Starr memoir recounts Lewinsky’s ‘fierce but misguided loyalty’

WASHINGTON — Ken Starr, the former independent counsel whose investigation led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, writes in his upcoming book that if Monica Lewinsky had cooperated from the beginning, “the country would not have been dragged through an eightmonth ordeal.” Recounting his Clintonera investigation, Starr contends that the former White House intern who had a sexual relationship with the president carried “fierce but misguided loyalty” and “allowed herself to become a tragic figure of late twentieth-century America.” “She carries with her forever the living reality of the Clintons’ victim-strewn path to power, the most visible casualty of the Clintons’ contempt,” Starr writes in “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.” The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be released Tuesday. Starr’s book recounts his reluctant yet duty-bound decision to serve as independent counsel in the Whitewater probe that ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House on charges he lied under oath and obstructed justice. The memoir arrives two decades after Congress was presented with the Starr Report, the culmination of an investigation that ultimately ended with Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate. He offers a scathing critique of Bill and Hillary Clinton, describing the former president as someone “who believed he was above the law.” David Kendall, Bill Clinton’s attorney, said in a statement to the AP: “The American people saw through Starr’s obsessive pursuit of President Clinton and will see through his attempt to rewrite history to vindicate his own sullied reputation.” Lewinsky declined to comment. The book describes how investigators first learned of Lewinsky’s role and recounts their talks at a Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton — dubbed “Prom Night” — in which Starr’s team tried to get Lewinsky to cooperate. Starr writes that Lewinsky used a mall payphone to call the White House in what he believed was an attempt to warn Clinton. “She hissed ‘Hoover, Hoover’ into the phone, as if she were speaking in code, which she later explained meant the FBI, as in J. Edgar,” Starr writes.