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Then there's Webb Hubbell. Starr still suspects that Hubbell, who was Hillary Clinton's former partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, knows something about Whitewater that he's not telling, and that consulting fees to Hubbell arranged by Clinton friends were hush money to keep him quiet. It was Starr's effort to prove that Vernon Jordan was a hush-money middleman that gave Starr his path into the Lewinsky case. But Hubbell still insists he has nothing to say.
Skeptics say the lull in Starr's investigation may explain why last year his investigators in Little Rock began circling around Clinton's sex life, questioning state troopers and women with whom Clinton was rumored to have had contact. Starr said he was using "well-accepted law-enforcement methods" to gather leads. All the same, the theory he was pursuing--that Clinton may have disclosed Whitewater secrets during pillow talk--seems a stretch.
Starr was born by the Red River in Vernon, Texas, on July 21, 1946. In the tiny town of Thalia, his father served as minister while sidelining as a barber to make ends meet. Before Kenneth was out of elementary school, the family, including his older sister Billie and brother Jerry, moved to San Antonio. His mother Vannie recalls that "he was spoiled because he was the baby. I had to get that out of him, and it took me some time to do that."
In high school Starr discovered politics. He once told an interviewer that some of his earliest recollections are of the Nixon-Kennedy election of 1960. "I really identified with Nixon because of his rather humble roots and the way he worked his way up," Starr said. "I admired that greatly; I thought that was very much an American dream."
After high school Starr enrolled at Harding College, a Christian school in Searcy, Ark. But 18 months later, after Harding's president chided him for criticizing the school's spending priorities in the college newspaper, he left for George Washington University in Washington. After graduating from there and then from Duke University law school, Starr clerked for then U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger until 1977. He went on to the Washington offices of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm based in Los Angeles where William French Smith, a friend of Ronald Reagan, was a partner. In 1981, when Smith became Reagan's first Attorney General, Starr left the firm--and his six-figure salary--to follow his mentor into government, becoming Smith's chief of staff.
Two years later, Ronald Reagan named him to the prestigious D.C. Federal Appeals Court, a traditional waiting room for Supreme Court nominees, which was the position Starr wanted. During six years on the appeals court, Starr was on the more moderate side of a conservative voting bloc that included Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia at its rightward end. He got a reputation as a consensus builder, ruling against affirmative action and busing but strongly supporting the First Amendment, notably in a high-profile decision favoring the Washington Post when it was sued for libel by Mobil chairman William P. Tavoulareas.