Hickman Ewing, the former Memphis federal prosecutor who sent some prominent Tennesseans to prison in the 1980s, also put Donald Trump in the White House.
I came up with this startling proposition after reading Kenneth Starr’s new book Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.
Hickman Ewing in 2014. Photo by Andrea Zucker
Here’s how. Start by focusing on the loser, Hillary Clinton, not the winner. “Crooked Hillary,” to Trump and his fans, lost the 2016 election even though she won the popular vote by 1.9 million votes. Her reputation for sleaze started during the presidency of Bill Clinton, known as “Slick Willie” to his detractors in Arkansas who made “Whitewater” a big deal years before the hook-up with Monica Lewinsky, which got him impeached because of the doggedness of Starr, who was independent counsel.
Contempt is prominently displayed on the crowded table of new releases and memoirs at Novel, the East Memphis book store. There’s a nice shot of Bill and Hillary sharing a secret on the cover. Oh those Clintons, always with the secrets. I went straight to the index to see if there was anything about Hick Ewing. Is there ever!
In the first sentence of the acknowledgements, Starr writes, “I wrote this book drawing on memory, but would have been unable to recount many of the details without the invaluable insights and astonishing recall of Hickman Ewing.”
Ewing, now 76, grew up in Memphis and today lives in Germantown. He was the United States Attorney in Memphis in the 1980s and Starr’s right-hand man for the Arkansas phase of the Clinton(s) investigation known as Whitewater, focused upon a real estate investment. He is mentioned on 25 pages in Starr’s book. The man-of-the-hour as I write this, Supreme Court nominee and co-counsel on the Lewinsky phase of that investigation, Brett Kavanaugh, is mentioned just three times, and Trump but two.
Ewing told me that Starr’s publisher thought he needed a “book coach” to liven up his manuscript and hired a writer in Dallas to come to Memphis to get anecdotes. She stayed three days.
Starr praises Ewing the way a proud father might speak of his son: “the heart and soul of the Little Rock investigation,” a “superstar” with a “prodigious memory” backed up by journals, as well as a “gifted raconteur” who could “speak Southern” with the charming Bill Clinton and his pals and enemies. Ewing was trial savvy, too, sometimes putting adversaries together in the grand jury waiting room to “get the molecules moving” in an investigation. Even cooperative witnesses, Starr writes, start by telling prosecutors what they already know, then 80 percent of what they really know. It’s the other 20 percent you have to dig out, and Ewing was good at it.
Kenneth Starr praises Ewing the way a proud father might speak of his son.
Bill Clinton mentions Ewing several times in My Life, his autobiography, calling him “just as obsessed as Starr with going after us and not nearly as good at disguising it.” It’s anyone’s guess, of course, why a few hundred thousand people in key states didn’t vote for Hillary, but I suggest that Ewing/Starr’s efforts some 20 years ago cost her as many votes as Russian interference or any of the many other things blamed for her defeat, making Donald Trump the upset winner.
I got to know Ewing after his tenure as Memphis prosecutor while I was writing historical sketches about Memphians who got in trouble. Several years ago I drove to Little Rock with him to tour the newly opened Clinton Library. He was a fountain of information whether he was talking about the Clintons, Lewinsky, former Tennessee governor Ray Blanton, former basketball coach Dana Kirk, the notorious Tiller family of tough guys, Memphis high-school sports in the 1950s, the Senior Olympics, or crooked Tennessee sheriffs.
As Ewing said in his distinctive drawl, “I remember stuff.” That, plus the fact that his Bill Clinton impression was so good that he played the part of the then-President in mock interviews, driving the rest of Team Starr to exasperation with his long-winded evasions.
In 1995, he took the depositions of both Clintons in the White House in 1995. Depending on whether he was being formal or folksy, Bill called him “Mr. Ewing” or “Hick.” Hillary skipped the facade of friendliness and just gave him icy stares and curt “I don’t recall” answers.
Starr writes that Ewing thought “BC was a lying dog” and “HRC committed perjury.” Little did she know — or maybe she did know — that it would come back to haunt her 20 years later. The molecules were in motion.
