Ken Starr's Memoir 'Contempt' Looks At The Rocky Road To Clinton Impeachment

Anyone contemplating the impeachment of a president should read Ken Starr's new book on the case he made for the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.

Not that the author of Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation is interested in setting the stage for the next impeachment. His immediate mission here is reshaping our memories of that earlier "national trauma."

Starr is offering, at long last, a defense of his most famous work as a lawyer. But it may also be read as a cautionary tale. He is warning that even when the facts at hand seem damning, even incontrovertible, impeachment proceedings may not produce the expected result.

Starr had already been a federal appeals judge and U.S. solicitor general when he agreed in 1994 to take over the investigation of Clinton. The probe had initially related to a failed real estate project called Whitewater and a savings