STARR, Kenneth W(inston) 1946-

PERSONAL: Born July 21, 1946, in Vernon, TX; son of Willie D. (a minister) and Vannie Maude (Trimble) Starr; married Alice Jean Mendell (a public relations executive), August 23, 1970; children: Randall Postley, Carolyn Marie, Cynthia Anne. Education: Attended Harding College; George Washington University, B.A., 1968; Brown University, M.A., 1969; Duke University, J.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Home—McClean, VA. Office—Kirkland & Ellis, 655 15th St. NW, Ste. 1200, Washington, DC 20005.

CAREER: Admitted to the Bar of the State of California, 1973, State of Virginia, 1979, and District of Columbia, 1979; U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, Miami, FL, law clerk to Judge David Dyer, 1973-74; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Los Angeles, CA, associate, 1974-75, partner, 1977-81; U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, DC, law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, 1975-77; U.S. Dept. of Justice, Washington, DC, chief of staff to Attorney General William French Smith, 1981-83, solicitor general, 1989-93, independent counsel, 1994-99; U.S. Court of Appeals, Washington, DC, judge, c. 1980s; Kirkland & Ellis, Washington, partner, 1993. New York University, adjunct professor; George Mason University, visiting professor.

MEMBER: American Bar Foundation, American Bar Association, American Law Institute, American Judicature Society, Institute of Judicial Administration (president), Supreme Court Historical Society, Order of the Coif, Phi Delta Phi (Hughes chapter Man of the Year, 1973).

AWARDS, HONORS: Honorary law degrees from Hampden Sydney College, Shenandoah University, and Mitchell College; Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service, 1993; American Values Award, U.S. Industrial Council, 1993; alumni awards from George Washington University and Duke University.

WRITINGS:

Referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr in Conformity with the Requirements of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c): Communication from Kenneth W. Starr, Independent Counsel, Transmitting a Referral to the United States House of Representatives Filed in Conformity with the Requirements of Title 28, United States Code, Section 595(c) (called The Starr Report; includes appendices and supplemental materials), U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, DC), 1998, published as The Starr Report: The Evidence, edited by Phil Kuntz, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1998, published as The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair ("Public Affairs Reports" series), with analysis by the staff of the Washington Post, Public Affairs (New York, NY), 1998.

First among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2002.

As Independent Counsel, author of other reports, including Report on the Death of Vincent Foster, Jr., 1997.

ADAPTATIONS: The Starr Report: Substantial and Credible Information (sound recording, eight cassettes), narrated by David Ackroyd and Tracy Brooks Swope, commentary by Alan Dershowitz and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Dove Audio (Los Angeles, CA), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS: In 1994 Kenneth W. Starr was appointed independent counsel by Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate the Whitewater affair, an assignment that eventually led to a White House sex scandal and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Starr, who had served as a federal judge and solicitor general, replaced Robert B. Fiske, who had served for several months in investigating Clinton's activities while he was governor of Arkansas, because many conservative Republicans felt Fiske was not tough enough. Starr reopened the case concerning the 230 acres known as Whitewater, but when he couldn't make a case against Clinton based on that business deal, he went after him on charges of sexual misconduct, particularly with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Ironically, when all the sordid facts came out, President Clinton's popularity ratings climbed, while the American public felt that Starr's investigation, which cost the American taxpayers more than forty million dollars, may have gone too far in invading the president's private life over activities that did not constitute a crime.

Starr was born in Vernon, Texas to a religious family, and his father was a Church of Christ minister who worked as a barber for extra money. The family moved to San Antonio when Starr was in grade school. While attending Harding College, a Christian school in Searcy, Arkansas, Starr sold bibles door-to-door to raise money for tuition, then transferred to George Washington University, where he was editor of the school paper. He continued his education at Brown University and Duke University Law School and landed two plum jobs right out of Duke. He first clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge David Dyer in Miami, then spent two years clerking for Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Warren E. Burger.

While with the Washington law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Starr was approached by William French Smith, who asked him to serve as his chief of staff when President Ronald Reagan appointed Smith as his attorney general in 1981. This move led to Reagan's appointing Starr to the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals, which he left in 1989 to become solicitor general under President George Bush. In this capacity, he represented the administration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. His positions, though conservative—he was against legalized abortion—were not conservative enough to justify his appointment when a seat on the Supreme Court became vacant. Bush named David Souter, and when President Clinton was elected in 1992, Starr returned to private practice with the firm of Kirkland & Ellis.

In 1993 Starr became embroiled in his first sexual misconduct investigation when the Senate Ethics Committee asked him to look into allegations against Senator Bob Packwood. He also reopened the investigation into the death of White House counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., which was deemed a suicide, a conclusion Starr later let stand. When Starr was asked to replace Fiske, the law written in 1970 that had established the position of independent counsel was about to expire. President Clinton renewed it, and a month later, three federal judges assigned Whitewater to Starr. None of the people linked to Whitewater testified against either President Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Among the Clintons' friends and business partners who were convicted or entered pleas were Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Webster Hubbell, a partner in Hillary Clinton's law firm and a former deputy attorney general, and Susan McDougal, and her husband Jim. Susan McDougal served twenty-one months on civil contempt charges, then published her account, titled The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk. McDougal contends in her book that she refused to testify before the Starr commission for fear that her words would be twisted and used against the Clintons. Jim McDougal, who cut a deal to lesson his jail time, died in prison.

A hornet's nest was stirred up when Paula Corbin Jones filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton. Although the case was eventually dropped, it was during this investigation that Monica Lewinsky's name first came up. Starr was relentless in trying to prove a sexual relationship between the president and the intern, although both denied his accusations. The truth became apparent when a number of recorded tapes made by Linda Tripp, with whom Lewinsky had worked at the Pentagon, indicated that President Clinton had asked Lewinsky to lie and cover up their affair.

It was Starr's tactics that undermined his investigation in the eyes of many. He confiscated bookstore receipts to see what Lewinsky had been reading and called on her mother to testify. And then there was the little blue dress, the one that was supposedly stained with presidential semen, an allegation that was never proven. In a show of indignation, Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Starr of leading a right-wing conspiracy against her husband.

On August 17, 1998, President Clinton testified before the grand jury and appeared on television to blast Starr and admit that he had an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky. Even Clinton's supporters felt he had not adequately expressed genuine sorrow for his actions. When Starr's incendiary 454-page report was released on September 11, 1998, it listed eleven grounds for impeachment, including allegations that the president had lied about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky and had used his office and staff to cover up that relationship. New York Review of Books contributor Lars-Erik Nelson noted that "according to the transcript contained in Part 1 of the separately published appendix . . . even the grand jurors had misgivings about Starr's techniques." Michael Emmick, one of Starr's deputies, tried to end one day's proceedings but was challenged by a juror who wanted to hear more about January 16, the day Lewinsky was seized by Emmick, along with two FBI agents, who refused her request for an attorney, held her in a hotel room, and threatened her with jail time of twenty-seven years for perjury and other charges. In all, they detained and terrorized Lewinsky for eleven hours.

"And with that, the tables turned," wrote Nelson. "Starr joins Lewinsky and Clinton on the hot seat. Whereas Starr's Referral to the House of Representatives is the equivalent of an indictment—accusatory, one-sided, damning—the appendix to his report is far more ambiguous and perhaps more damaging to Starr than to the president. The appendix poses the question: Which is more outrageous to us—Clinton's sexual relationship with a twenty-one-year-old intern or Starr's use of the law to hound an elected president from office."

On October 2, the House released nearly 5,000 pages of additional material, including testimonies and transcripts. These three volumes represented thousands of hours of work and seemed by some disproportionate to the offense. On December 19, 1998, President Clinton was impeached by the House on two charges, obstructing justice and committing perjury before a federal grand jury, but the Senate declined to remove him from office. Starr returned to private practice and to teaching.

New Republic reviewer Cass R. Sunstein noted that "under Starr's leadership, the Office of Independent Counsel was overzealous, to say the very least. This came as a big surprise to those who knew Starr's earlier work, or who knew the man personally, because Starr's performance showed so little of the caution and the good judgement that previously marked his career. Since resigning as independent counsel, Starr has, in his writing and public statements, acted in the measured and responsible way that he did as a judge and a solicitor general."

First among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life is Starr's account of the Rehnquist Court. He details rulings involving the Miranda law, flag burning, federalism, states' rights, freedom of speech, campaign finance, discrimination against homosexuals (the Boy Scout case), affirmative action, and Roe v. Wade. In an interview with a writer for American Lawyer, Starr said that his view is that the Rehnquist Court "follows a more traditional mode of constitutional interpretation than did the Warren Court."

Dennis J. Hutchinson, who reviewed the volume in the New York Times Book Review, questioned why Starr calls the Supreme Court First among Equals, "in what is otherwise a democratic government. Starr concedes that 'justices appointed for life' constitute 'the least accountable branch of government.' The Warren court constantly got it wrong, according to Starr....TheBurger court wasn't much better—fewer mistakes but one whopper, what he calls the 'unspeakably unacceptable' abortion decision. What vexes Starr, and all who grasp the theoretical nettle, is distinguishing between good and bad reasons where the constitutional language is at its most ambiguous." Hutchinson noted that "the debate over the proper role of the court has been acute for the last two generations, and quickened again when the 2000 presidential election was decided by a 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore."

Book reviewer Terry Teachout wrote that Starr "uses his long experience to illuminate the inner workings of the most mysterious branch of government, as well as to elucidate his counterintuitive conviction that the current Court, for all its reputation as a hotbed of right-wing judicial activism, is in fact 'dedicated to stability, not change; moderation and incrementalism, not liberalism or progressivism,' and to assert that 'prudence and caution have characterized much of the work of this Court of lawyers, not politicians.'"

Andrew Musicus reviewed First among Equals for Bookreporter.com, commenting that Starr "has great respect for Justice Breyer's intellect and his ability to build consensus. Justice O'Connor is another favorite, who Starr called the 'most influential and powerful woman in America.' In the end, however, Starr's real favorite is the Court itself. First among Equals is his love letter to an institution he reveres. And this authoritative telling of some of its history adds greatly to the rich tapestry of Supreme Court literature."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Carville, James . . . and the Horse He Rode in On: The People v. Kenneth Starr, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

McDougal, Susan, and Pat Harris, The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk, introduction by Helen Thomas, Carroll & Graf Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

Newsmakers 1998, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Schmidt, Susan, and Michael Weisskopf, Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2000.

Wittes, Benjamin, Starr: A Reassessment, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

PERIODICALS

American Enterprise, January, 2000, John Meroney, interview with Starr, p. 18.

American Lawyer, June, 2000, "A Starr Is Reborn" (interview), p. 25.

American Prospect, December 16, 2002, Garrett Epps, review of First among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life, p. 37.

Book, November-December, 2002, Terry Teachout, review of First among Equals, p. 77.

Business Week, October 21, 2002, Dan Carney, review of First among Equals, p. 26.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2002, review of First among Equals, p. 1207.

National Review, December 31, 2002, Richard A. Epstein, review of First among Equals, p. 42.

New Republic, October 21, 2002, Cass R. Sunstein, review of First among Equals, p. 23.

New Statesman, October 2, 1998, Michael Bywater, review of The Starr Report, pp. 47-48.

New York Review of Books, November 5, 1998, Lars Erik Nelson, reviews of appendices to The Starr Report, pp. 8, 10.

New York Times Book Review, October 13, 2002, Dennis J. Hutchinson, review of First among Equals, p.14.

Observer (London, England), September 20, 1998, review of The Starr Report, p. 16.

People, February 16, 1998, Thomas Fields-Meyer, "The Inquisitor," p. 182.

Publishers Weekly, September 2, 2002, review of First among Equals, p. 68.

Time, December 28, 1998, Eric Pooley, Michael Weisskopf, "How Starr Sees It" (interview), p. 82.

ONLINE

Bookreporter.com,http://www.bookreporter.com/ (December 12, 2002), Andrew Musicus, review of First among Equals.

Charlotte Observe Onliner,http://www.charlotte.com/ (October 28, 2002), David W. Marston, review of First among Equals.*