If any prominent public official in Washington had earned the right to be called a public servant, it was Kenneth Starr, who died last week in Houston, age 76.
As attorney, federal judge, senior official in the Justice Departments of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and as solicitor general, Starr was known for his sharp mind, stalwart work ethic, devotion to the rule of law, fairness, and personal generosity, and, not least, guidance to a rising generation of conservative lawyers and jurists.
He was also known for his ambition. The son of a Texas minister, Starr had worked his way through college selling Bibles door to door. Having earned a master’s degree in political science at Brown and a law degree from Duke, he spent two terms as a law clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger. His stellar performance as counselor to Attorney General William French Smith prompted Reagan to appoint him, at 37, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Later, while serving as Bush’s solicitor general, Starr found himself on everybody’s short list for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yet the appointment was never made. When Justice William Brennan announced his retirement in 1990, Republicans in and out of Congress raised concerns that Starr might be insufficiently conservative, prompting Bush to name New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice David Souter instead. Indeed, Starr’s reputation for professional objectivity and nonpartisanship was enhanced a few years later when, in private practice, he was assigned by Congress to evaluate the diaries of Oregon’s Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, who had been charged with sexual misconduct. Packwood resigned when Starr issued his report.
Accordingly, in 1994, when an independent counsel’s inquiry into banking scandals and assorted allegations against President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton — these ranged from a dubious Arkansas real-estate venture called Whitewater to the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, the possible abuse of FBI confidential files against Republican officeholders, to the mistreatment of personnel in the White House Travel Office, among other incidents — a panel of three federal judges on the district circuit recruited Starr as special prosecutor to bring order out of chaos and get at the facts.
Which, to his everlasting credit and regret, he proceeded to do.
Starr never brought charges against the Clintons over Whitewater, although he believed that Hillary Clinton had lied to investigators. And contrary to widespread belief in conservative circles, he concluded that Foster’s suicide was caused by his chronic depression, not political scandal. Starr successfully prosecuted innumerable Clinton political associates, including Bill Clinton’s successor as Arkansas governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and Hillary Clinton’s onetime law partner and the associate attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, Webster Hubbell.
Starr was about to conclude his investigation and had announced his intention to accept an offer to become dean of the Pepperdine University law school when he learned that Clinton, in the course of defending himself against an Arkansas sexual-harassment lawsuit, had engaged in a sexual liaison with a 22-year-old intern in the White House, had lied under oath about the affair and coached potential witnesses to lie on his behalf.
The picturesque details of this episode remain fresh in public memory. Less well remembered is the onslaught of press and partisan hostility toward Starr, whose statutory duty to separate fact from spin and render a credible accounting to Congress of Clinton’s incredible conduct was undertaken in the face of obstructive White House tactics, personal abuse, and harassment at the hands of the Clintons and their friends and admirers.
Starr’s faith in the rule of law and its integrity came, in this instance, at a high cost. His report to Congress led to Clinton’s impeachment in the House (and Senate acquittal). Yet its measured tone and scrupulous detail have never been disputed, Clinton was found in contempt of court, and his license to practice law was suspended.
“I regretted the whole thing,” Starr later reflected, “but it had to be done.”
