KURTZ: Why wasn't that enough to go on? Well, I'm sure you've asked yourself this a hundred times.

WHITAKER: Right, right, right, right. Well, a couple things is that Mike really knew a lot. It wasn't like Woodward and Bernstein writing a little piece where they only knew about Starr. He knew a lot about it, but he had never met Lewinsky herself. All of his sources were sort of around her. So we didn't know, you know, just how credible she was. And by the time, once when Starr had her, you know, basically under protective custody to sort of, you know, question her, we couldn't get to her.

The other thing which we didn't talk about at the time but I talk about in the book is that I had stepped in for Maynard Parker, who was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time. Maynard had been aware for almost a year that Mike was working on this story, but he had never told me, and he hadn't told Rick Smith, who was the publisher. He hadn't told Don Graham. So -