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By Root 1693 0

Clinton. “I mean, we had similar childhoods, in a way.” Although Starr’s background was “more fundamentalist” than Clinton’s, their origins could be traced to similar Southern roots. From the first time Starr had visited the White House to take his deposition in the Whitewater matters, the former president recalled having grave doubts “whether he [Starr] was looking for the truth as opposed to looking for a way to use this vast apparatus of power he had to find that Hillary or I had done something wrong.” Several things about Ken Starr caused the president to be wary, from that first meeting. Clinton knew that Starr had appeared on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour just months before his appointment as independent counsel, openly advocating that the president could be sued civilly in the Paula Jones case. This punctured any pretense in Clinton’s mind that Starr was a neutral prosecutor. Second, the president knew that Starr had grown up in the “hard-scrabbled” part of North Texas, where the religious right had first planted its seeds, and then attended Harding College in central Arkansas for two years. Everyone from Arkansas, Clinton said, lifting his eyebrows, knew what “Harding” stood for at that time: “Well, it was an ultraconservative Church of Christ school that in the fifties had a president who was a leading, militant anti-Communist. And was rather well known in those super anti-Communist circles around America.” The Church of Christ believed in “the saving grace of baptism” and was “steeped in the New Testament teachings of Jesus.” While serving as governor, Bill Clinton had established positive relationships with Harding and had used his good offices to benefit that institution. Yet as soon as he moved to Washington, he knew that some Arkansans who grew up in this tradition of “extreme conservatism” saw the Clinton presidency as a threat to their religious and moral well-being.

Said Clinton: “I grew up around a lot of people like this. They were always most comfortable when they had an enemy. So if you’re asking, ‘What did that Harding background mean to me?’ it was basically conservative fundamentalist and more comfortable in any political setting where there was an enemy.”

Looking unusually gaunt after his heart surgery, Clinton pushed aside a New York Times crossword puzzle and conjured up a vision of his first meeting with Ken Starr during the inception of the Whitewater investigation. “He was a smart man,” the president said of his nemesis. “He knew the whole thing was a huge lie,” said Clinton, his face reddening. “And I looked at him and I thought, you know, this fellow just thinks he’s doing the Lord’s work. And he’s got the power and he’s going to use it.”

Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, two men who would engender intense, polar opposite feelings among the American public, in reality embodied flip sides of the same life story. Both had been born into Southern families of modest means—the word poor would not be an exaggeration in either case. Both had been born within a month of each other, a few hundred miles apart. Both seemed destined for great things. Yet both men had deep beliefs and strong ambitions that, in the last decade of the twentieth century, steered them into a collision course that produced disastrous consequences for themselves, and for those surrounding them.

BILL Clinton had entered the world on August 19, 1946, a steamy hot day in Hope, Arkansas, a town abutting the Texarkana border. The name recorded on the boy’s official birth record—William Jefferson Blythe III—had been his sole inheritance from a restless traveling-salesman father who had died three months earlier in a freak automobile accident. The unglamorous truth, forever part of his life story, was that “Billy” Blythe’s father had skidded off the highway during a rainstorm and drowned in a drainage ditch. As a result, Billy’s mother was the dominant figure in his life.

Virginia Cassidy Blythe, the daughter of an ice deliveryman from Hope, was a woman who possessed uncommon gregariousness and drive that would one day serve her son