HOW STARR SEES IT
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In 1994, Starr saw his decision to continue a full-time law practice (even defending tobacco interests) while investigating Clinton to be a sign of his independence, because he wouldn't be beholden to the job. Others saw it as evidence of his lack of high seriousness and of his conflicted motives. In 1997, when he decided to quit the probe and take a position at Pepperdine University, he knew the institution was funded in part by the Clinton-bashing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who for years has been paying for right-wing fishing trips into Clinton's past. But again Starr didn't see the conflict. In fact, he saw Scaife as one of his own harshest critics because Scaife's minions had attacked a Starr report concluding that Vince Foster killed himself. "What the name Richard Mellon Scaife meant to me was, here was someone who had been financing some of our harshest critiques," says Starr. "This will tend to show my less than fastidiously attentive political antennae."

Starr admits to being a political innocent. ("Clearly. Absolutely. How do I measure the ways?") He admits to being "a slow learner," to committing "boners and goofs," to failing to realize that "even though one is carrying on a legal function, one's activities are going to be viewed through the prism of...appearances and politics." But underlying these admissions is a sense that, as his mentor, Attorney General William French Smith, used to say when Starr was Smith's counselor in the Reagan Justice Department, Washington is "not merits-oriented enough. He would say, 'You've got to get past this huge layer of appearances, then a huge layer of politics. And then finally, perhaps as a distant third, you will get to the merits of the issue." And so Starr's remarks about p.r. ineptitude appear to be both a defense--the errors were about surfaces, he insists, not substance--and a form of vanity, as if he operates on a higher plane and can't be blamed for losing a war of perceptions with Clinton.

Chapter Three: The Root of It
Starr's probe of the president has been so bruising that it seems fair to ask what kept him going. Averse to conflict, he has slogged through the most disagreeable year imaginable. Why take the job? Why put up with the abuse? Many have assumed he did so because he was on a moral crusade, or carrying water for the Republican Party. But when it comes to Starr, nothing is quite so simple.

Some who know him point to an odd combination of ambition and naivete as fueling his decision to become independent counsel. While serving as George Bush's Solicitor General in 1990, Starr made the short list for nomination to the Supreme Court but was passed over. After he left the Administration and returned to private practice, he shelved his dreams of becoming a Justice, ran the Washington office of his new firm, Kirkland & Ellis, but seems to have been looking for a way to become a player again. He toyed with the idea of politics, considering and then rejecting a run against Oliver North in the 1994 Republican primary for Virginia Senator because he didn't have anywhere near enough chits to cash in among the state's pols and was considered too soft, untested--and moderate--to compete.

Then he was offered the independent counsel's job. His closest friends thought him crazy to consider it. "Starr wasn't under any illusion that this would make him popular," said William Kelley, a former Starr law clerk who later became a consultant in the Lewinsky probe. So why accept the post? "Because he was asked," says deputy Bittman. Duty, sacrifice, public service--these were values rooted in Starr's early years as the son of a Fundamentalist preacher in South Texas. From the Scriptures, he says, he learned the value of serving others, of raising the soul by diminishing the self. In college his studies in political science drew a bridge to the real world, where Starr came to know the "importance of institutions" and the role of law in upholding them.

Much has been made of the premium he places on truth as the bedrock of the legal system. He was mocked for sounding like Moses last April, when he declared that "there's no room for white lies" in court. Clinton's enemies see Starr's fealty to the facts as a handy weapon, but to Starr himself, the truth seems to be something more basic, less tactical. It's an attitude that was shaped, he says, by a traumatic moment in preadolescence.

As a sixth-grader in Floresville, Texas, Starr was moving down the lunch line in his primary school cafeteria when a teacher pointed at him and yelled, "You didn't pay!" All eyes turned to Kenneth. "It lasted probably for three seconds, but it was so horrifying that here I would be accused, wrongly, of trying to sneak through, and not paying, literally, 25[cents]," Starr recalls. "It was the public humiliation to be wrongly accused of this very petty offense." The incident, he says, taught him that lies are weapons, and that the truth is one of life's "great virtues." And while "it might be more convenient to do something treacherous or dishonest," he says, "don't do it... The truth is way up there in that pantheon of important things that must be well served."

When he likened himself to the tortoise, Starr may have been revealing more about himself than his steady style. This tortoise has traveled so far, and taken so many hits along the way, that his shell is hardened and scarred. The toll of this year displays itself in small, self-lacerating asides, such as his remark about how the Justice Department document appointing him as independent counsel "will hang in infamy." But at other times, Starr seems to lack perspective on himself, either missing or willfully ignoring his own mental connections. He loved Saving Private Ryan, and he refers to Jan. 16, when his agents first intercepted Lewinsky, as "D-day," yet he says he's never thought of any parallels between Ryan's platoon and his loyal band. He's also a Churchill buff--his middle name is Winston--but he waves off any comparison to the British leader so famously rejected by his countrymen and so thoroughly vindicated by history. "I try to keep my feet very much on the ground and not to draw any wild and grandiose comparisons," he says. But a few seconds later, he's drawing this one: "I love the Lincoln-Douglas debates... [But] had Mr. Gallup been running around the countryside [taking polls], he would have been guiding Mr. Lincoln not to give the House Divided speech. It was not as well received by as much of the populace as was necessary in order to be elected to the U.S. Senate. But he gave it... Why was it the right thing to do? Because it was grounded in a very fundamental sense of right and wrong, which was in the fullness of time broadly shared by at least a substantial part of the American electorate. And then, of course, there's the stuff of marble monuments to remind us that there is right and there is wrong and that a nation cannot endure based on wrong, which was his fundamental message." Then he seems to bring the riff back to Clinton. "And this is wrong. So."

He snaps out of it, perhaps realizing that he's just made the kind of comparison he had boasted about avoiding. He savors these small imaginative flights. In trying to explain himself in the past year, he has invoked such figures as Joe Friday, Atticus Finch, the Lone Ranger, George Washington and Christ in the garden at Gethsemane on the night before the Crucifixion ("Let this cup passeth from me"). The roster suggests that Starr needs to place himself in the company of heroes and saviors. "I can't be the judge in my own case," he says, and maybe it's true. But like Bill Clinton, he still dreams of being found not guilty.