Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [10]
Virginia Clinton Kelley would marry four men over the course of her lifetime—one of them (Roger Clinton) twice. She was strong, opinionated, loving, comical, and sentimental. Virginia drank Chivas Regal, bet on ponies, loved nightclubs, and applied heavy layers of makeup each morning: a quintessential Hot Springs woman. She continued to play a major role in Bill’s life, even after his star rose as the leading political figure in Arkansas and he made the leap at age forty-six that no other son of that tiny Southern state had ever made—to the White House. Although she died in 1994 of breast cancer—far too young, her friends would lament, for such a high-spirited woman—they would agree that it was probably for the better. If she had been around to witness the dogged pursuit of her son by that despicable special prosecutor, said her friends, Virginia probably would have gone after Ken Starr and stuffed that report where it would cause him as much pain as it had caused Bill.
KENNETH Winston Starr was born a month before Bill Clinton, on July 21, 1946, in Vernon, Texas—just a short ride from the Arkansas border. His father, William D. “Willie” Starr, a minister in the Church of Christ denomination, traced his roots back to Texas pioneer days. The elder Starr preached in Thalia, an area near the Red River dominated by wheat fields and cow pastures. To make ends meet, he had supplemented his part-time ministerial duties with the worldly trade of barbering. This unusual combination led Willie Starr to move his family to San Antonio, a town that included more churches and additional heads of hair to cut and thus provided sustenance to the family both spiritually and materially. Ken Starr grew up in San Antonio in the 1950s, a happy, earnest, and deeply religious boy. The elder Starr passed along to his son a love of scriptures, an occasional urge to cut hair, and an unwavering (some would say unyielding) moral compass.
Like Bill Clinton, Ken Starr was indelibly shaped by a strong and self-reliant mother. However, the indulgent Hot Springs resort life, which had energized Clinton’s mother, was the antithesis of the Southern life that Vannie Starr endorsed. Vannie worked tirelessly on the home front, canning vegetables from the garden, making homemade jam, and shelling pecans. She cooked hearty meals that consisted of chicken or roast and a mess of vegetables—mostly okra, purple-hull beans, corn, cabbage—“all the good vegetables” that had sustained Willie Starr as a young man on the farms of East Texas. Vannie Starr tended to their small white house, gave her husband inexhaustible support, and made sure there was time set aside each night for reading Bible stories to the three children.
Although Willie Starr would die of a heart attack in 1989, never hearing the word Whitewater or the name Monica Lewinsky, Vannie Starr would live to the ripe age of ninety-one. She was still residing in the family house in San Antonio when National Enquirer reporters began snooping around for quotes about her son Ken, the nation’s most famous (or infamous) special prosecutor. Until her last days, however, Vannie was convinced that her son was acting morally and properly in investigating a president plagued with scandal. It was not Ken’s fault, she believed firmly, that he had been roped into pursuing a president who did not know the difference between truth and lies, righteousness and sin.
BILL Clinton attended college at Georgetown from 1964 to 1968, attracted by the lure of foreign service and government work. He was elected to student government, excelled in the U.S. Constitution and Law course