HOW STARR SEES IT
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During his interviews with TIME, Starr's basic civility was always on display. His detractors tend to view this refined manner as gaudy camouflage for fanaticism. But Starr's elaborate politesse runs deep: it is both a key part of his self-image and a buffer against the world. He insisted that his prosecutors refer to Clinton as "the President" even as they gathered evidence to impeach him. And his response to verbal assaults (such as Clinton lawyer David Kendall's promise that if Starr questioned Clinton about embarrassing sexual details, "I will fight you to the knife") is often nothing more than a knitted brow--a defense, a rebuke, a way of reassuring himself that he's made of better stuff. Starr wants to disagree without being disagreeable. During a flag-burning case before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Starr once tried to have a nice chat with his opponents, raggedy members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. (They wanted nothing to do with him.) In the same way, the practiced cadences of Starr's speech--each thought qualified, calibrated, modified by one or more careful subordinate clauses--is an elegant and pre-emptory shield.

When Starr took the independent counsel's job in 1994--against the advice of virtually everyone he knew--he was immediately assailed as a partisan Clinton stalker. It was an unusual position for him since he'd always enjoyed being the Democrats' favorite Republican--a lawyer trusted enough to be asked to review Senator Bob Packwood's private diaries, a conservative judge with serious credentials as a defender of the First Amendment. He had even ruled in favor of the Washington Post in a big libel suit. "[When] the attacks began," Starr says, "I started saying, 'Well, how do you respond?' And one of the things I said was, 'I will try to bring the qualities of the judge [to the investigation]...eschew political considerations and personal predilections, and [try] to be as steadily neutral as possible."

And there is some solid evidence that he meant it. Most of the charges leveled against Starr--that he colluded with Linda Tripp and the lawyers for Paula Jones to entrap Clinton, that his men mistreated Lewinsky in their long Jan. 16 session with her--turn out to have little basis in fact, according to an investigation by TIME. Starr's last known contact with the Jones team, for example, came years before he ever heard of Lewinsky; Tripp--who clearly did collude with Clinton haters--had been briefing the Jones lawyers about Lewinsky for two months before she made her approach to Starr.

Starr has also been accused of discouraging Lewinsky from contacting her lawyer and of pressing her to wear a wire to set up the President. But Starr insists there was never a plan to secretly tape Clinton. Instead, he says, it was Betty Currie who might have been taped. And many of the actions of his prosecutors that day were approved in advance by senior Justice Department officials--including the outlines of the effort to persuade Lewinsky not to call her attorney, whom Starr and his men suspected was part of the obstruction conspiracy. Starr argues that his team's moves were monitored by a Justice Department official; that man, Administration sources told TIME, was Josh Hochberg, then deputy chief of the public-integrity unit. He was there to say "watch out for this, or watch out for that," Starr says. He took copious notes, asked questions but raised no red flags. Justice Department sources confirm that Starr's office briefed the department in advance on many of its dealings with Lewinsky. Both the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility and the District of Columbia Bar Association are looking into the events of Jan. 16, but in a ruling unsealed in December, Judge Johnson cleared Starr's prosecutors of White House charges that they denied Lewinsky her right to counsel.

When Starr had a chance to trap Clinton in a way that could have destroyed the President overnight, the prosecutor declined. The story, told here for the first time, involves the infamous blue dress, which Lewinsky gave Starr's office on July 29, saying it might be soiled with evidence. The dress presented prosecutors with a choice: the office could keep secret the results of its DNA analysis until after the President's testimony, or it could tip off the President before he swore his oath. Clinton knew Starr had the dress, of course, and could have surmised what the test results would show. But Starr wasn't legally bound to inform him. And if Clinton's grand jury testimony stuck to the story that he had not had sexual relations with Lewinsky and Starr then proved otherwise in a lab, the prosecutor would have a relatively clear-cut perjury case.

But Starr wouldn't set the trap. His job, he told colleagues, was to encourage Clinton to tell the truth, not catch him in a lie. When the DNA results came back, on July 31, Starr had deputy independent counsel Bob Bittman contact Kendall to request a presidential blood sample. Kendall asked if Starr's office had "a precise factual basis" for the demand--something against which to match Clinton's blood. A "substantial" one, Bittman replied. Seventeen days later, Clinton appeared before the grand jury and admitted an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky. Alerting Clinton to the test results, Starr told TIME, just seemed like the "right thing to do" because it was "in everyone's interest to get to the bottom of this."

But perhaps the most convincing evidence of Starr's good intentions was the way he structured his office. Trained in appellate law--a protected world of polite debate over constitutional issues--Starr decided to apply the same set of values to the far harsher world of criminal prosecution. He says he modeled his decision-making process on "the way judges on a collegial court operate," a consensual, deliberative style that was alien to most of his prosecutors. Every afternoon at 5 o'clock when he was in Washington, he and his 30 lawyers and 10 investigators crowded around a 30-ft.-long conference table to hear the daily report and discuss strategy. Starr previewed the agenda but had Bittman run the meetings so Starr could absorb more of the discussion. For major decisions, he assigned a prosecutor to summarize facts and evaluate the pros and cons. Starr insisted on hearing opinions from everyone at the table as he searched for the majority view, a process that he says was not intended to reach "some Solomonic middle ground" but to achieve decisions free of "arbitrariness and caprice." Though Starr made the final calls, sources say, he invariably went with the majority vote.

But if the man is so dedicated to fair play and consensus, why has his investigation--which dragged bit players before grand juries, interrogated a White House aide about his media contacts, issued a subpoena for bookstore records and forced Secret Service agents to testify about the man they protect--so often seemed wild and obsessive?