Many Americans and members of the press think that Ken Starr, motivated by conservative political ideology and seeking partisan advantage, was obsessed with bringing down the Clinton presidency. Few doubt that the Starr-Clinton confrontation was personal as well, a clash of cultures between Starr, a deeply religious man with a puritanical bent, and Clinton, a political animal of protean ethics and unabashed cupidity. Wittes, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, refuses to accept this view. Instead, based on hours of interviews with the independent counsel, he suggests that Starr's errors and egregious misjudgments were the result of a fundamental misreading of the special prosecutor statute. In Wittes's analysis, Starr's adamant belief that the statute required him to act, not as a normal prosecutor might when searching for a provable crime, but as the chief investigator of a Truth Commission with an unlimited mandate, led him to repeatedly engage in excesses and abuses that left his reputation tattered and his investigation in disrepute. Wittes's depiction of how Starr's misconceived notion caused him to mishandle the investigation is both coherent and plausible. Nonetheless, so extreme do Starr's misjudgments seem that even the most open-minded readers may remain skeptical of Wittes's contention that Starr's intentions were honorable. A happy side benefit of the book is that Wittes's thumbnail sketches of a wide range of events—the original Whitewater charges, the issues surrounding the Vince Foster suicide, the details of the elusive Travelgate and the equally elusive FBI file scandal, Webster Hubbell's role in the investigation and the famously boggled negotiations between Monica Lewinsky's lawyer and Starr's staff—make these obscure elements of the scandal intelligible for many, perhaps for the first time. (May)
