Remembering Ken Starr

If America had never learned the name of Monica Lewinsky, of Bill Clinton and scandal, lawyers of my generation would still know the name of Ken Starr. Dead this week at age 76, his legal career was marked by unstinting public service delivered with unfailing grace under pressure.

The son of a Texas minister, Starr started his legal career with the golden ticket: a clerkship on the Supreme Court of the United States for Chief Justice Warren Burger. Service as counselor then chief of staff to the U.S. attorney general at the start of the Reagan Administration was followed by a nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, considered the second-highest court in the land, just ten years after his graduation from Duke Law School. At the time, Judge Starr was the youngest nominee to be confirmed to a seat on a U.S. Court of Appeals.

His tenure on that bench, where he served alongside giants such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia, ended after only six years, when he accepted an appointment as solicitor general of the United States, the federal government’s chief advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was a finalist for appointment to the Supreme Court in 1990, upon the retirement of liberal Justice William Brennan. As history will record, the seat went instead to David Souter, who turned out to be a liberal himself.

In January 1993, as the White House changed over, Starr chose to join a law firm after more than a decade of public service. His sojourn was short. A year later, he accepted a call from his former colleagues on the D.C. Circuit to take over the flailing independent counsel investigation of the Whitewater land deal and the roles of President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. That investigation grew to encompass the suicide of a top White House aide and eventually the perjury of the president, leading to the first House impeachment and Senate trial since 1868.

As independent counsel, Starr put together a truly great legal team, including a future Supreme Court justice (Brett Kavanaugh), deputy White House counsel, deputy attorney general, secretary of Health & Human Services, and three Court of Appeals judges. They conducted a thorough investigation, produced a comprehensive report, and Starr personally sat for hours of widely watched testimony on C-Span before the House Judiciary Committee.

Eventually President Clinton was impeached but not convicted. I think William J. Bennett’s book title characterized the outcome best: it was “the death of outrage” that politics trumped the high standard expected of those in high office.

Starr was lambasted throughout that entire episode, attacked by political opponents as a leader of a “witch hunt,” smeared as obsessed with sex, and targeted by the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a “politically motivated” prosecutor working alongside a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a phrase that endures in our political lexicography. No one seemed to appreciate that he was asked to do this job by three federal judges, could have made much more money focusing on his law firm, and took the role as a thankless task of public service.

After the investigation, Starr realized a turn to academia, first as dean of Pepperdine Law School, then as president of Baylor University. He did not end his advocacy, either, taking cases at the U.S. Supreme Court, defending Proposition 8 in the California Supreme Court, and eventually defending Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. His landmark cases include McConnell v. FEC, where he represented U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell in his challenge to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance limits. He also wrote a book, Religious Liberty in Crisis, reflecting on the challenges facing people of faith in a secular age. (His family asked that memorials in his honor be made to the Alliance Defending Freedom).

Throughout his life, with innumerable ups and downs, twists and turns, Starr kept his compass pointed true north. Investigating Clinton’s peccadilloes, he endured relentless political and personal scrutiny himself, and came through clean. He described his approach to litigating in his memoir: “Likability, rock-solid integrity, and honesty.” Those words set a high standard, for Ken Starr and for us all.