Getting Beyond The Cliche

A new book shows Starr is less ideological than portrayed, but often inept

Scarcely more than a year after its denouement, the Lewinsky scandal has already entered its revisionist phase. The inevitable histories are showing up in bookstores, and the most commercially successful of them--from Monica Lewinsky's bathetic memoir Monica's Story to the artful partisanship of Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy--are markedly one-sided in recounting the struggle between Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr. The accepted narrative, in brief: an insensitive but all too human Chief Executive is beset by a sex-obsessed religious zealot masquerading as an upholder of the rule of law. To judge by sales, this version of events has many adherents among...

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