Former federal judge and independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who died today, was an eminently decent man and dedicated public servant who did not come close to deserving the calumny he received from most of the establishment media.
This is not to say that Starr’s judgment, especially when involving political ramifications, was always the best. But it is to say that he did his duty thoroughly and, importantly, fairly and without malice.
Starr was a soft-spoken man. He was a patriot, and he had the mentality of a boy scout. He was genuinely offended by transgressions against the law, duty, and normative ethics. He was offended no matter which political side the offenses originated. As a judge, he was humble, thorough, and fair-minded more than ideological. As solicitor general, he was persuasive and well-grounded. And as independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation and related matters, he was far from the prurient, sex-obsessed caricature the media created of him. Instead, he faithfully did his duty as assigned to him by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
As it happened, both as a staffer on Capitol Hill and as an editorial writer in Little Rock, I became deeply involved in investigating the scandals of the Clinton era, trying to separate wheat from chaff. One bit of chaff (among many) was the persistent rumor that Clinton friend Vince Foster’s suicide had been staged. Some conservatives absolutely would not accept the suicide story and insisted that Foster was murdered.
Starr, with his then-young staffer Brett Kavanaugh playing a lead role, meticulously put that conspiracy theory to rest. And Starr’s team had Kavanaugh walk me through the report they presented, noting key clues that, while public, were ones the media missed. The effect was to exonerate the Clintons further on that score, even as Hillary did lead a cover-up of some materials in Foster’s possession when he died. If Starr had been “out to get” the Clintons, he and Kavanaugh would not have been so intent on noting even more of the exculpatory materials about the Clintons than the media had gleaned.
Starr’s broad investigatory mandate was broadened even further when President Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky — and, crucially, Clinton’s significant misuses of his office to cover it up — came to light. It was Reno who gave him that broader authority, not to prove Clinton’s adultery but to look into the misuse of power. In pursuit of that investigation, Starr just did his job.
Granted, Starr overshot his mark. To demonstrate the perjury he found (just one of Clinton’s transgressions in the matter), it absolutely was necessary somewhere, somehow, to report on the exact nature of the sexual conduct at issue, especially since Clinton was splitting legal hairs about it. Starr’s mistake was in overruling Kavanaugh’s advice to separate the more prurient parts from the main report, perhaps in a separate section. Starr did not anticipate that House Speaker Newt Gingrich would immediately release the whole report rather than take the time to redact or otherwise put partial (if eventually searchable) shields on the prurient portions of it.
Starr was thinking legally, not politically. It was not his job to think politically. Indeed, if he had been more political, then he would have finessed the report’s delivery. His error wasn’t as much a nasty “gotcha” mentality as it was a strange form of naivety.
As it was, Starr went on to a productive career in academia, again sometimes showing better judgment than at other times. Overall, though, he served his nation well and did so with admirable motives. R.I.P. to a good man.
