The President, the Prosecutor, and the Wheel of Fortune by Linda Greenhouse
'So Bill Clinton appears well on his way back to the White House (albeit in a different capacity) while Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who pursued him and his sexual indiscretions all the way to his impeachment, is out of a job. Anyone who imagined such a reciprocal reversal of fortune belongs in a Hollywood writers’ room — although probably not even “The West Wing” would have offered up such a plot twist.
Mr. Starr resigned two weeks ago from his tenured position as a law professor at Baylor University. He had served the Baptist university as president for six years until May, when the trustees fired him for failing to respond adequately to, of all things, a sex scandal involving assaults and criminal behavior by members of the university’s super-lucrative Big 12 football team. Originally, Mr. Starr, a former federal judge and United States solicitor general, was going to stay on as chancellor. But he resigned from that position on June 1, saying that “the captain goes down with the ship.” Evidently, the original plan to retain his position on the law faculty proved untenable as well.
Just before the story of his imminent dismissal broke, Mr. Starr was taking part in a program at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on the subject of the Constitution and the presidency. His comments about his former target were generous, if oblique. He referred to Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency philanthropic career as a “redemptive process” and called him “the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation.” He added: “There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament.”
Mr. Starr, named to a federal appeals court by President Ronald Reagan while still in his 30s, was once seen very plausibly as a future Supreme Court justice. Is there a tragic dimension to his trajectory as well? The victims of his coddled football players wouldn’t think so. It seems to me that his story is essentially the story of the corruption that flows from the pact that college administrators make with big-time sports programs.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/opinion/the-president-the-prosecutor-and-the-wheel-of-fortune.html?
