BOOK REVIEW: ‘Contempt’ by Ken Starr

OPINION:

CONTEMPT: A MEMOIR OF THE CLINTON INVESTIGATION

By Ken Starr

Sentinel, $28, 338 pages

Earlier this month, when the unsupported allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had just become front page news, I happened to be in a physician’s office for a routine check-up. It turned out that my doctor — whose anonymity I’ll respect — had been a prep school classmate of Judge Kavanaugh.

He distinctly remembered Judge Kavanaugh as a straight arrow, the last person in the world to behave the way his accuser claimed he had, especially at a time and place she said she couldn’t remember, at a gathering she doesn’t know how she got to or how she got home from. According to his classmate, Judge Kavanaugh was a good scout type, an earnest, serious student who already had his sights set on a judicial career, and who was “a very good guy but not a lot of fun to hang out with.”

A few days later, as I read “Contempt,” it occurred to me that the same description might fit its author, Ken Starr. Mr. Starr emerges from the pages of his honest, straightforward memoir as an exemplary private person and a first-class legal thinker of impeccable integrity and meticulous professionalism. In short, “a very good guy but not a lot of fun to hang out with.” While this might not make him ideal happy hour company, it certainly made Ken Starr the right choice to head a sensitive investigation into serious — and ever-expanding — evidence of unethical, illegal behavior on the part of a sitting president and a first lady who was a ruthless wheeler-dealer in her own right.

As my old friend Tim O’Brien, who covered the investigation for ABC news, has commented elsewhere, “If you think you know the story, you don’t — until you read this gripping account of what happened behind the scenes, as the Whitewater prosecutors crossed swords with the most powerful man — and woman — in the world.”

Throughout his life, Ken Starr has lived by a strong moral code instilled in him by firm but loving parents with strong religious roots (his father was an evangelical pastor). Mr. Starr is almost exactly the same age as Bill Clinton, and, like him, was a bright kid from humble origins who decided to go to law school. But there the comparison ends. Mr. Starr was raised in a healthy family setting, Mr. Clinton by a rather flamboyant mother and an abusive, alcoholic stepfather. Mr. Starr reverenced his profession; Mr. Clinton considered it a convenient stepping stone to elective office. Mr. Starr has always played by the rules; Mr. Clinton doesn’t think they should apply to him.

Everything that made Ken Starr a man you’d like to face in court if you were innocent also made him a man you’d want to avoid if you were guilty. Small wonder then, that Bill and Hillary did everything they could to thwart and discredit the Starr investigation. “Early in 1998,” Mr. Starr writes, “we had heard that people were poking about for dirt on individual OIC (Office of Independent Counsel) team members. Laughably, someone circulated the rumor that ’Ken Starr had a honey’ in Little Rock. A lie.”

Meanwhile, “Mystery faxes and anonymous phone calls to members of the press promised spicy details proving that ’Ken Starr’s office is completely imploding’”and the first lady and assorted Clinton allies vigorously slimed the reputations of numerous women who, with credible supporting evidence, claimed to have been sexual victims of the First Philanderer.

In the short term, the bad guys won. Bill Clinton got away with lying under oath and Hillary brazenly pursued her own political ambitions while the family foundation, fat with millions of dollars in suspect foreign donations, provided a convenient launching pad and staff payroll. Slowly but surely, however, justice of a sort was done. Hillary failed in her two bids for the presidency in large part because the more the public saw of her the more it doubted her character and remembered evidence of her past, unpunished misconduct. As for Bill Clinton, he seems to have become his own decadent, self-revealing “Picture of Dorian Gray.”

More importantly, as Ken Starr writes, “in the fullness of time, the culture would change significantly … Firings and resignations of abusive powerful men became an everyday story … The verbal assaults by the Clintons and their surrogates, who hurled demeaning epithets such as ’trailer park trash,’ would become unthinkable … “

As for Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Starr’s closing lines provide a stern but just historical verdict: “[T]he citizens of the United States deserved better. Talented they were, to be sure, but deeply flawed, fundamentally dishonest, contemptuous of law and process. That was a personal tragedy, but even more, a tragedy for our nation.”

• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.