Clintons Return to a Capital Set for Scandal

WASHINGTON —  As President Clinton ended his vacation Sunday and returned to Washington, two GOP congressmen talked of putting theirs on hold until the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal is resolved.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said on “Fox News Sunday” that the House should take up the Lewinsky matter as soon as independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr submits a report and should not go home for the year until it has reached a conclusion on impeachment. Another senior House Republican, Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach, said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” that if Starr’s report contains significant evidence of wrongdoing, it “ought to be attended to rather than let it drag on and on and on. In the national interest, that might make sense.”

Starr has not indicated when he will submit his report or whether it will go beyond Clinton’s admitted sexual relationship with the former White House intern and associated allegations of obstruction of justice, perjury or suborning perjury.

Amid such talk about his fate, Clinton and the first family ended the vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and the president began preparing for his departure to Russia today for a summit with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Meanwhile, Starr has asked a literary editor and lawyer to help write the report that the prosecutor will deliver to Congress, Time magazine reported Sunday.

Stephen Bates, a Harvard-trained lawyer, is literary editor at the Wilson Quarterly, a Washington-based international review, the magazine reported in today’s editions. An acquaintance described Bates to Time as a “genuinely moral conservative, religious-based, but not an ideologue.”

Lewinsky’s own account, also yet to be written, is already starting a bidding war, according to the New Yorker, which reports in its Sept. 7 issue that the Star tabloid has offered her “$1 million for exclusive rights to her story--if and when she should decide to talk publicly.” But publisher HarperCollins has offered $2 million for a book, the magazine said.