Fiske’s Successor Is Active GOP Partisan : Special counsel: Only recently Kenneth W. Starr weighed a bid for U.S. Senate. But friends from both parties say he will be fair and impartial.

Like Robert B. Fiske Jr., whom he will replace, Kenneth W. Starr is a Republican, a lawyer in a large corporate law firm, a man who has served in high positions in the Justice Department and elsewhere in government.

But unlike Fiske--and much to the dismay of nervous White House officials--Starr is also an active Republican who has worked on party campaign committees in northern Virginia, where he lives, and who earlier this year looked carefully at the possibility of running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Democratic Sen. Charles S. Robb.

Starr, 48, was also widely touted as a likely Supreme Court nominee in the George Bush Administration and would be a prime candidate for consideration should the Republicans once again capture the White House.

Over the last several weeks, Starr also has discussed with other lawyers plans to file a brief opposing President Clinton’s legal position in the sexual harassment case filed against the President by Paula Corbin Jones. The brief would have challenged Clinton’s claim that he cannot be sued while in office. Starr’s appointment will preclude him from going ahead with those plans but that fact alone did little to mollify White House aides who described themselves as “surprised” and dismayed by the appointment.

Friends of Starr’s, including some prominent Democratic lawyers, insisted Friday that the dismay is unwarranted. Despite his partisan background, Starr can be counted on to weigh the evidence in the Whitewater case fairly and decide it impartially, his friends said.

But even friends conceded that Starr may face another major problem: unlike Fiske, who was a former prosecutor, Starr has never handled criminal cases or investigations. “He’s going to have to learn a lot in a hurry,” one friend said.

“I’m sure some people will be worried” about partisanship, said Terence Adamson, a Democrat and a former top aide to Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell during the Jimmy Carter Administration. But “Starr is a man of tremendous integrity. That’s worth a lot.”

Theodore B. Olson, another longtime friend of Starr’s, who served with him in the Ronald Reagan Administration, voiced a similar sentiment. “Ken is an enormously able, extremely conscientious, very, very fair individual,” Olson said.

Starr is no stranger to politically charged cases. Last year, for example, he took on the assignment of trying to mediate between the Senate Ethics Committee and Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) in the dispute over how much of Packwood’s diaries could be used in the committee’s investigation of sexual harassment allegations against the senator. A judge eventually ordered Packwood to turn over the diaries.

As solicitor general in the Bush Administration--the government’s chief advocate before the high court--Starr also observed the disputes between the White House and special counsel Lawrence E. Walsh’s Iran-Contra investigation. That experience left him aware of the potential abuses of unfettered special counsel investigations, said another friend and former Justice Department colleague, Terry Eastland.

“I think he’ll be a somewhat constrained special counsel,” said Eastland, who interviewed Starr extensively for a book about special counsels. “He understands the excesses that have characterized some special counsel investigations.”

“It’s a different kind of thing from Jay Stephens,” Eastland added, referring to the Republican lawyer whose appointment to investigate Whitewater-related issues for a division of the Treasury Department infuriated White House aides earlier this year. “Stephens publicly criticized Clinton in harsh terms,” Eastland said. “I don’t think you’ve seen any of that from Ken Starr.”

Indeed, even if Starr harbors critical thoughts about Clinton, it would be uncharacteristic of him to have uttered them publicly.

Throughout a spectacularly successful career, which has seen him go from a Supreme Court clerkship for former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to the Justice Department, to the federal Court of Appeals, back to the Justice Department and then on to a highly lucrative private practice, Starr has demonstrated the virtues of prudence, caution and moderation.

A native of San Antonio, Tex., Starr first entered political life in the Reagan Administration as a protege of William French Smith, whom he had gotten to know as a young lawyer in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the large Los Angeles-based law firm.

Smith made Starr his chief of staff and counselor and he quickly proved his worth by extracting the new attorney general from a series of potentially embarrassing ethics questions--convincing him in one case to return a $50,000 severance payment he had received from a steel company that had been a former client. Starr also helped shepherd Sandra Day O’Connor’s nomination to the Supreme Court through the Senate.

In 1983, Reagan appointed Starr to the federal appeals court in Washington. At 37, he was the youngest judge ever appointed to that court, and was widely admired as a thoughtful and moderate judge. When he left the court in 1989 to become the Bush Administration’s solicitor general--the government’s chief advocate before the Supreme Court--the move was generally seen as preparation for a high court nomination.

But Starr never got the nod that was so widely expected. When the time came, Bush shied away from choosing a judge who had ruled on many controversial topics in favor of a relatively unknown quantity--New Hampshire judge David H. Souter.

Instead, after Bush’s defeat, Starr became the center of one of Washington’s most active bidding wars as several major law firms competed for his services. He eventually chose Chicago-based Kirkland & Ellis. Working in the firm’s Washington office, he is reputed to be among the city’s highest-paid attorneys.