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Starr operates out of offices in Washington and Little Rock, Ark., with grand juries seated in both places. He recently seated a third in suburban Virginia, the locale of one of Tripp's taped conversations with Lewinsky. Critics charge he chose that venue because the more conservative citizens there might produce a grand jury less favorable to Vernon Jordan and Clinton. Starr's staff includes 20 lawyers who move between Little Rock and Washington as needed, plus about 20 support staff and scores of federal agents who are at his disposal. Even by the standards of Washington, a place accustomed to big, churning investigations, that's a mean machine. And in a place as small as Little Rock, it's like a volcano has popped up in the middle of town. During the 3 1/2 years of Starr's Whitewater probe, hundreds of people there have dealt with Starr through criminal trials, testimony at the downtown federal courthouse--where critics of the independent counsel have taken to calling the grand jury room "the Starr Chamber"--or in meetings at his West Little Rock offices.
Many of them say his tactics there offered a foretaste of the problems being cited in the Lewinsky case. That Starr squeezes little people too hard in his pursuit of bigger targets. That he pushes them to say things they don't believe. That when all else fails, he plays the sex card. What has Little Rock most unnerved is how he aims firepower against the smallest of players if he thinks they might lead him to Bill and Hillary.
There's nothing new about tensions between federal prosecutors and locals, especially the ones who are targets of the prosecution. It is after all part of the purpose of U.S. Attorneys to remain aloof from the natives' habits of mutual back scratching and looking the other way. So at least some of the talk around Little Rock against Starr sounds like sour grapes from a hometown nexus of business, law and government that likes to keep its dealings, including the dubious ones, within the family. Yet there are still some valid questions about prosecutorial overreach.
Starr is an outsider, of course. He lives in McLean, Va., with his wife Alice, a past president of the Chamber of Commerce who works at a real estate management company, and their two daughters, Carolyn and Cynthia. A son, Randall, is an undergraduate at Duke. Starr comes to Little Rock a couple of days each week, dividing his time otherwise between Washington and New York City, where he teaches a law course. And while Starr's predecessor as Whitewater investigator, Robert Fiske, hired a mix of government prosecutors and private attorneys, Starr leans more heavily toward two-fisted federal attorneys from New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. With no ties to the locals and a single goal--get the goods on Whitewater, whatever they may be, by whatever (legal) means--they are perceived by some to have bombed Little Rock as if it were Baghdad.