Dear Reader:

In past columns, I have faulted independent counsel Kenneth Starr for maintaining a private law practice on the side, representing a tobacco company and planning to take a deanship at Pepperdine University funded by Clinton-bashing conservative Richard Mellon Scaife.

In short, I have faulted Starr for insensitivity to the need to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, and thus for feeding suspicions that he is biased against the President.

Now I am being criticized on exactly the same grounds. The criticism is valid.

My mistake was that I wrote two columns for National Journal about matters under investigation by Starr without first disclosing to our readers that I had considered joining Starr’s office. I thereby let down my colleagues and invited suspicions that I had (and was hiding) a conflict of interest.

I plead innocent to any conflict of interest. I plead guilty to two serious errors in judgment: failing to tell my editor, Steve Smith, what he needed to know when he needed to know it, and failing to figure out for myself what Steve would have told me about the need for disclosure to readers.

These mistakes have not only damaged my credibility, but also left a small cloud (me) hanging over National Journal’s hard-won reputation for nonpartisan reporting and analysis. I apologize to my colleagues, and to any readers whose confidence in this magazine has been shaken.

Apologies aside, the best I can do to make amends is to assure you that I have no actual conflict of interest in writing about Clinton or Starr; that I have no bias against Clinton or for Starr; and that my mistakes were honest ones, rooted in an ill-considered promise of confidentiality to Starr.

Conflict of interest: Nothing I have written (or will write) has been influenced in the slightest by my discussions with Starr, except insofar as I gained newsworthy insights into his thinking. (I got no grand-jury secrets.)

As my friend Michael Kinsley recently wrote in Slate: ” ‘Conflict of interest’ is an overused and underanalyzed concept. Why is a conflict of interest a bad thing? For a journalist, there are two possible answers. 1) The conflict causes some kind of personal advantage to distort either your perception of the truth or your willingness to honestly state what you perceive. In other words, it amounts to a bribe. Or 2) the conflict reveals a previously hidden incentive or tendency to misperceive or misstate the truth.”

Was Starr bribing me? Well, he was offering me a position likely to last two to six months; it would have meant a large financial sacrifice for me in the short run (to underscore my independence, I told Starr that if I joined his office, it would be as a $ 1-a-year volunteer); and it would have put at risk my ability to support my family in the long run, by burning my bridge to my employer, National Journal, and quite likely tainting me in the eyes of other mainstream publications.

Was Starr offering me a part in what I saw as a worthwhile and potentially historic enterprise? Yes. The mission was not to ”get” Clinton. As I wrote Starr on March 27, the independent counsel has an ”obligation to tell the truth, clearly and fairly.” Getting to the truth, I added, has been my ”driving professional passion.”

My alleged bias: Does my willingness to consider joining Starr show anti-Clinton or pro-Starr bias? In my view, no. As I told Starr in that March 27 letter: ”I voted for President Clinton in 1992, and don’t recall ever having voted for a Republican (excepting my write-in vote for Colin Powell for President in 1996).”

I do have opinions of both Clinton and Starr. They are based on open-minded analysis of facts and evidence, and subject to revision as I learn more. My criticisms of the President over the past 12 weeks reflect my reaction to a mass of new facts that began coming to my attention on Jan. 21. That evidence suggests that Clinton may have lied to the nation, lied numerous times under oath in the presence of a federal judge, tampered with witnesses and obstructed justice, all for the purpose of concealing evidence of reckless personal conduct and abuse of his office.

My view of the evidence is hardly unusual among journalists who have followed it closely; many (if not most) of them–liberals and conservatives alike–see this as the leading example of presidential lying and lawlessness at least since Iran-contra, perhaps since Watergate. If I am exceptional, it is in my opinion that lying and lawlessness by any President should be energetically exposed and forcefully condemned.

Suggestions that I am politically biased here should also be evaluated in the context of the countless columns I have written since 1989 criticizing Ronald Reagan, George Bush and other Republican leaders, including Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, especially for working various deceptions on the American people.

And in at least five pieces since 1995, I have criticized Starr himself. They include my Feb. 21 and 28 National Journal columns: ”Why Kenneth Starr Should Resign” and ”How Kenneth Starr Shot Himself in the Foot.” Some earlier columns take Clinton’s side against Starr on specific issues.

Whatever my professional flaws, they do not include enthusiasm for vast right-wing conspiracies, or politically motivated prosecutors, or invasions of privacy (sexual or otherwise). To make sure Starr knew this, I stressed in my March 27 letter:

”I don’t believe that prosecutors have any business investigating anybody’s sex life, except to the extent that it is essential to determining whether serious crimes (such as obstruction of justice and perjury) have been committed; I have (in various writings) assailed abuses of prosecutorial power, unduly punitive criminal laws, unwarranted invasions of privacy by the government and the wisdom of the Independent Counsel Statute (under which you were appointed); I have occasionally criticized you; and I reserve the right to do so again in the future.”

Starr also knew that he would be taking a risk that I would bring him more bad publicity, were I to come aboard only to fall into some fundamental disagreement with him. In that event, I wrote Starr, ”I would resign, and would make my reason for resigning public insofar as I could ethically do so.”

Why was Starr willing to risk that? Apparently because he was confident that he and I would agree–once I had access to his evidence–on what he should do.

My ethics: My mistakes of nondisclosure were big but honest.

I told my editor (on March 10) about an initial feeler by Bob Vagley, a close friend of Starr’s who–without Starr’s knowledge–asked on March 7 whether I would be interested in joining Starr’s staff. On my editor’s advice, I told Vagley that while I admired Starr, I was not interested in working for him.

Then–on March 13–Starr called me, at Vagley’s prompting, and suggested that we talk. I said I’d be glad to talk–and to learn what I could, as a journalist engaged in off- the-record reporting–but that my answer to Bob Vagley’s idea was no. Starr and I had a long meeting on that basis on March 14, with two Starr deputies present.

My first mistake was in persuading myself that nobody at National Journal needed to know about this, as long as I was telling Starr (and myself) that my answer was no, and that I was talking with him as a journalist.

On March 26, I decided to consider joining Starr’s office, and told him so by phone. We met again on March 27. My rationale for nondisclosure at that point was that I was not writing anything then (because I was on vacation) and that before writing again, I would either join Starr’s office or end our discussions.

The reason that I did not disclose any of this to my readers between March 30 (when I ended my talks with Starr and brought my editor up to date) and April 2 (when the news leaked) was that the need for disclosure never crossed my mind. If it had, I would have avoided writing about Starr or Clinton unless and until Starr released me from my promise of confidentiality.

I failed to appreciate fully until later that I should have told my editor immediately about Starr’s March 13 phone call; I should have told Starr that I could not even listen to his proposal unless he would consent to eventual disclosure to my readers; and I should have stopped writing my National Journal column in the interim.

I was blinded by hubris: I had absolute faith in my own integrity. What I failed to see is that integrity, in journalism and politics, is often in the eye of the beholder.