Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [14]
From the start, Clinton also had an uncanny ability to forge a bond with African American voters. Judge L. T. Simes II understood why this was so: Simes had grown up picking cotton in Helena, Arkansas, at a time when the Mississippi Delta of Arkansas was predominantly segregated and inhospitable toward African Americans. He had attended law school in Fayetteville when “wonderboy Clinton” was a young professor. Simes immediately took note that Clinton, unlike most of the stodgy “old-boy” professors, treated black students with the utmost fairness and respect in the classroom. After becoming governor, Clinton bucked the system by appointing highly qualified blacks to key positions in state government. Simes himself became the first African American to serve as chairman of the Arkansas Soil and Water Commission. Although Clinton paid dearly, in political terms, for eschewing the prevailing culture by appointing blacks, that didn’t slow him down. During the governor’s 1980 reelection campaign, Clinton brought Simes along to a country club in an elite section of eastern Arkansas, where segregation was still firmly entrenched. Notwithstanding the “redneck” audience, Clinton began uttering jaw-dropping declarations about the ugliness of racial prejudice, as Simes tugged at his jacket and pleaded, “Don’t do that, Bill.… I’m only worth one vote, don’t do it for me.” Clinton was defeated by Frank White that fall, which required him to vacate the governor’s mansion for two years. Still, as Simes and Clinton cried together early that morning after his concession speech, Clinton told Simes not to worry. “We’ll be back,” he said. “We’re not going to let the people down.”
Simes would conclude, a hitch of emotion in his voice, “I really believe that Bill Clinton was born to be president.” He steadied his composure and added, “In the Bible, it talks about a slave becoming king. Bill’s daddy was not a Rocke-feller. He didn’t come in with any wealth. He had a middle-class mother, a single family woman. It was fate. He was destined.”
How then did this uncommonly talented political leader become ensnared in an ugly sex scandal that nearly wrecked his presidency? Clinton’s closest friends would all point their fingers at the same man—an overzealous prosecutor named Ken Starr.
As a Christian woman, Nancy Adkins, a co-member of the “Birthday Club” with Virginia Clinton Kelley, couldn’t find the right adjective to describe Starr. She confessed, “I’ve never said I hated anybody, but, believe me, I really think I hate him. God forgive me for saying that, but it’s the truth.”
Clinton’s stepfather, Dick Kelley, settling back in a chair inside his lake cottage where he and Bill Clinton’s mother had lived until her death in 1994, gripped his cane and spoke measuredly about the independent prosecutor who had led the investigations against his stepson. “You can’t put in there what I think of Starr,” Kelley said. “My vocabulary pulls up some dandies.” At age eighty-nine, Dick Kelley considered himself a forgiving man. Yet when it came to Starr, he was not prepared to forgive and forget. “No. I haven’t forgiven him. They ought to put him in jail and keep him there,” Kelley stated. If there were any silver lining to this otherwise dismal story, it was that Virginia had died before witnessing the absolute worst of it. “Ken Starr was lucky she wasn’t around,” he said, tapping his cane.
BEFORE heading the investigation that nearly toppled a presidency, Kenneth Winston Starr had borne none of the markings of a controversial figure. For those who knew him growing up in rural Texas, he would seem like the