Ken Starr praises, laments Bill Clinton’s legacy
Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel who vigorously pursued Bill Clinton across the 1990s, spoke highly of the former president’s personal attributes last week, days before Donald Trump began dredging up accusations from that era to hammer Hillary Clinton in their looming general election bout.
“President Clinton was and perhaps still is the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation. He just has remarkable gifts,” Starr said during a panel discussion on the American presidency on May 16 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, in which he compared the 42nd president to predecessors Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter in different respects.
Starr’s remarks, first reported by The New York Times on Tuesday, suggested a tinge of regret about the role his investigations played in coloring Bill Clinton’s legacy. Now the chancellor of Baylor University, Starr has dealt with criticism of his own leadership of the private baptist school in Waco, Texas, in the wake of the administration’s handling of sexual assault charges against football players. The school declined to comment Tuesday on reports that Starr had been terminated from his position.
Starr in 1994 took over the investigation of the Clintons’ involvement in the so-called Whitewater real estate deal and investigated the circumstances surrounding the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, an incident Trump brought up as “very fishy” in an interview with The Washington Postpublished Monday evening. Starr’s investigation expanded to include a lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones and his subsequent affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Trump, who has hit Hillary Clinton for enabling her husband’s behavior, released a video on Instagram on Monday featuring the voices of Lewinsky, as well as Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, two of the women who have accused the former president of sexual assault.
Remarking upon Clinton’s “genuine empathy,” Starr said, “Leave aside the unpleasantness, his genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear.”
“It is powerful. It is palpable. And the folks of Arkansas really understood that about him, that he genuinely cared,” Starr said. “The ‘I feel your pain’ is absolutely genuine.”
Starr said Clinton’s situation reminds him of the 1969 book titled “The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,” explaining, “because what could have been and so there are certain tragic dimensions of it, which we all lament.”
“Now, that having been said, I think this idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully I think both with President Carter and then President Clinton,” Starr said. “President Carter I think set a very high standard which President Clinton clearly continues to follow.”