September 11, 1998
Starr's Hour
Who better to bring Bill Clinton to justice than a
hymn-singing son of a fundamentalist minister? Kenneth Starr's investigation
of the Clinton White House, culminating in the report just sent to Congress,
has played out amid a constant chorus of opinion from all those quarters
that have recently set the terms and tone of American culture. Until this
moment, the chorus has been that whatever Mr. Clinton's moral and
political transgressions, there was something about Kenneth Starr that was
equally off-putting and reprehensible.
This is curious and instructive, given Mr. Starr's
impeccable pedigree: Clerk to Chief Justice Warren
Burger. Justice Department chief of staff. A
judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court, the nation's
second most important. Solicitor General. A figure
of integrity so imposing that Democrats helped
choose him as Independent Counsel for the
Packwood case. And now Clinton Independent
Counsel, a position in which he has already
convicted 14 criminals, including an Associate
Attorney General and the Governor of Arkansas.
Something off-putting? What something? We would
go so far as to suggest that the "something" about Ken Starr that so rubbed
many opinion-makers the wrong way was the clear understanding that he
was not just prosecuting Bill Clinton; he was prosecuting the entire culture
that gave birth to what Bill Clinton represents.
Everyone does it. It's only sex. Whatever the crimes of the Whitewater land
deal, it was all so long ago. No one cares.
The carriers of these opinions--in newspapers, on the airwaves--were the
voices of an American and European culture that since the 1960s has been
undergoing a relentless moral transformation, a transformation that before
certain recent economic difficulties was engendering talk of an "Asian
Century."
Under this new rubric, the verities that guided the generation that fought
World War II were deemed inappropriate for the social forces that got up
and running during the 1960s. In place of earlier ideas about right and
wrong behavior came the strong belief that the particularities of any one
person's circumstances left any moral judgment troublesome. And so
eventually most people, including the churches, simply stopped judging.
Anything goes, so everything went.
This is precisely what Senator Joseph Lieberman was talking about when he
took to the floor of the Senate last Thursday to denounce not merely Bill
Clinton's behavior, but Mr. Clinton's own barely audible assessment of that
behavior as "not appropriate." This is precisely the warning issued on the
floor of the Senate Monday by Senator Robert Byrd, who excoriated the
slovenly culture that serves as context to the Clinton scandals.
But no such clear-eyed view of the nation's moral lodestar has been evident
during the time of the Starr investigation. Instead the sophisticates of that
culture, deploying the same tangled chains of logic that allowed so much
else through the doors the past 30 years, managed to write venomously
about both Bill Clinton and Ken Starr. By these lights, Mr. Starr was
somehow equally at fault for violating the newer mores.
He wasn't "fair," they said, dragging before the grand jury that poor girl's
mother, who hid her daughter's evidence, and now demands $10 million to
tell her daughter's story. Mr. Starr wasn't very "nice." In short, he isn't one
of us.
That's for sure. Quick case in point: He never aspired to be dean of, say,
Yale Law School; instead, he desired, and was vilified for, preferring
Pepperdine--wherever that is. What the Pepperdine episode showed was
that Mr. Starr really was not at all part of the world his critics lived in and
dominated.
These, of course, are the same two worlds that now compete for primacy in
American politics. One pleads for re-establishing commonly held rules of
the road. The other insists that social and moral diversity has rendered such
commonality impossible--and, as they like to add, get used to it.
We guess that Ken Starr, and indeed the prosecutors from both parties
who have worked with him, never could get used to the world that the
evidence of their investigation of the Clintons laid before them. Indeed, it's
possible that they were, as Senator Hollings said a few days ago, "fed up."
Yet against the vilification of the Clinton spinsters and the mockery of the
pundits, Mr. Starr persisted to the point at which we have now arrived--the
brink of an impeachment. Explaining this peculiar behavior, we now have
journalistic exegeses of what shaped Ken Starr. What drives him, we are
inclined to say, is nothing more complicated than a sense of political and
legal duty. We doubt that before the 1960s anyone would have asked
twice.
In the world Mr. Starr represents the law does not "spin"; it stands still, at
its best defending civilized behavior against moral chaos. Throughout the
Clinton investigations, Mr. Starr was, in effect, asked repeatedly to let it go,
to accept the chaos of one President's turbulent life. He said no.
Now the nation is about to read through the hundreds and hundreds of
pages specifying just what it was that Ken Starr would not accept as lawful
or appropriate in a Presidency. It will be an instructive exercise, above all
for the sophisticates ridiculing the notion that some standards are not
passing fashion but eternal.
interactive.wsj.com |
