Man of the year: Ken Starr

HUMAN EVENTS could not have chosen more appropriately in naming Ken Starr "Man of the Year."

That is not because he has .achieved celebrity or, more accurately, had celebrity thrust upon him. Others, including some not very savory personages, have rated more column inches and television coverage than Starr, but no one has exemplified old-fashioned republican virtue in the pursuit of civic duty than he.

Bill Clinton may or may not be removed from office, but, if he is not, that will in no way diminish Starr's performance. The destruction of the President was never Starr's objective or the measure of his success. The establishment of facts and the revelation of truth were his mandate and his goal. In that he has succeeded, and his work is not yet done.

But it is not even that success, with all of its implications for our national political and moral life, that entitles Ken Starr to the accolade that is bestowed upon him. Rather, he deserves to be called the "Man of the Year" because he has done his duty in the face of an outrageous storm of vituperation, much of it orchestrated by the White House and its assorted minions. I can think of no one who has suffered more, or suffered less deservedly, than Mr. Starr for his actions in the public sphere, for his attempts to serve the public good.

Protecting the Rule of Law

At the time he accepted the special court's appointment as independent counsel to investigate the President's role in the financial skullduggery permeating the Whitewater real estate development, Starr's friends wondered why he would accept such an assignment. Some urgently advised him not to take what promised to be a thankless job. (Of course, it turned out to be far worse than thankless.) The post seemed a detour onto a muddy road that could not conceivably advance his career.

Ken surely saw pitfalls. He is intelligent and possessed of normal ambitions, yet he accepted the assignment. For those who know him, there is only one explanation: He put his sense of duty and devotion to the law ahead of his personal ambitions and desires.

Admirable as those characteristics are, they often exact a heavy price. Though we all profess devotion to the truth and the rule of law, for many, that profession is spurious, and many more are discomfited when forced to confront truths they would rather not think about. The messenger is often blamed for the news.

Those few of us who know the man personally have a much better appreciation of his qualities than the public at large could. Despite the distinction of his career, the public was generally unaware of Kenneth Starr prior his appointment as independent counsel. A word about that career is in order.

After work in a major national law firm, in 1981 Starr was recruited by Atty. Gen. William French Smith as a personal aide in the Department of Justice. After service in that important but relatively anonymous position, he was appointed by Ronald Reagan to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often referred to (accurately or not) as the second most important court in the nation. Though I had met Starr when he was at Justice, I really came to know him well only when he joined the court on which I also sat.

As a judge, Starr established a reputation for intelligence, diligence and unfailing courtesy to counsel and to his fellow judges. Though reliably on the conservative wing of the court, which meant that he tried to follow the law and minimize the role that inevitably a judge's personal outlook plays in decisionmaking, he was anything but an extremist. It was always a pleasure to sit with him at oral arguments.

Starr resigned from the court to accept the position of solicitor general of the United States in the Department of Justice. Several times we met as opponents or allies on particular cases, and, as before, he was invariably courteous and intelligent.

Resolute in the Face of Calumny

With the end of the Bush Administration, Ken Starr went into private practice with my former law firm, Kirkland & Ellis. There he displayed a new quality: enormous energy and the capacity to work long hours without loss of his customary equanimity and poise. Once after a late evening at an event in New York, he left to be driven back to Washington in time to deliver a speech at breakfast. His partners told me that they became accustomed to finding upon coming to work e-mail messages he had left at two or three in the morning. It was obvious from the beginning that Ken would attract clients, but, as one of his partners said, "The man isn't just a rainmaker, he's a walking thundercloud."

This happy career progression was interrupted with the independent counsel appointment. Initially, the investigation was confined to Whitewater, but, as further suggestions of administration wrongdoing accumulated, Starr's jurisdiction expanded at the request of the attorney general and appointment by the special court. He and his staff worked assiduously and obtained 14 convictions and guilty pleas, with still more indictments awaiting trial and investigations continuing. This is a record to make any prosecutor proud.

This is not to say that there have not been lapses, but they were tactical rather than moral. At one point, Starr announced that he would resign and leave further investigation up to his staff, in order to take up the deanship of the law school at Pepperdine University. The resulting public outcry, though predictable, came as a surprise and Starr stayed on.

Though definitely not a public relations triumph, the episode demonstrated conclusively that Starr is not a zealot bent "getting the President." How the same journalists and Clinton partisans could first criticize Starr for being insufficiently devoted to his task and then for being overzealous must remain a mystery.

The major tactical misstep, however, was the examination of the President on closed-circuit television before the grand jury. Starr conducted very little of the questioning, but he must have supervised the preparation of his assistants who did. When the tapes were released and shown to the public, the result was to help restore Clinton's poll ratings.

The prosecution had the President dead to rights on perjury and obstruction of justice but, probably out of excessive deference to the office, allowed Clinton to offer his denials and contorted definitions without much challenge. (How exaggerated deference can also be equated with zealotry is another mystery.)

By contrast, Starr's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee was a triumph. Subjected to ruthless grilling by superzealot Democrats for 12 hours, he remained calm and precise, spelling out the results of his investigation. He came across as the reasonable and judicious man that he is. retaining his calm demeanor under a barrage of insults.

Significantly, neither the Democrats nor Clinton's lawyer questioned the truth of Starr's findings, prefering instead to assail the prosecutor personally and irrelevantly. There could be no more convincing admission by his own partisans that the President was guilty as charged.

The most disheartening aspect of this entire matter is the degree to which constitutional processes have been politicized and a good man trashed.

The subject of the deformation of the impeachment process is a topic for another day. The demonization and vilification of Kenneth Starr is the subject here, for it is StarT s resoluteness in the face of the worst libels that can be thrown at a man that puts the cap on the case for awarding him the honor that HUMAN EVENTS has given.

Day after day, he has been subjected to a barrage of unfair criticism from Democrats in Congress, for whom partisanship displaces honor, and from White House hit men, both in an out of government employment, ignobly abetted by much of the press. Of the likes of James Carville and Lanny Davis little need be said. Mud thrown by even such creatures, however, is bound to stick and to hurt.

Despised for His Virtues

We were told that Starr's prosecutors kept Monica Lewinsky incommunicado against her will for hours. The judge has since ruled that nothing improper occurred. We were invited to feel outrage over the savagery with which Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, was treated before the grand jury and over the sight of Susan McDougal being led in manacles from jail to the courtroom.

It turned out, of course, that prosecutors routinely question before grand juries family members about persons under investigation. Lewis, moreover, was apparently not merely a beleaguered mother; she sought and received immunity from prosecution herself.

Susan McDougal went to prison for contempt in refusing to answer whether Bill Clinton had testified truthfully at her trial. She could have gone free by saying yes or no. But if she said yes, there might have been a perjury charge; if she said no, there might have been unpleasant consequences having nothing to do with the independent counsel. Her manacles were pursuant to a Bureau of Prisons policy and had nothing to do with Starr.

Most disheartening, however, was the attitude of much of the mainstream press. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, for example, until recently one of Clinton's severest critics, has turned on a dime. She writes that Ken Starr's "goons . . . manhandled Monica's mother" and "held Monica hostage at a shopping mall in pursuit of almighty facts." Those charges have, of course, been proved false.

Now Ms. Dowd writes that Ken Starr (along with Newt Gingrich, R.-Ga.) "made a monumental mistake." He was not "content with punishing the President for having an affair in the Oval Office with an intern." He "wanted to kill off the lax moral spirit of the '60s . . . and restore '50s black-and-white morality."

That, as a matter of fact, seems like a splendid idea, but there is not the faintest evidence that Stair harbored any such ambition. She refers to the results of the congressional elections and "Ken Starr's feet sticking out from under the house like the Wicked Witch of the East after the tornado."

The liberal press finds it ominous that Starr is religious. Worse, he is said, horror of hon-ors, to open meetings of his staff with readings from the Bible. He also has been know to sing hymns in the morning. surely a sign of fanaticism.

Then, of course, there is the accusation that he is obsessed with sex. Apparently, if he were not, he would not be concerned about perjury and obstruction of justice. The upside-down nature of these charges is amazing. As between the two principal characters in this investigation-Clinton and Starr-which is sex-obsessed?

There is hardly any need to go on. However foul and wide of the mark these "charges" are, I know how much they must hurt Ken, his wife, Alice. and their children. He has been demonized for his virtues. I am afraid that the assault upon Ken Starr says much more about the deplorable state of our culture than it does about him. In truth, that assault says precisely nothing about him.

For performing his duty under the most trying circumstances, for defending the rule of law when others hate him for it, for resolutely going about his task when he was unable to answer the slurs and false accusations flung at him, and for performing a much-needed national service, Kenneth Starr is indeed the man of the year.

Mr. Bork is the John M. Olin scholar in legal studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Dec 25, 1998
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