Mr. Clinton was individually present in contempt of court docket and fined by a federal choose. In his remaining hours earlier than leaving workplace, Mr. Clinton struck a cope with Mr. Starr’s successor during which the president admitted not telling the reality underneath oath, paid a advantageous and surrendered his legislation license.
However Mr. Starr grew to become “essentially the most criticized man in America,” as he himself put it, the goal of Clinton allies and the punchline of a thousand late-night comedy sketches. “Half the nation cherished him. The opposite half loathed him,” Ken Gormley, the writer of a e-book in regards to the battle between Starr and Clinton, as soon as mentioned.
There was by no means any reconciliation between Mr. Starr and the Clintons. Throughout an interview in 2009, Mr. Clinton talked in regards to the numerous one-time foes he had come to befriend or a minimum of make peace with, together with Mr. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife. What about Mr. Starr, he was requested. “Properly,” Mr. Clinton mentioned, after which paused. “That’s one other kettle of fish.”
Certainly, when Mr. Starr re-emerged two years in the past to defend Mr. Trump, Mr. Clinton’s allies didn’t maintain again. “Whether or not it was representing Large Tobacco, obsessing about President Clinton’s intercourse life or disgracing himself within the Baylor rape scandal, Ken Starr has all the time been on the mistaken facet of historical past, ethics, and customary decency,” Paul Begala, a former aide to Mr. Clinton, mentioned on the time.
However Mr. Starr’s buddies and admirers all the time insisted that he was misunderstood by the general public and caricatured by the Clinton political machine. For all his notoriety, they noticed him as a genial, principled, skilled lawyer, who acted not out of animus however out of real dedication to what he thought was proper.
“Ken was a very variety and fantastic individual,” Elizabeth M. Locke, a lawyer and protégée from Kirkland & Ellis, mentioned on Tuesday. “Opposite to a lot that has been written about him and the way in which he was portrayed within the wake of the Whitewater investigation, he was probably the most mild souls you’d ever know. And he was probably the most moral attorneys I’ve ever met.”