Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [11]
Ken Starr likewise entered college in the fall of 1964, staying closer to home at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, just sixty miles north of Little Rock. By his junior year, after being elected class representative and excelling scholastically, Starr had been smitten by the urge for new intellectual challenges and was dreaming of a career in the diplomatic corps or foreign service. So Starr packed up his boxes and moved to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., just a few miles from where Bill Clinton was making his mark. An earnest student with a boundless capacity for work, Starr sought out a job on Capitol Hill, clerking for the conservative Congressman Bob Price from the Panhandle of Texas. Here, he worked late into the night, proud to have a parking spot and thrilled to have late-night access to books in the Library of Congress. Starr was enthralled with learning, especially when it came to comprehending how the intricate American system of government functioned. One day, he decided, he might like to do government work.
Bill Clinton spent two years in England as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He was haunted, during this time, by personal conflicts involving his moral views concerning the Vietnam War, and shared these concerns with those he trusted back home, including his mother’s close friend Marge Mitchell. After receiving a draft notice, signing up for the graduate ROTC program in Arkansas, receiving a deferment, having the deferment withdrawn yet still managing to avoid being drafted—a series of moves that later caused some commentators to label him a draft dodger—Clinton returned to the states to attend Yale Law School in 1970.
Ken Starr spent a year in the State Department as his own way of sorting out the turmoil of Vietnam. From there, Starr won a full fellowship to Brown University to pursue a Ph.D. in political science. While working on the fellowship, he became enamored with constitutional law, so he packed up his car and moved to Duke Law School in August 1970. It was the same year Clinton was moving into a house on Long Island Sound to begin Yale Law School.
As he settled into legal studies at Duke, Starr had just tied the knot with Alice Mendell, a petite, poised New Yorker with a degree from Swarthmore College, whom he had met two years earlier while attending a Harvard summer school class. Clinton—although he did not yet know it—was likewise in the process of meeting his future wife, sharing late-night conversations at Yale with a frizzy-haired young woman named Hillary Rodham. This Wellesley graduate with hippie-style glasses was very much Clinton’s intellectual equal. She also shared his taste for politics.
After law school graduation, Clinton returned home to Arkansas, married Hillary (who bucked Southern tradition by keeping her Rodham surname), and soared to the top of his new profession. After an unsuccessful run for Congress, Clinton was elected state attorney general in Arkansas and soon became at the age of thirty-two the youngest governor in the country, taking the oath of office in 1978.
Starr earned a clerkship on the Supreme Court with Chief Justice Warren Burger, practiced law at a top firm in Los Angeles, worked as counselor to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration, and then was appointed (at age thirty-seven) to serve as judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the youngest person ever named to that court. Several years later, President George H. W. Bush tapped Starr to serve as solicitor general of the United States, the top lawyer representing the government in the Supreme Court. In his early forties, Starr had already moved to the pinnacle of the legal profession. It was not uncommon for solicitors general to earn seats on the nation’s highest court. Starr, aware of that history, permitted a flame of hope and ambition to burn inside him. One day, he daydreamed in moments of solitude, he might