Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Starr

A lawyer’s defense rarely sounds more like an epitaph than when it leans on “time” as the ultimate judge. Kenneth Starr’s line is built as a retroactive vindication: critics complained about process, he replies with outcome. The structure does the work. First comes the familiar grievance (“too thorough, for taking too long”), a phrase that recasts delay as diligence. Then the pivot: “But time has proved…” It’s a courtroom maneuver translated into public rhetoric, inviting the audience to treat history as an appellate court that has already ruled in his favor.

The subtext is less about procedural pride than about legitimacy. Starr isn’t just arguing that the investigation was careful; he’s arguing it deserved to be expansive, even invasive, because later events would justify the scope. “Throughout that investigation” signals a siege mentality: they were attacked while doing the hard, righteous thing. It’s a convenient inversion in a case where the very breadth of the inquiry was the controversy.

Context matters: Starr’s most famous “investigation” is the Whitewater-to-Lewinsky expansion that culminated in Clinton’s impeachment. Critics charged partisan overreach; supporters framed it as accountability. Starr’s sentence sidesteps the moral messiness of that era by adopting the clean language of institutional virtue. “Thorough” is a halo word in law, and “time” is an alibi that can’t be cross-examined.

What makes the line effective is also what makes it slippery: it converts a disputed political project into a tale of professional rigor, asking us to remember the delay, not the damage, and to treat controversy itself as proof that the investigators were doing something important.