Kenneth Starr still likes to be called “Judge,” in deference to his time on the federal bench. He is unfailingly polite, and many describe him as scholarly and decent.
Yet the independent counsel’s face peers out from dozens of hostile, obscene posters along the streets of the nation’s capital. The posters, whose origin is unknown, attest to the powerfully contradictory images Starr projects.
Suddenly one of the best-known figures in the country, Starr invariably is seen either as a courtly, truth-seeking gentleman or a nasty, overzealous partisan. Both of these perceptions will come into play, and perhaps into conflict, as Starr’s team undertakes the task of questioning President Clinton on Monday before a grand jury.
Abner Mikva, a former Chicago congressman who served with Starr on a federal appeals court, says there seems to be two Ken Starrs.
“The one I knew as a judge, solicitor general and when I went to the White House was a very thoughtful, deliberate kind of person who would have looked askance at someone who brought a sex scandal to him,” said Mikva, who also was a White House counsel for Clinton.
But Starr’s recent tactics make him seem like a different person, Mikva continued. “I thought he was of a higher integrity,” Mikva said. “His investigation is going to affect the institutions of government and has the potential for disaster.”
After spending four years and $40 million, Starr’s investigation reaches its dramatic high point this week. Never before has a sitting president testified in a criminal investigation with himself as the main target.
It began as a seemingly modest investigation of the Clintons’ role in the long-ago failed real estate venture known as Whitewater. Since then, the investigation has taken more controversial directions, most notably whether the president illegally covered up an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an allegation that could prompt impeachment proceedings in Congress.
It may be hard to recall, but when he was named independent counsel in 1994, Starr was hailed as ideal for the job, and his tour of duty was not expected to last much beyond 1995.
He boasted impressive and impeccably Republican credentials: law clerk to Chief Justice Warren Burger, 1975-1977; counselor to Atty. Gen. William French Smith, 1981-1983; judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, often called the nation’s second-highest court, 1983-1989; and solicitor general, arguing the George Bush administration’s positions before the Supreme Court, 1989-1993.
Starr is at ease in a courtroom, arguing his position with nimbleness and polish, and his clients have ranged from the state of Wisconsin to the National Football League Players Association.
As a person, Starr strikes some office mates as pompous and priggish, not unlike Burger.
Most current and former colleagues give Starr high marks for character. Mikva described Starr, whom he counted a personal friend, as “a family kind of guy and very community-minded” who was involved in Little League and his church.
Though he grew up in a fundamentalist background with a Texas minister father, Starr was “no Bible thumper,” Mikva noted, and “a moderate conservative judge much like (Supreme Court) Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy.”
Thomas Merrill, deputy solicitor general under Starr, spoke of his former boss as being “extremely careful, particularly in highly controversial cases.”
As an example, Merrill, a Northwestern University law professor, remembered Starr’s decision in 1989 to file a friend-of-the-court brief in a controversial Missouri case involving a couple’s right to remove their daughter from life-support equipment after six years in a coma.
“My initial reaction was, `Why do we want to get into a hot potato?’ ” Merrill said. “But he clearly wanted to, not because he had any ax to grind. I never got the sense he was driven by some emotional or religious passion: He taught Sunday school, but he was not one of those people who use the law to shore up a conservative Christian agenda.
“What impressed me was the extra time he took to uncover every stone and hear from all sides. His thoroughness and anxiety to get it right consumed more time than I was used to. Perhaps that trait is what we are seeing in this investigation.”
Starr’s current job is unlike any position he has held. Starr presides over a complex operation with offices in Washington and Little Rock, Ark. The latter is being phased out after winning 11 convictions.
Starr’s deputy, Jackie Bennett, supervises most of the day-to-day business, which involves staff attorneys, paralegals who track the paper flow of evidence and records, and FBI computer and security experts.
Once a month, attorneys from Little Rock come to Washington for an all-day session, usually featuring a brown-bag lunch, to discuss pending investigative matters. Starr also seeks advice from academics and seasoned prosecutors such as Sam Dash, who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate panel in the 1970s and now teaches at the Georgetown Law Center, and University of Illinois Law School professor Ron Rotunda.
Being independent counsel has subjected Starr to attacks unlike any he has faced.
Among the most persistent critics is Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), who has accused Starr of conducting a personal vendetta to discredit the president and has complained to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno about possible conflicts of interest.
Torricelli and others criticized Starr for continuing to handle private law clients for the Chicago firm of Kirkland & Ellis and drawing a salary reportedly “in excess of $1 million” for his part-time work. The Chicago-based firm, Torricelli told the Senate in June, “represents important interests, including tobacco companies whose interests may be at variance with policy positions of the Clinton administration.”
As the investigation entered its final stage in late July, Starr said he would take an unpaid leave of absence “until I complete my public duties.”
Another of the critics’ concerns, as Torricelli put it, is “association with people and organizations that appear intent on discrediting President Clinton.” Last year, Starr announced he was quitting as independent counsel to become dean of Pepperdine University’s law school and its new School of Public Policy, which was funded largely by conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, one of Clinton’s toughest critics. Starr came under intense criticism for the move and later announced he would stay on as independent counsel.
Arthur Spitzer, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s office for the Washington area, praised Starr when he was appointed four years ago.
“If I were going to be a subject of an investigation, I would rather have him investigate me than almost anyone I can think of,” Spitzer said at the time. He now says his statement is “inoperative.”
“I think Starr’s recent activities don’t evidence the kind of good judgment and detachment that I think he used to have,” Spitzer said. “I think they reflect an overzealous and vindictive attitude, and I look forward to the day when he returns to being the Ken Starr he used to be.”
