"I believe that we conducted ourselves honorably," he said.

Starr's odyssey from a federal appellate judge known mainly to Washington insiders to a symbol of the Clinton's impeachment crisis began in 1994, when a three-judge panel asked him to become the independent counsel charged with investigating the Whitewater land deals and other matters.

In late 1997 and early 1998, Starr began to investigate whether Clinton had pressured a White House intern, Monica S. Lewinsky, to lie in her deposition to the Paula Jones lawsuit.

When cyber-gossip Matt Drudge made public the new tack of Starr's probe, the White House fought back.

Starr was pigeonholed as prurient and incompetent.

"It got very nasty," said Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, the reporter who broke the Lewinsky case. "You [had] so many people who [were] portrayed as enemies of the Clintons and as driven by hatred and deep seated animus," he said. "The White House people were very successful in portraying Starr as the right-wing zealot when the truth is, he was not that at all."

But Gene Lyons, the former editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, said that the criticism of Starr is deserved.