxpayer dollars but had very little to show for it.

In 2001, journalists Gene Lyons and Joe Conason coauthored an exhaustive takedown of the Starr investigation; The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton became a New York Times bestseller. On June 15 a documentary film, directed by Harry Thomason, based on the book will premiere in Little Rock; the movie will be released nationwide on June 18. The Hunting of the President reveals the players who conspired to take down a president, as well as the lives that were destroyed in the process.

The American Prospect's writing fellow Ayelish McGarvey recently spoke to Conason and Lyons by phone about the film.

What role did you have in the development of the film?

Conason: We decided to sell the book to Harry Thomason for development, and then we conducted the interviews. We conducted all of the interviews for the film together, with the exception of Susan McDougal – Gene couldn't make it out to Los Angeles for that one.

But every other interview was done by a team of Gene and me; Doug Jackson, who was there to help produce; and [cinematographer] Jim Roberson and the rest of our crew, who were all on hand. The interviews were turned over to [Thomason] as raw footage, and the production team added the other clips, the narration, and so forth. As the movie was cut, we saw different versions and added our two cents from time to time. We actually had some strong arguments with the production people about what should and shouldn't be in the film. And I should say, I think Gene and I are pretty satisfied: Most of the content we hoped would be part of the film was in included. There was much more we wanted to include, but we just couldn't fit it all – it's a 90-minute movie.

I was wondering about that. The book is nearly 400 pages long, and covers a complex series of events and characters. How is a book like this is transformed into a smooth, 90-minute movie?

Conason: Leave a lot of stuff out!

Lyons: If I had been responsible for making the film, it would have been longer than The Sorrow and the Pity, and twice as depressing. There was just too much detailed information – you can't include all of that in one film. I learned a lot from [Conason] during this process. I've always been the kind of writer that follows the sounds of words around, and chases metaphors. Mine are literary antecedents – I used to be an English professor.

The structure of the film was very important, and we were forced to come up with a simple one, which I would describe this way: The film becomes the story of how the political right constructed a "bear trap" for Clinton that had two "jaws" – one jaw being the Whitewater investigation, which was a hoax, in my view. The other "jaw" was the fraudulent Paula Jones investigation. So the sex is on one side, and the money is on the other. And Bill Clinton gaily jumped into it all.

So that is the basic structure, and we go back and forth between the two. The difficult thing about telling the story is that there was no conservative politburo, for example, coordinating all of this; it was a bunch of disparate people with similar interests operating in parallel, sometimes coordinating with one another. It was hard to keep that simple narrative going, while still reminding people of the interconnections of the various players who set about to ruin both Clintons by any means.