Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [415]
Perhaps it was Bill Clinton’s abiding distrust of Ken Starr and his fear that any censure resolution could easily be revoked by the next Congress, allowing Starr to march forward and indict him anyway, that caused Clinton to balk at this compromise. Perhaps it was his stubbornness, having convinced himself that his word dances in front of the grand jury would enable him to beat any possible perjury rap. Whatever the basis for Bill Clinton’s unyielding position, he was surprisingly candid with his predecessor. Ford recalled, “There was never any rancor. Just a very pragmatic conversation.” When Clinton refused to budge on the perjury issue, Ford told the younger president that he could do nothing further to help. “So our discussion ended.”
President Ford would go to his grave believing that a stiff and meaningful censure resolution would have been the proper solution to the Clinton impeachment imbroglio. “I believed it was the right thing to do,” Ford insisted in a strong and clear voice at age eighty-seven. Nothing good, he felt, would come of a Senate impeachment trial. “I didn’t think it [would enhance] the reputation either of the President or the Congress. I greatly preferred another route.”
JUST as Time magazine was going to print with its year-end issue in which it named Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton joint “Men of the Year” for 1998, as a testament to the historic cataclysm they had wrought, the Starr family received news that dimmed any sense of achievement. Ken’s mother, Vannie Mae Starr, was found dead in her San Antonio home at age ninety-one, just two days after Christmas. The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Mrs. Starr had died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, linked to old age. The death was believed to be sudden; Mrs. Starr had failed to activate an emergency communication device she wore around her neck.
For the weary independent counsel, the fact that his mother had passed away before he could travel to Texas for the holidays, while the strain of the ugly impeachment proceedings still weighed heavily on the whole family, added a dose of special sadness that would linger for years. Becoming openly emotional at the memory of his beloved mother, Starr said that he worried that this independent counsel mess had “upset” her greatly. In his heart, Ken Starr feared that the whole Clinton-Lewinsky-impeachment ordeal was a “source of sorrow” for his mother in her final months on earth. “Yes, I was distressed for her,” he admitted. “And yet I don’t want to sound too—well, the words are failing me in talking about my mother due to emotion.…”
After taking a deep breath and collecting himself, Starr continued: “I think it was hard on her, and yet, she was a very strong person.” Seeing her son dragged into the thick of a scandal like this—and watching him become demonized as special prosecutor—was certainly disturbing for a saintly, old-fashioned lady like Vannie Starr. Yet she had remained strong and had learned to “speak her mind” when journalists (including those from the National Enquirer) traipsed around her property looking for a quote. Ken Starr said, regaining a flicker of humor, “She was from the old school. Honor, integrity, the stuff I was brought up on. And that was mother’s milk; that’s Mom. That was Mother. She was very grounded in a sense of right and wrong and ‘what’s honorable and what is not honorable.’ And ‘what is excellent and what is not.’ The sacred versus the profane. And ‘you strive imperfectly to aim high, to aim for excellence and for the sacred.…’ It was a very Christian perspective.”
The independent counsel sat silently for a moment, before concluding: “She was a very sweet lady, and not a lady of this world, of the things of this world.”
A terrible snowstorm in the East prevented the Starrs from arriving in San Antonio at the Mission Park Funeral Chapel in time for the visitation and viewing. They did make it, accompanied by a U.S. Marshals’ protective detail,