Dogged prosecutor came to regret role in investigating Clinton’s Lewinsky affair

The concept of an independent counsel, Ken Starr once said, was ‘‘stupid, stupid, stupid’’. He took the job anyway. Starr, who has died aged 76, may have been driven by a sense of patriotic and moral duty, as well as the knowledge that making a success of the thorny task was the last chance to bolster his case for a seat on the US Supreme Court under a future Republican administration. However, he came to regret the role he accepted in 1994 when a panel of judges appointed him to dig into misconduct allegations against President Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary and others in their orbit.

Starr’s dogged investigations lasted five years, cost US$40 million and led to the impeachment of the president over his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. But when Clinton was acquitted of perjury and obstruction of justice by the Senate in February 1999, Starr’s Supreme Court ambitions lay in ruins.

His reputation had already been ravaged by the interminable and bitterly divisive process and the prurient elements in his 445-page report, which delved into the connection between Lewinsky and Clinton in graphic detail. The description of Clinton’s unorthodox use of a cigar, and of a stained blue dress, became fodder for comedians and a media sensation. Websites were crippled by high demand as millions of internet users tried to download the Starr report after it was published in 1998.

Starr aimed to show that Clinton had lied under oath about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky; but to critics the passages served as evidence that he was a prude seeking to humiliate the president. The investigation was depicted as a political battle that pitted a charming philanderer against a strait-laced zealot. Lewinsky, meanwhile, was collateral damage. Starr described her in 2018 as ‘‘a tragic figure’’.

Though the Clintons were never charged with a crime stemming from the arcane Whitewater land deal scandal in Arkansas, 15 people were convicted. Starr pursued the president with all the wide-ranging powers provided to the independent counsel, setting up a small army of lawyers in Washington and Arkansas in an investigation that became the most expensive of its kind in US history.

He looked into the case of Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who sued Clinton for alleged sexual harassment, and learnt that Lewinsky had told her friend Linda Tripp, a former White House secretary, about her affair with Clinton. Tripp handed over 22 hours of recorded conversations to Starr, who persuaded her to meet Lewinsky while wearing a wire. In December 1998, Clinton, who had publicly declared ‘‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’’, became the first American president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Kenneth Winston Starr – his parents admired Winston Churchill – was born in Vernon, Texas. His father, William, served as a Churches of Christ minister and his son, the youngest of three children, was raised not to drink or smoke. Possessing a formidable work ethic and genteel southern manners, Starr sold bibles from door to door to help pay for his education, earning an undergraduate degree in history from George Washington University in the capital, where he would show up in class in a jacket and tie.

After a master’s degree in political science, he studied law at Duke University in North Carolina. In 1970 he married Alice Mendell, daughter of a New York real estate developer. She survives him with their three children: a son and two daughters.

He rose quickly in private legal practice and was appointed to the DC federal appeals court, a traditional waiting room for Supreme Court nominees, at 37. In 1989 he became President George H.W. Bush’s solicitorgeneral. He returned to private practice after

Clinton’s acquittal and was part of a legal team that helped financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to secure a lenient plea deal in 2008 after being accused of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

Starr moved to Texas in 2010 for what proved to be a disastrous stint as president of the world’s largest Baptist university, Baylor University. Under his tenure it was embroiled in a sexual assault scandal centred on its football team. A damning external review found a lack of oversight and failure to support victims had allowed the team to act as if it was ‘‘above the rules’’. Starr resigned.

He wrote several books, including Contempt: AMemoir of the Clinton Investigation (2018), in which he wrote: ‘‘I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation. But at the same time, as I still see it 20 years later, there was no practical alternative to my doing so.’’

He characterised Bill and Hillary Clinton as ‘‘fundamentally dishonest’’, adding that ‘‘much of the drama was tragically unnecessary, a self-inflicted wound by a talented but deeply flawed president who believed he was above the law’’. Yet ‘‘an indulgent and prosperous nation readily forgave Bill Clinton and instead blamed the prosecutor’’. –

lawyer b July 21, 1946 d September 13, 2022

To critics the passages served as evidence that he

was a prude seeking to humiliate the president.