how do you clean up a sharp word beginning?

Zoooooooming all the way in to do the edit. It's as much art as it is science with this sort of thing. The undo key will play heavily in this. It's really a matter of finding that edit point where once you make the edit, things sound "fairly" natural. What I've also done is found the word I've edited somewhere else and used it instead of the edited word . . . and sometimes I've used part of a clean word with the edited word (the beginging or end) to make it sound more natural. Again, a lot of art plays into it.

Not really. You could put in a short fade up . . . and I mean, short. Depending on what you're trying to cover up it could be 2 frames long. But, that might be long enough to cover the noise.

Another possibility is searching the interview for another "was" and edit that over the original "was".