Starr, Kenneth (1946—)

Kenneth Starr will be remembered in the popular imagination as the soft-spoken but tenacious Republican special prosecutor locked in mortal combat with Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton and his White House—a battle which culminated in impeachment proceedings for only the second time in U.S. history. Starr, a former Federal Appeals Court judge and solicitor general under President George Bush, was appointed as Independent Counsel by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in 1994 to investigate allegations of wrong-doing by the former Arkansas governor William Jefferson Clinton, his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, and their various business and personal associates. Starr's investigation, which began as an attempt to ascertain if the President and First Lady had illegally benefited from a land deal in Arkansas, culminated in the referral of a controversial report to the U.S. House of Representatives regarding President Clinton's affair with a 21-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The story of the affair, and the legal clash between Starr and Clinton, dominated the media during 1998 and well into 1999.

From the beginning of his investigation, Starr was accused of partisan bias and conflict of interest, particularly in representing tobacco companies for his law firm of Kirkland & Ellis and nearly filing a Supreme Court brief in support of Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton. The charges against Starr intensified when the Lewinsky story broke in January of 1998. Though Starr had received permission from a three-judge panel and the Attorney General to expand his Whitewater investigation to include the Lewinsky matter, critics took issue with some of the Office of the Independent Counsel's legal tactics, such as its wiring of a Pentagon employee named Linda Tripp to record Lewinsky, its justification for expanding the investigation, and its subpoenaing of sympathetic witnesses such as Betty Currie (the President's personal secretary) and Monica Lewinsky's mother. Seemingly unheedful of his public relations problems even as the President's approval ratings climbed, Starr pressed forward with his grand jury investigation throughout the first half of 1998. For months, the President stood by his initial denial of having had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky, but before Starr's grand jury on August 17, the President reluctantly admitted to at least some details of what he called an "inappropriate relationship."

The Starr Report, submitted to Congress on September 9, 1998, and quickly released to the American public both on the Internet and through various publishers, was widely criticized not only for its omission of most matters relating to the original Whitewater investigation, but for its explicitness in detailing specific sexual encounters between President Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky. Starr's office and its defenders argued that the detail was unfortunate but necessary in order to prove that the President had obstructed justice and committed perjury first in a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against him and later before the grand jury investigating the matter. The referral went to the House Judiciary Committee, charged with the task of debating and drawing up articles of impeachment against the President. Starr himself appeared before the committee in order to defend his office's investigation and the report that resulted. Following often acrimonious debate between Republicans and Democrats in the Judiciary Committee, President Clinton was formally impeached on December 19, 1998, on a mostly party-line vote by the full House on two charges of obstructing justice and committing perjury before a federal grand jury—only the second such presidential impeachment in American history. The Senate declined to remove the President from office. The man singly most responsible for the President's impeachment, Kenneth Starr, remained as Independent Counsel into 1999, though analysts predicted that the case against Clinton would go no further.

—Philip L. Simpson

Further Reading:

Bugliosi, Vincent. No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton: The Supreme Court on Trial. New York, Ballantine, 1998.

Carville, James. —And the Horse He Rode in on: The People v. Kenneth Starr. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Coulter, Ann. High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton. Lanham, Maryland, Regnery, 1998.

Dershowitz, Alan. Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis. New York, Basic Books, 1998.

Drew, Elizabeth. On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Kurtz, Howard. Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

The Starr Report. New York, Pocket, 1998.

The Starr Report: The Evidence. New York, Pocket, 1998.

Stewart, James B. Bloodsport: The President and His Adversaries. New York, Touchstone, 1997.