THE STAR CHAMBER: THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL’S INVESTIGATION OF THE PRESIDENT by John Wilkes. Fayetville, AR: Pepperdine Press Books, 1998. 499 pp.
Reviewed by Stephen S. Meinhold, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
"The truth IS stranger than fiction…"
THE STAR CHAMBER is a fictitious account of an Independent Counsel’s investigation of a president. A president, who happens to be a former Southern Governor, who was involved in a shady land deal before being elected and who gets caught up in a sex scandal while in office. Sound familiar? THE STAR CHAMBER is political reality masquerading as fiction. Despite the author’s forewarning that he "made it all up" (ix) and that the book is not about real people or events, do not be mislead, this is a parody of the Kenneth Starr investigation. THE STAR CHAMBER is occasionally funny but it is pretty much useless for scholars. The public may learn something of value from this fictional story of an Independent Counsel’s investigation run amok but astute observers of politics will not. THE STAR CHAMBER is too real to be good fiction and too fictionalized to be valuable.
John Wilkes is the literary name of Stephen Smith, a professor of communications at the University of Arkansas and a one-time assistant to Governor Bill Clinton and business partner of the McDougals. Smith plead guilty in 1995 to a misdemeanor after being investigated and prosecuted by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Thus, he knows of what he writes. But what he writes has a certain bent to it and that is perhaps the reason he chose fiction as the means to tell the story. I found little in THE STAR CHAMBER that readers of this list have not probably already talked about with their students given the events of the past five years.
THE STAR CHAMBER is not your everyday political fiction. It is political fiction with a strong dose of reality,
a reality that is probably better taught using the real people, places and events.