Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [443]
CHAPTER
51
“WHO WILL BLINK?”
Ken Starr’s decision to depart as independent counsel in October 1999, according to those close to him, was an emotionally tough one. Starr himself was confident that he could act objectively in deciding whether to bring criminal charges against Bill Clinton, even after the flopped impeachment. At the same time, he realized that he had become “so demonized” in the press that it “warped gravity” around him. “He wanted people to have a clean view on the merits of whether or not the president should be prosecuted,” said Mike Emmick. “And he thought that it was only going to be possible if he left.”
Jackie Bennett had already cleared out of OIC, returning to private practice in Indiana. Hickman Ewing, whose name had been submitted for the position to replace Starr, told the three-judge panel chaired by Judge Sentelle (who advocated in his favor): “My answer is ‘no.’ Don’t appoint me.” Ewing had been “trashed” by the White House, branded a “religious fanatic” and kicked around by the pro-Clinton camp. He no longer maintained an open mind on the subject. As Ewing saw it, both Bill and Hillary were “crooks” who would have to answer to a Higher Judge. The Tennessee prosecutor wanted no part in pursuing a president who continued to “thumb his nose” at the justice system. Moreover, Ewing could not ignore that Ken Starr had been treated so abhorrently. “Ken unfairly took lots of hits,” said Ewing. “And Ken has got more integrity in his little finger than Clinton’s got in his whole body, or ever will have.”
For his own part, Ken Starr blamed much of his unfortunate situation on the dysfunctional independent counsel law. Congress had permitted that statute to die in late June 1999, with both Democrats and Republicans bidding it good riddance. The past year’s events, capped off by the draining impeachment trial, had simply worn legislators out. Ironically, Starr himself had testified against renewing the law under whose banner he had marched. “All roads led to the structural defects of the independent counsel mechanism,” Starr later said, sitting on the couch in his McLean home, which he and Alice would soon sell so that they could start a new chapter of their life. The independent counsel law, in Starr’s view, had caused prosecutions to become “very personal, very personalized,” which was “quite inimical to the idea of the administration of justice.”
Some commentators were quick to point out that Starr himself had been the chief grave-digger who had buried this noble Watergate-era law, through his prosecutorial overzealousness and lack of self-restraint. They noted that the requiem for the independent counsel statute was as much about Ken Starr as it was about the statute’s defects. Yet supporters and detractors of the independent counsel law, alike, agreed on one point: Starr was “simply too much of a lightning rod” to stay on the job pursuing Bill Clinton.
Alice Starr seconded that vote. “It was a relief,” she said. “It wasn’t necessarily a happy time, but definitely a relief.”
The transition from internationally famous (or infamous) special prosecutor to ordinary citizen was a welcome but bumpy one for Ken Starr. He spent the first few months playing “Mr. Mom” for daughter Cynthia (age fourteen) and remaining sequestered at home in his jeans and plaid shirt, writing a book about the role of the U. S. Constitution in American life.
Ken and Alice next went through the tough transition of selling their home in McLean, where they had raised their family and accumulated twenty-three years’ worth of happy memories, trading it in for an anonymous abode in a different section of the Northern Virginia suburbs. The former special prosecutor’s wife would say, a slight hitch in her voice, “Ken was still getting letters, threatening letters.” She paused and added soberly, “All you need is one person … I worried about my daughter and some of her friends.”
Starr wrote a farewell opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal—a publication that consistently had stood behind OIC—admitting that it had been a