Starr's war: Ken Starr saw his job as truth commissioner. Everyone else still sees it as a disaster. - book review

STARR: A Reassessment by Benjamin Wittes Yale University Press, $24.95

MY MOST ENDURING IMAGE OF Ken Starr was formed in the men's room outside his office on the afternoon of Jan. 15, 1998. I had just come from a tense meeting with his top staffers in which I confronted them with my discovery that they had launched a secret criminal probe into the relationship between the president and a certain former White House intern. Aghast at how many details I knew, they pleaded with me to hold off publication. In so doing, they implicitly gave me what I needed most: official confirmation that this investigation was, in fact, real. My heart pounding, I ducked into the bathroom and there discovered, much to my amazement, Starr, washing his hands. He turned toward me, smiled broadly and gave me a jovial greeting--"Mr. Isikoff, how nice to see you"--as though he didn't have a care in the world. The scene was surreal. Starr had just launched the most audacious federal law-enforcement operation in decades--a move that, I was sure even then, was about to throw the country into political turmoil. And yet, he seemed utterly oblivious to the enormous consequences of what he had just done.

That image of Starr--as an airy, good-natured prosecutorial blunderbuss--is powerfully reinforced by Benjamin Wittes's new book, Starr: A Reassessment. An editorial writer with The Washington Post who specializes in legal affairs, Wittes spent many hours interviewing Starr after he stepped down in 1999 from his five-year tenure as Whitewater independent counsel. Those interviews, combined with his own astute reading of the public record, have enabled Wittes to write a balanced and insightful analysis of how Starr conducted his operation--and why it went so disastrously awry. In Wittes's view, Starr was an accomplished lawyer and decent man who bizarrely misread the statute that authorized his appointment and fundamentally misunderstood his role as independent counsel.

Instead of serving as a traditional prosecutor whose sole reason for being is to bring criminal cases that can hold up in court, Starr quite consciously turned his office into a sweeping "truth commission"--a la Bishop Desmond Tutu's in South Africa--that was determined to get to the bottom of every allegation of wrongdoing leveled against the Clinton presidency. Starr's flawed reading of the independent-counsel law proved a double curse: It caused him to roam tar afield from his original mandate and allowed many inquiries to linger on long past the point where they could reasonably have hoped to bring any successful cases. All of this was made even worse by Starr's strange disconnect from the real world environment in which he was operating.

Wittes's portrait is all the more biting because he rejects the cartoonish caricatures and malicious partisan attacks on Starr's office spread by the Clinton White House and its allies. As Wittes makes clear, Starr was never a rabid political partisan. Indeed, top lawyers inside the Clinton White House cautiously welcomed his appointment to the post. None of the many allegations of ethical infractions leveled against his office were ever substantiated. Perhaps most disconcerting to Clinton defenders is Wittes's endorsement of the core Whitewater inquiry itself. When Starr, in May 1996, secured the felony convictions of Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal (longtime business partners of the Clintons in the Whitewater real estate venture), it was, writes Wittes, "a significant prosecutorial achievement that was entirely legitimate."

Wittes argues that if Starr had stopped there, he might have gone into the history books as a modestly successful prosecutor who honorably discharged his duties. And, to be fair, it wasn't quite so easy for him to stop. As is often the case in white-collar fraud investigations, after the trial, Jim McDougal agreed to cooperate and provided damaging new testimony against the Clintons. He backed up the story of David Hale, the operator of a federally backed small-business lending firm, that Clinton had pressured Hale to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan to an advertising company purportedly run by Susan McDougal. McDougal also alleged that, at a meeting with the then-Arkansas governor in 1984, the two of them concocted a scheme to route business to Hillary Clinton by placing her on a $2,000-per-month retainer. It was, as McDougal would later describe it, a way of making payments to Clinton "over the table."

Provocative stuff, to be sure. No matter how much Clinton's still-percolating defense machine tries to portray the entire Whitewater scandal as the fevered concoction of a Richard Mellon Scaife-funded right-wing conspiracy, the essential facts were difficult to dismiss--and inherently malodorous. McDougal, a convicted crook, was running a corrupt savings and loan that was regulated by Bill Clinton's appointees. At the same time, he was both covering the Clintons' debts in a floundering real estate investment firm and steering monthly payments to Clinton's wife, in part (as he later testified) because of the extra clout he figured she would carry with the state regulators appointed by her husband. The belated discovery inside the White House living quarters of Hillary Clinton's long-missing billing records--showing, among other things, that she had indeed undertaken crucial legal work on an questionable transaction that led to McDougal's undoing--only aroused further, and entirely reasonable, suspicions on the part of Starr and his team.