NewsHour Impeachment Coverage: Analysis and Commentary – Looking forward to the president’s counsel

JIM LEHRER: And good evening once again. I’m Jim Lehrer. We’re back with our special PBS NewsHour coverage of Kenneth Starr’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. Stuart Taylor of the National Journal and Newsweek Magazines and author/journalist Elizabeth Drew are back to offer their commentary. The NewsHour’s chief Washington Correspondent, Margaret Warner, is also here to assist me in keeping the story line going, among other things.

JIM LEHRER: And speaking of that, Margaret, when we come back, David Kendall, the moment that a lot of people have been waiting for, will finally have arrived. David Kendall is the President’s personal lawyer and he was a classmate of the President, was he not, in law school?

MARGARET WARNER: Yes. He has a very similar rÈsumÈ. He was a Rhodes Scholar. Then he went to Yale Law School. He’s 54 years old, just a little older than the President. And he has been handling both the Whitewater case and now the Lewinsky case for five years. And as someone pointed out today, he hadn’t been seen much in public –

JIM LEHRER: There he is now looking through his –

MARGARET WARNER: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: — notes.

MARGARET WARNER: He – inside the White House there was the same wrap on him that there has been on Ken Starr, that he was too focused on the legal jeopardy the President might be in and had a deaf ear to the politics. But when all these letters came out between him and Kenneth Starr, you saw that a lot of bad blood has developed between the two of them and so it’ll be very interesting to see when he finally gets to confront Ken Starr.

JIM LEHRER: And for a long time, Stuart, David Kendall had a very low profile. It’s only been in the last few – I guess last couple of months — has it not? — that he’s finally come out in public and first he wouldn’t say anything, he never had anything to say.