Kenneth Starr may be the man who can overthrow Bill Clinton, but he is also proof positive that not every baby boomer started out as a little rebel. The son of a Church of Christ minister, the future independent counsel was raised not to drink or smoke. At George Washington University in the 1960s, when the academic dress code was being cracked at every turn, he would show up in class in a jacket and tie. And even as a teenager, when the freedom to be a slob is supposed to seem like one of life's essential liberties, he liked having everything just so. "By the time he got to junior high, his hobby was polishing shoes," says his 90-year-old mother Vannie. "He polished his shoes every night, and his daddy's shoes too, just sitting down on the floor in front of the TV."
Now Starr is running a different kind of spit-and-polish operation, one using all the considerable means at his disposal to corner the President. It would be easy to frame the contest between them as one in which a straitlaced, no-nonsense prosecutor faces off against a slippery, lubricious President. But Starr's single-mindedness in pursuit of the Clintons has raised questions about his own propriety. A lot of them are being put out there, of course, by the President's die-hard defenders, notably by way of Hillary Clinton's charge that the independent counsel is a tool of the right wing--talk that Starr calls, simply, "nonsense." But you don't have to be a conspiracy buff to have trouble with how the Whitewater investigation ended up focused on the President's pants. Or to feel that, whatever turns out to be true about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Starr's own methods are not always easy to stomach. Going after the President's sex life, wiring Linda Tripp to secretly tape Lewinsky, trying to persuade Lewinsky to tape Clinton--are those the actions of a conscientious prosecutor or a political hit man?
The confusion stems partly from the independent-counsel law itself. Because it provides such wide-ranging powers, it can make even the most scrupulous prosecutor look at times like the Grand Inquisitor. The unlimited budget and open-ended time frame of an independent counsel give Starr's probe an ominous bulk even when it's idling in neutral, as it was during much of the year before the latest scandal exploded. "Any federal prosecutor has more resources than the target of his investigation, but other federal prosecutors must assign priorities among investigations," says Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general in the Justice Department who was investigated by an independent counsel for three years, then cleared.