Ken Starr - Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation

For years, people have come up to me and asked, Why dont you write a book about your experience during the Clinton investigation? People dont know your side of the story. They were right to guess that I had quite a lot I could tell. But they were wrong to imagine I was eager to tell it.

Think back to the rough outlines of the story: Twenty years ago, after a four-year investigation resulting in fourteen criminal convictions in Arkansas and leading to the resignation of the sitting governor of the state, the Whitewater investigation took a bizarre twist. It was revealed that in 1995 President Bill Clinton had begun an extended Oval Office affair with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, then tried to cover it up.

In the fallout from the presidents misdeeds, the nation went through wrenching political turmoil. 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. In the long and painful saga, he showed contempt not only for the law, but for the American people, whom he willfully misled for his political self-preservation. He also demonstrated a shockingly callous contempt for the women he had used for his pleasure.

Yet ultimately, the president was lucky. An indulgent and prosperous nation readily forgave Bill Clinton and instead blamed the prosecutor.

That would be me.

I became the most criticized man in America and found my hard-won reputation for integrity and fairness under assault. I had a thick skin, but that kind of attack cant be borne forever without pain. And hurt feelings aside, my family suffered immeasurably, all thanks to the Clintons and their vicious surrogates. According to them, the nation went through the trauma of impeachment not because of Bill Clintons offenses, but because of an overly zealous prosecutor.

In the face of these attacks, I was resolutely silent. I knew I had to grin and bear it. Prosecutors are severely limited in what they can say. The truth would have to come out eventually, but I could notunder my professional obligationsplay the Clintons game.

And in the following years I maintained that silence. I hadnt sought out the job as independent counsel and frankly hadnt wanted it. I wasnt burning with desire to live through the unpleasant saga all over again by writing about it. I wanted to move on with my life, to focus on my work in the academic world, where I served as dean of Pepperdine law school before becoming president (and later, simultaneously, chancellor) of Baylor University in my native Texas.

Then, in 2016, I found myself unexpectedly freed of all these considerations. On June 1, 2016, I was stripped of the Baylor presidency in the wake of serious allegations of sexual violence at an institution that stood for the best values and virtues in human life: treating all persons consistent with the teachings of Christ Jesus and, in particular, the Golden Rule.

Although I had not been personally implicated in any direct way in the universitys scandal, I was nevertheless in charge of the institution. Captains go down with the ship. As a matter of conscience, I soon resigned from my role as Baylors chancellor. I likewise amicably terminated my formal relationship with the Baylor Law School, where I had concurrently held an endowed chair in constitutional law. All this was filled to overflowing with personal anguish, but I found myself suddenly freed from the all-consuming daily responsibilities of the academy.

Then, in the fall, the 2016 presidential election brought an unexpected and crushing conclusion to the political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. A seeming shoo-in to follow Barack Obama into the Oval Office, Hillary had suffered bitter defeat at the hands of the disruptive newcomer to American politics, Donald Trump. The Clinton era was over.

Not only was I freed from personal and professional constraints, but the moral compass of the country had shifted since 1998. Furthermore, as questions of presidential obstruction and impeachment have come up in the Trump administration, many are rethinking the Clinton saga and looking for what can be learned from those tumultuous times.

I concluded that, at long last, the time was right to talk about the Clintons contempt.

By the end of this book, my personal account of the legacy of Bill and Hillary Clintona legacy of contemptI believe most reasonable, open-minded people will agree with me. Or at least they should agree with my basic proposition: that President Clinton and the First Lady knowingly embarked on a continuing course of action that was contemptuous of our revered system of justice.