The voyeurist counsel
Mail & Guardian reporter
There is a certain irony in the fact that the independent prosecutor who reportedly sings hymns on his morning jog and keeps a calendar with daily scripture verses at home should be the author of the United States’s latest publishing sensation.
The 440-page report produced by Kenneth Starr has been described as a “Harold Robbins novel” which tells the public more than they really want to know about President Bill Clinton’s sex life.
The White House has called it a lurid attempt “to humiliate the president and force him from office”. And all this from a man who once planned to follow his father into the clergy.
Kenneth Winston Starr was born on July 21 1946 in Vernon, Texas. His father, Willie Douglas Starr, was a Church of Christ Baptist minister and a barber. Kenneth Starr was the youngest of three children and he was raised with deep religious convictions. At a young age he showed signs of a passion for politics. In 1960, when he was in the ninth grade, he is reported to have passed out campaign literature for Richard Nixon; and as a senior he did the same for Barry Goldwater.
He spent two years at a Church of Christ school in Arkansas, selling Bibles door-to- door to help pay his tuition. However, he eventually went on to get a law degree from Duke University.
In the mid-1970s he began a clerkship with Chief Justice Warren Burger. This was the first of many times Starr was to advance his career by serving an older, conservative Republican.
At the age of 37, Starr was appointed by then president Ronald Reagan to the United States court of appeals. The six years he spent on the appeals court were reportedly among the happiest years of his career.
Wrote Michael Winerip in The New York Times: “He loved being away from politics, immersed in law and constitutional issues. Though he was conservative, voting a large percentage of the time with his fellow judge Robert Bork (against affirmative action, against federal intervention to guarantee minimal prison standards), he had an independent streak that pleased civil libertarians.
“He ruled for The Washington Post in a major libel case, for an artist whose subway mural had lampooned Reagan, and for a Jewish military chaplain who wanted to wear a skull cap with his uniform.”
Starr’s great ambition was to be a Supreme Court justice, but he was forced to make a difficult career decision in January 1989 when then president George Bush asked him to be solicitor general. He is said to have agonised for days before deciding to accept the job.
“Ken recognised if he took it, there was a good chance he’d never get back to the appellate bench, never make it to the Supreme Court, because he’d make too many political enemies,” Tex Lezar – a friend of Starr’s – told The New York Times.
“But he understood that reaching the Supreme Court is kind of like lightning striking: it’s out of your control.”
In 1990 his name was on the shortlist for a Supreme Court vacancy he so badly wanted, but he lost out to David Souter. By the time he left the post of solicitor general, after Bush’s defeat in 1992, his experience arguing before the Supreme Court made him the most sought-after appellate lawyer in Washington.
In 1993, he returned to private practice. One website alleges that, before he become independent counsel, he volunteered to help Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment suit against Clinton sparked off the Lewinsky scandal. The Jones case was thrown out of court.
In August 1994 Starr was appointed as the Whitewater independent counsel. In Washington he is reportedly famous for his lapses of political common sense.
“He has repeatedly entangled himself with anti-Clinton forces, making himself appear highly partisan,” wrote The New York Times.
An example quoted was a public appearance Starr made a month before the 1996 presidential election with Pat Robertson, the Christian-right leader and vicious Clinton critic, at a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the founding of Robertson’s law school.
Until he took the job as independent counsel he had never been a prosecutor, a fact that was seen as something of a shortcoming. Wrote Winerip in The New York Times: “Another prosecutor – say a streetwise one who had spent a career fighting serious crime – might have formed a different perspective on a president who lied about sex in a dismissed civil suit. Another prosecutor could have ended the [Monica] Lewinsky inquiry long ago.”
But the former appellate judge who was described by one of Lewinsky’s lawyers as having the beautiful manners of a Southern gentleman, surprisingly opted for an all- out assault.
The fact that Starr was willing to drive on when so many other prosecutors would have stopped is part of his legal temperament. He has been described as a workaholic of mythic proportions who will doggedly pursue every last fact.
“Ken is determined that no one will defeat him by out-working him,” his friends are reported to have said.
Starr is said to have a “scholarly and at times pedantic” love for the law and is genuinely offended that anyone, let alone the president, would denigrate it. But whether it is religion, politics or sheer hatred, no one really knows what motivated Starr to pursue the president with such determination.
With his future in academia or corporate law secured and his dreams of a place at the Supreme Court long since shattered, perhaps he felt he had nothing to lose, no matter how his investigation turned out.
But as an editorial in The Guardian noted: “By the time you’ve waded through the 440 pages and 2 000 footnotes you are wondering less about the central characters than about the author.
“Bill and Monica’s doomed relationship is unremarkable, sad and banal. Kenneth Starr’s single-minded act of voyeurism might one day make a much more rewarding story.”