Bill Clinton

Saturday, Apr 6, 1996 7:29 PM UTC

The Great Frame-Up

There is a Whitewater scandal all right, but it has little to do with the benighted patch of land in the Ozarks or a failed Arkansas S&L.

By Andrew Ross

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There is a Whitewater scandal all right, but it has little to do with the benighted patch of land in the Ozarks or a failed Arkansas S&L. It’s about journalistic malfeasance, cynical political gamesmanship and a gross abuse of judicial power. In combination, these forces are gunning to frame the president of the United States.

The story, misreported from the start by the once-reliable New York Times, augmented by journalists too lazy to check out facts in front of their own eyes, has now become the No.1 best-seller in the form of James B. Stewart’s “Blood Sport.” As
Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette pointed out in a recent issue of SALON, a number of Stewart’s basic assertions of what the Clintons did and said in regard to Whitewater are flat-out wrong. Lyons is no longer alone. Joe Conason, in the April 1 issue of the New York Observer, blows a huge hole in Stewart’s most prized “finding” — that Hillary Clinton lied on a Whitewater loan document in 1987. Guess what? She told the truth, which Stewart would have known had he actually read page two of said document. What happened? “I didn’t see the second page in the documents that were produced to me,” Stewart told Conason. Whoops!

A more devastating critique of the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s book is to be found in the April 18 issue of The New York Review of Books. Historian Garry Wills actually took the time and trouble to read the detailed reports done for the Resolution Trust Corporation and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — by Republican attorneys, among others — and compared them to Stewart’s efforts. Wills discovers (as Gene Lyons has been shouting from the rooftops for months) that the reports systematically address every allegation made against the Clintons and find not a shred of evidence to support any of them. The RTC reports, as Wills notes, destroy the demonstrably false claims of Clinton involvement in shady dealings trumpeted by James and Susan McDougal, and the crooked Arkansas judge, David Hale — the same three characters whose imaginative allegations Stewart appears to have swallowed whole.

As Wills plows through Stewart’s book — noting various direct contradictions from one passage to the next — his sense of outrage grows. At one point he accuses Stewart of consciously endorsing the “fabrications” of crooks like David Hale. He also takes dead aim at the New York Times. “Jeff Gerth’s Times articles, William Safire’s rumblings about (Vincent) Foster’s ‘so-called’ suicide, the distorted accounts of travelgate — such work by the respectable press gives an opening to wild conspiratorialists. When an FDIC report lays to rest many of the charges implicit in Jeff Gerth’s articles, the Times does not apologize for its errors but argues strenuously to continue the blatant political circus of Al D’Amato.”

That particular circus, ringmastered by the co-chairman of the Bob Dole for President campaign, has been temporarily derailed, courtesy of a Democratic filibuster. But the increasingly grotesque activities of the so-called Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr, continue unabated. It is now quite apparent that Starr fully intends to nail the Clintons for something, anything — no matter what — as evidenced by his embrace of David Hale as the star witness in the current federal trial of the McDougals and Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker. Hale, a convicted felon, who at one time ran 13 different dummy companies from one address, claims that Bill Clinton leaned on him for a $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal. The charges, hotly denied by both Clinton and the McDougals, came up, rather handily, as Hale was facing a blizzard of felony charges and considerable time in the hoosegow. None of which appears to faze Kenneth Starr.

Neither do Starr’s own conflict of interests, which the ultraconservative former GOP Solicitor General appears to have embraced with relish. Unlike previous special prosecutors and independent counsels, Starr has refused to put his private law business on hold for the duration. He still represents the extreme right Bradley Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to anti-Clinton activist groups; he has also gone to bat for cigarette companies in their efforts to withhold documents from the government. And, as Joe Conason and The Nation discovered, Starr’s own law firm, Kirkland & Ellis managed to reach a highly favorable settlement on claims filed against it by the Resolution Trust Corporation, whose role in Whitewater is being investigated by — Kenneth Starr.

Such blatant disregard for elementary ethics raises anew the circumstances by which Starr got to be the Whitewater prosecutor in the first place. He replaced former U.S. Attorney Robert Fiske Jr., a Republican, whose preliminary report exonerating the Clintons proved intolerable to the GOP-dominated Congress. In their search for a more malleable replacement, one of the Clinton-hating Senators from North Carolina, Lauch Faircloth, an outspoken member of Sen. D’Amato’s Whitewater committee, had a cozy lunch with Judge David Sentelle, whose judicial committee appointed independent counsels. Soon after, Starr, who no doubt impressed Faircloth with his work on Paula Jones’ sex harassment suit against President Clinton, got the prosecutorial nod. And guess who got a job soon after as a receptionist in Sen. Faircloth’s office? Judge Sentelle’s wife.

One can only guess at the ultimate reward that awaits Starr, apart from the malicious pleasure of trying to destroy a Democratic president. A seat on the Supreme Court would be a pretty good bet. But with the President continuing to look good in the opinion polls — especially in the key Midwest states — a Starr-engineered frame-up is even more urgently required if the Republicans are to regain power. Troopergate, travelgate, and if he can’t nail the President, how about the First Lady? As Garry Wills concludes, “There are levels of the despicable that Whitewater ‘analysts’ have been plumbing to new depths. That is the real scandal.”

Andrew Ross is Salon's executive vice president. More Andrew Ross.

Saturday, Mar 9, 1996 6:00 PM UTC

The Downsizing of Robert Reich

For nearly four years, the Clinton administration has locked away its Labor Secretary, Robert Reich -- and his progressive ideas about how to get corporate America to practice better "citizenship." Has Reich's time finally come?

By Mark Hertsgaard

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Before Pat Buchanan, there was Robert Reich.

Until the Dole campaign finally took the “go” out of the Buchanan crusade, it was the bellicose broadcaster who grabbed the headlines, doing what no
Democratic politician of the modern era has managed to do: put the hardships and
injustices facing American workers on the front burner of American politics.
It’s an achievement that must stick in Robert Reich’s craw. As Secretary of
Labor, Reich was supposed to be Bill Clinton’s point man on this issue. And
certainly Reich has spoken out, and fought, for workers since joining the
administration of his old Oxford classmate Clinton. But Reich’s efforts have never attained the visibility of Buchanan’s. In an interview with SALON,
Reich conceded the point, arguing, “It’s far easier to make headlines by
vilifying and demonizing, by casting blame, instead of doing the more
difficult work of coming up with solutions.”

No doubt. But Reich also faces a second problem, closer to home. As a Labor
Secretary whose progressive outlook places him on the leftward edge of the
Clinton administration, Reich serves a president who seems less interested in
the travails of ordinary workers than in keeping corporate America happy
through a program of deficit reduction, tight money and global trade
agreements. As the New York Times has noted (citing White House sources, no
less), Bill Clinton “has done more for the Fortune 500 than virtually any
other President in this century.”

With Buchanan now forcing politicians of all stripes to confront the
plight of American workers, it seemed a good time to visit Secretary Reich and
hear his side of the story. Reich has made news in recent months by
aggressively pressuring The Gap, Eddie Bauer and other large clothing
retailers to stop relying on overseas suppliers who pay workers sub-minimum
wages and impose inhuman working conditions. He has successfully cracked down
on companies who have illegally raided their workers’ pension funds. And throughout Clinton’s presidency
Reich has demanded that attention be paid to
the human consequences of an economy that is fantastically enriching the upper
crust while crushing the poor and turning America’s once-confident middle
class into what Reich calls “the anxious class.”

But Reich has wielded relatively little influence over Clinton’s
larger economic policy, which has instead reflected the Wall Street
perspective of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, former Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Bentsen’s successor, Robert Rubin. Might this
change, now that Clinton is running for reelection? Clinton has reportedly
fretted in private that he must deliver “something for the common man” if he
is to “crawl through to reelection.” Is it time, then, for Clinton to bring
Reich off the bench and into the game?

Physically, the Labor Secretary stands a mere four-foot-ten compared to Pat
Buchanan’s six-foot-two, but when it comes to workers’ issues, Reich’s giant
brain and stout heart would seem to make him the administration’s best
possible match-up against the hulking Irishman’s pseudo-populism. Reich
knows how to sell his ideas. In television appearances (including a CNN face-off with Buchanan last Labor Day in which he more than held his own), he invariably speaks
in the quick, witty sound-bites producers love. In books and newspaper
articles, he writes with a verve and directness uncommon among government
officials.

For some reason, though, Reich spoke at a slow, deliberate pace in the
interview for this article, as if he were dictating to a secretary. He stayed
relentlessly “on message” and loyal to his president, skirting questions about
what specific steps, if any, Bill Clinton might take to stand up for workers
and regain the initiative from the Republicans in the economic debate. His one
flash of spontaneity came when I mentioned that his ideas for encouraging
socially responsible corporate behavior had been attacked from both the left
and the right. “Then I must be doing something right,” he chuckled.

Reich politely rejected any suggestion that the administration had been
caught flat-footed by Buchanan. “In his State of Union address, long before
Pat Buchanan scored well in the New Hampshire primary, the president called on
corporations to share with their employees not just the downside burdens and
risks of economic change but also the upside benefits and profits,” said
Reich. Not only has Clinton “been talking about this issue for many years,”
Reich added, he has tried to do something about it: by raising the minimum
wage, expanding the earned income tax credit, providing universal health
insurance, reforming the pension system, and supporting
low-interest student loans, school-to-work apprenticeships and other education
and job training programs.

To some, this list of initiatives may sound rather bloodless, especially when
compared to Mr. Buchanan’s hellfire attacks on corporate privilege and
callousness. Reich counters that, “Casting blame and indulging in the
politics of resentment may draw loud applause, but it’s irresponsible.
There’s no magic bullet for the insecurities, stagnating wages and widening
income disparities this country has been experiencing for the last 15
years. And anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being honest with the American
people.” A second problem is that many of the initiatives Reich listed, such as the efforts to broaden health coverage and raise the minimum wage by 90 cents an hour, remain unfulfilled, victims of congressional Republicans’ opposition. Still, says
Reich, “We’ve accomplished a great deal, though there’s far, far more to do.”

Reich’s current favorite idea is a controversial one: offering
tax cuts to encourage corporations to treat their workers better. Reich first
broached the concept in the wake of AT&T’s announcement in January that it was
firing some 40,000 workers; IBM, Boeing, Sears, GM and many other
blue-chip companies had previously executed similar cutbacks. Lamenting these
job losses in an Op-Ed article in the New York Times, Reich pointedly asked,
“Do companies have obligations beyond the bottom line?” Reich argued they
did and made his case by exploiting a favorite theme of Bob Dole and other
Republicans: If entertainment companies are expected to forego the profits of
lewd and violent programming in the name of social responsibility, “what about
a corporation’s duty to its employees and its community? The sudden loss of a
paycheck can be more damaging to family values than a titillating screen
performance.”

The problem, continued Reich, is that under the rules of the marketplace,
AT&T “may have done exactly the right thing by its shareholders.” If
government wants companies to honor their social responsibilities, Reich
added, it must give them an economic reason to do so. Hence, Reich’s idea of
reducing, or even eliminating, corporate income taxes for firms that provide
workers with decent wages and benefits, upgrade their skills and remain in
their communities.

“The great transformation of the American workforce from the old
(manufacturing) economy to the new (information) economy is difficult and
costly,” Reich added in our interview. “Right now, individuals are bearing
most of the cost themselves, and government is picking up part of the tab. Why
shouldn’t the private sector bear some of the responsibility as well?”

Secretary Reich is not the only Democrat ventilating such ideas. Senators
Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and
Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri have each advanced similar
proposals. Reich told me he hopes all these proposals will serve as “a
departure point for a national debate about corporate citizenship,” a debate
similar to the one over the role of government that has occupied American
politics the past 15 years.

Of course, no one has more sway over the national political conversation than
the president. Yet it is unclear whether Bill Clinton will take the lead on
this issue. While Reich is pushing his old friend in one direction, Clinton’s most senior economic policy-makers, Treasury Secretary Rubin and Council of Economic Advisers chief Laura D’Andrea Tyson, have argued that the focus must remain on Clinton’s
current economic agenda — in other words, a continuation of the centrist
consensus.

Any steps in Reich’s direction would undoubtedly antagonize the corporate community. The very idea that
corporations have responsibilities beyond producing profits and dividends is
anathema to the Wall Street Journal crowd. Conservative columnist William
Safire, who has been remarkably quiet about his former White House colleague
Buchanan’s corporation-bashing, nevertheless pounced on Reich’s tax incentive proposal with hysterical vengeance, dubbing it “The New Socialism.” From the American
Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group funded by big business, tax
expert Diana Furchtgott-Roth argues that telling corporations they shouldn’t
fire people is “the height of industrial policy” — a self-evident evil,
apparently. Besides, she adds, aggregate U.S. employment is steadily
increasing (even if the newly created jobs pay workers far less), so
“downsizing is not a national problem.”

At the same time, critics on the left question why taxpayers should subsidize the very
corporations who are putting so many people out of work. “A good start on
getting companies to do the right thing is to stop rewarding them for doing
the wrong thing,” says AFL-CIO spokesman David Saltz. Adds MIT economist Lester Thurow, “Essentially what they’re saying is, ‘We’ll bribe you to be good guys.”

The fact is, corporate tax rates have already been lowered substantially in
the United States. The corporate tax rate was 52 percent in the early 1960s;
today, it is 35 percent. Corporate taxes provided 25 percent of federal
revenues in the 1960s; they now account for 10 percent. When I asked
Secretary Reich whether additional corporate tax breaks made sense when
previous cuts had not produced the socially exemplary behavior he desired, he
replied that the alternative approach was to impose more regulations on
corporations; this he opposed because it “could be enormously inefficient.
The virtue of a tax incentive is that corporations do not have to seek it if
they don’t want to.” He added that the revenue losses from his tax cuts would
be recouped by “cutting corporate welfare,” a step recently promoted
separately by a bipartisan group of Senators led by Ted Kennedy and John
McCain of Arizona.

“Pat Buchanan may fade, but not the anger that fuels him,” wrote Reich in
late February. Bill Clinton is a smart enough politician to recognize he must
deal with that popular anger. After all, it was mass economic discontent that
enabled him to defeat George Bush in 1992, and Americans are hurting much more
today than they were four years ago. Reich and his congressional allies want
to address Americans’ anger by promoting corporate responsibility. But will
common folk struggling to keep their heads above water really accept a
strategy of using carrots rather than sticks against job-cutting corporations?
For his part, will Clinton endorse Reich’s proposal, thereby risking
retaliation from the business elite he has courted so faithfully?
Given Clinton’s allegiance to the
centrist consensus, says Jesse Jackson adviser Robert Borosage, the most likely scenario is that the
president “will talk more about this stuff as the campaign heats up but do
little and forget it entirely after Election Day.”

What does Clinton himself say? From the White House, spokesperson Mary Ellen Glynn says the president will
soon travel to California, where he will visit the Harmon corporation, a
family-friendly company that tries to keep its workers employed during hard
times. “This is something the president has been talking about for years and
years,” Glynn says. “And you’ll hear more about it in the next few weeks.”

Who is to blame for the plight of the “anxious middle”? And what should be done about it? Join the conversation in the Issues & Politics area of Table Talk.

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More Mark Hertsgaard.

Sunday, Feb 11, 1996 2:40 PM UTC

John Major's Final Cut / Non-disclosure

Behind a convenient curtain, an anonymous writer throws poisoned darts at the President, and the cognoscenti applaud.

By Andrew Ross

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Aficionados of “House of Cards,” the wicked British television series, might be forgiven for thinking they are seeing the reincarnation of Francis Urquart, the show’s ruthless prime minister, in the heretofore drab and inoffensive John Major.

How else to explain the prime minister’s tactics in the Irish peace process — waving various red rags until the mad bulls could stand it no longer and went on a rampage?

Just as historic all-party talks, involving Protestants, Sinn Fein, and the British and Irish governments looked like a real possibility, Major insisted that the Irish Republican Army disarm first. Then, when Sen. George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy to the peace process, proposed the eminently sensible alternative of talking and disarming concurrently, the gray man poured more “petrol on the flames” (in the words of Irish prime minister John Bruton), demanding interim elections in the Protestant-dominated North ahead of any talks with Catholic nationalists.

The upshot has been entirely predictable. The stone killers of the IRA found the excuse to get back to the business they know best — killing and maiming. Gerry Adams, as usual, acted like the perfect IRA marionette, “regretting,” but refusing to condemn, its bombing of London’s Canary Wharf. Unlike Irish-Americans, the British don’t favor throwing ticker-tape parades for this terrorist mouthpiece. His mealy-mouthed response to the deaths and injuries of innocent civilians serve only to confirm their worst suspicions about the man.

Meanwhile, John Major strikes a proud and determined pose in the House of Commons. His short-term poll ratings — and the lowly Conservatives will take anything at this point — are likely to rise. An added political bonus: with the peace process halted, Major ensures the continuing support of the Ulster Unionists to prop up his vanishing majority in the House of Commons.

The truly conspiratorially-minded might even wonder at the timing. The bombing, at least temporarily, overshadows the just-released Scott Report, which details the extent of British government involvement in arms sales to Saddam Hussein — a report that otherwise would be resulting in a fresh wave of ministerial resignations in the already tottering Conservative government. “F.U.” must be applauding in his grave.

All right, so perhaps Major is neither clever nor Urquartian to pull off such a cynical ruse. More likely, it was wretched miscalculation. that handed a fuse to those for whom peace holds little attraction.

Ironic, for Major started the peace process — the one rare achievement in his sad premiership. To save it, he would surely have to back off from the demands that placed such formidable obstacles in its way. It’s hard to see how he can do that in the wake of the IRA bombing. The only chance for peace is for this gray man to leave office, along with his fellow Conservatives. For the sake of the war-weary denizens of the United Kingdom, the sooner the better.

–Andrew Ross

Non-disclosure

Behind a convenient curtain, an anonymous writer throws poisoned darts at the President, and the cognoscenti applaud.

It’s hotter than O.J., or Colin Powell’s ghosted memoirs, and bigger than the East Coast blizzard. A “team” of Washington Post reporters is on Anonymous’ trail. Larry King is talking about nothing but. The Insiders — those in the know — are raving. “Far and away the best thing I have read about the 1992 campaign” (Michael Lewis, New York Times); “An eerily accurate roman a clef about the 1992 Clinton campaign” (Todd Purdum, New York Times); “A thinly veiled and eerily precise account of the players and goings-on behind the 1992 Clinton campaign.” (Mary B.W. Tabor, New York Times).

That last accolade is a little peculiar, because Ms. Tabor covers the publishing&nbspindustry for the Times, not politics. One wonders how she is in a position to know what is “thinly veiled” or “eerily precise” about the book in question, “Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics” by Anonymous (Random House). Lewis, who did spend some time covering the Clintons in 1992, states flatly, “Almost every character, incident and setting has been drawn from life. . . The author’s portrait of Mr. Clinton is astonishingly powerful.” Similar testimonies to the book’s authenticity have come from such elite Beltway reporters as Walter Shapiro of Time, and Christopher Buckley of The New Yorker (“Who could have written this? Certainly someone with a front-row seat at the Clinton campaign.”)

Really? In that case, we are surprised to discover that George Stephanopoulos, who Washington cognoscenti agree is the model for the story’s narrator, Henry Burton, is in fact half black — and that he not only enjoyed a hot and heavy affair with media maven Mandy Grunwald (“Daisy”) but also had a somewhat unsatisfying quickie with Hillary Clinton (“Susan Stanton”). Paul Tsongas (“Leonard Harris”), on the other hand, was stricken with a heart attack and became a vegetable during the primaries.

Where was C-Span when all this was going on? And where were the American Spectator and those tattle-tale state troopers when Bill Clinton (“Jack Stanton”) was having carnal relations with the semi-retarded (but “luscious”) black adolescent daughter of a barbecue joint owner? Diverted from the truth, no doubt, by Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” spin doctor, Betsy Wright (“Libby Holden”), apparently a lesbian of almost Samoan proportions.

And if you find yourself wondering, after reading this book, why the Clinton presidential campaign described in it bears absolutely no resemblance to any in the history of Western democracy, that means that you, like most of the rest of us, have been reading the wrong newspapers and books all these years.

O.K., so maybe it’s really all a joke. Jolly good fun, and all that. Except that those in the know — like the aforementioned Michael Lewis — insist that this is the real McCoy. Walter Shapiro envies the author (“Words cannot describe how much I wish I had written it.”) To Lewis, “The author’s portrait of Mr. Clinton is astonishingly powerful. I doubt that anyone who reads the book will ever again think of the President in quite the same way.”

And therein lies a bit of a problem. If we are to take the portrait etched by Anonymous seriously, we have not just a cheerfully philandering head of state, but one who ruthlessly conned a helpless young black girl — whose child he likely sired — into undergoing a painful and unnecessary amniocentesis, while knowingly participating in a fraudulent blood test. Are Lewis and others saying such an incident, or one very like it, occurred? Given the ongoing hammering about Clinton’s “character” — which is bound to get louder as the campaign year rolls on — such questions of literary license and thinly-veiled “truths” assume some real-world import.

Not that Anonymous, Random House, nor a slobbering press corps seem to give two hoots for such concerns. When you’re anonymous, you can write whatever you like. Lots of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, none of which you will be called on. What are the Clintons going to do — sue?

The use of pseudonyms and anonymous bylines are invitations to pure charlatanism, not to mention the continuing erosion of publishing and journalistic standards. In the case of “Primary Colors,” the amusement factor may outweigh deeper concerns. But still, one can’t help but wonder at the implicit cowardice of it all.

–Andrew Ross

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Andrew Ross is Salon's executive vice president. More Andrew Ross.

Sunday, Jan 28, 1996 2:07 PM UTC

Whitewater: Parade of the red herrings

After spending $30 million, poring over 250,000 documents and investigating half the state of Arkansas the Republicans have produced nothing but "suspicions."

By Andrew Ross

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Drip. Drip. Drip. Another “newly-discovered” Whitewater document here, more “contradictory” testimony there, subpoenas everywhere. Fresh “revelations,” tossed out like morsels of bread, devoured by the angry flock of crows whose cawing, day by day, gets louder: “Cover-up.” “Obstruction of justice.” “Impeachment.”

White House aides call it “Groundhog Day,” after the movie in which Bill Murray experiences the same day over and over. And it won’t end any time soon. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is not likely to report much before election day. The Clintons’ one-time partner, Jim McDougal, faces a federal trial on charges similar to those he has already been acquitted of in state court.

House and Senate committee will continue to hold hearings, and are likely to range into ever more baroque territory. Watch for Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s committee’s efforts to raise dark suspicions about the Clintons’ relationship with a convicted cokehead, while a House panel attempts to link them to drug smuggling and money laundering at Mena Airport in Arkansas. Having lost the budget battle, been trumped by Clinton on the values battle, and saddled with a lemon of a presidential candidate, the Republicans have nothing left but Whitewater — and the “character issue.”

They’ve already spent about $30 million, gone through 250,000 documents, and indicted or subpoenaed virtually the entire state of Arkansas, so it’s astonishing how little they have. Investigations conducted by the Resolution Trust Corporation and by former independent counsel Robert Fiske have exonerated the Clintons. But that wasn’t enough.

“Our deepest suspicions,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal recently, “are that back in Arkansas the Clinton tag team was engaged in a pattern of sleazy operations, and that when they arrived in Washington they abused the powers of the Presidency to thwart investigation of them…These are perhaps only suspicions, but various people keep asking.”

That’s it. After three years of constant pounding, reams of newsprint, and stacks of public records gone over with the finest of fine-toothed combs, that is the sum of the Wall Street Journal’s judgment. It has “suspicions,” albeit of the “deepest” nature. That’s only slightly more than Ted Koppel got out of D’Amato on a recent “Nightline.” What crimes, Koppel kept asking, are the Clintons supposed to have committed? D’Amato buried his head in his notes and mumbled about the need for more documents.

But neither does one come away from this affair with a particularly enhanced view of the Clintons. Not only did they respond in the most boneheaded ways as the Whitewater stories broke, they appear to have exercised execrable judgment during their Arkansas days. Why, for example, would they go into business in the first place with a demonstrable loose cannon like James McDougal — known, according to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter, Meredith Oakley for “his volatile temper, his inattentiveness and the wild mood swings that were eventually diagnosed as manic-depression.”

The handling of “Travelgate” was every bit as sorry. The Clintons had every right to fire the
White House travel office staff; it does, after all, serve “at the pleasure of the President.” And as a Peat Marwick audit showed, the office was hardly a paragon of financial probity. But the Clintons’ timing — coming on the heels of the notorious $200 Christophe haircut and the “Troopergate” sex tryst allegations — could not have been more inept. “However valid the criticisms of the travel office were, the matter couldn’t have been handled worse,” wrote Elizabeth Drew in “On the Edge,” her closely-reported account of the first 18 months of the Clinton administration. “The picture that was drawn was of cronyism and looseness with the truth.”

None of which qualifies as a crime, but all of which is red meat for a press corps that the writer James Fallows says “has fallen into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom.”
It’s particularly appetizing in what conservative scholar Suzanne Garment has called the era of “scandal politics,” whose ringmasters “are not content to throw the book at a political figure who becomes their target; instead they spend great effort figuring out how to hit him with the whole library.” Spread by imitation and retaliation, she writes, scandal politics “has become not only self-reinforcing but virtually endless in its prospects. It exercises a power over government and the public agenda that is now out of proportion to the benefits it brings in.”

What benefits, if any, will Whitewater bring? Another failed presidency? Perhaps it’s all a cunning Clinton plot, filled with false leads, red herrings and suddenly — hey, presto! — a pull of the handkerchief, and there’s nothing there! Now, who is the audience most likely to be mad at? Then again, the Republicans could always dredge up those old Troopergate trysts and jobs-for-silence allegations. Of course, no sooner is Bob Dole ensconced in the Oval Office than the Democrats will take a hard look at his wife’s business dealings (“Liddygate”). Or if it should be Lamar Alexander, well, he was the governor of one of the less clean states in the Union; there has to be something there (“Memphisgate”).

“Self-reinforcing and endless in its prospects.” The circus will never end.

Is there anything to Whitewater? Are there serious criminal ethical issues at stake or are we spending tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars for purely political reasons? Go to Table Talk, click on the Issues category and go to the Hillary Clinton topic, where you will find the debate in full swing. (Remember to register if you haven’t already done so.)

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Andrew Ross is Salon's executive vice president. More Andrew Ross.

Saturday, Jan 27, 1996 1:46 PM UTC

What's the bottom line on Whitewater?

A Salon roundtable

By Martin Gross, Gene Lyons and Suzanne Garment

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Until something definitive emerges — if it ever does — Whitewater remains a prism, its “truth” a reflection from whichever side you view it. Warped by personal and political agendas, it’s a story told by a million authors, filled with “maybes” and “probablys” and “allegeds”. But even the most skeptical, including some in the White House, quietly wonder if there is not, after all, a “smoking gun” somewhere.

SALON talked to three writers, all drawn to the Whitewater story, who view the affair from different sides of the prism. Also, go to Table Talk to express your own opinions on the Whitewater affair. Click on the Issues category and go to the Hillary Clinton topic, where you will find the debate in full swing.

Martin Gross is the author of “The Great Whitewater Fiasco: An American Tale of Money, Power, and Politics” (Ballantine, 1995). The book is one of the more readable briefs for the prosecution, providing a fairly clear pr&eacutecis of the story so far — even though it contains some factual assertions that have been challenged by others. His previous books include “The Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z” (1992) and “A Call for Revolution: How Washington is Strangling America” (1993).

GROSS: The Clintons’ reputations will be permanently besmirched. I think they’re finished in the public mind….

Gene Lyons is a political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His article, “Fool for Scandal: How the Times got Whitewater Wrong,” appeared in the October 1994 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Since then, he has waged a virtual one-man crusade to correct the misimpressions and outright mistakes he says have been made by the media in their Whitewater coverage. He quotes a former Arkansas securities commissioner, appointed by Clinton’s Republican predecessor, as describing the controversy-launching March 8, 1992 Times story on Whitewater as “unmitigated horseshit.”

LYONS: The press mob is locked into a prosecutorial mentality. And reporters have careers at stake….

Suzanne Garment is the author of “Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics” (Times Books, 1992), which examines various scandals in the Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations. She is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A former Wall Street Journal columnist, she has taught government at Harvard and Yale. Garment is currently working on a book about the politics of white-collar crime.

GARMENT: Psychological explanations are never my first choice, but I think that some of these scandals, these crises, stir up various kinds of guilt and shame that otherwise cannot be faced…

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Saturday, Jan 13, 1996 1:07 PM UTC

Burning Down the House

Intent on making history, Newt Gingrich may become its victim

By Gary Kamiya

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As Washington digs out from the great blizzard of ’96, there is one battle that Newt Gingrich, that noted student of military history, would probably not like to be reminded of: Stalingrad. As his tanks sink into the budgetary mud, his elite troops turn on him, his ethical supply lines stretch to the breaking point and his own behavior grows increasingly erratic, those glorious days when the Republican blitzkrieg carried all before it must seem like a distant memory.

Whether the metaphor will hold — whether Gingrich’s audacious decision to strike at the very heart of America’s social contract will prove, like Hitler’s daring invasion of Russia, to be an act of monstrous and self-destructive hubris — remains to be seen.
If the American people decide that the values and goals of the Republican Revolution cannot be separated from those of its leader, 1994 may be remembered not as the annus mirabilis of conservatism but as the year of the failed coup.

One thing is clear: Most Americans do not like Newt Gingrich. A Time/CNN poll taken in December 1995 found that only 24% had a favorable impression of the Speaker of the House (compared with 61% for President Clinton) and just 9% would like to see him become president. A remarkable 49% found him “scary.” To be fair, the poll was taken at Gingrich’s lowest moment — during the government shutdown, after he had delivered a petulant outburst about being disrespected on Air Force One and a typically wild, Limbaugh-esque roundhouse in which he blamed a horrific murder on Democratic policies. Still, the conclusion is inescapable: most people, including many Republicans, think there’s something fishy about this guy — even if they can’t put their finger on it.

A new Frontline special, “The Long March of Newt Gingrich,” which aired January 16 on PBS and will be reshown at various times, seizes that quavering digit and sticks it where the sun don’t shine — in Newt’s character. The Gingrich that emerges from this documentary, produced by Stephen Talbot with correspondent Peter Boyer, is a Machiavel, a ruthless chameleon who shed his moderate image and reinvented himself as a fire-and-brimstone conservative to win his first election. He is a hypocrite who preaches moral regeneration — and proposes draconian measures to ensure it — while his own past, personal and political, is littered with sins of singular unpleasantness. A second-rate intellectual, he is a superb tactician with a hotline into populist resentments who uses negative messages brilliantly. And he plays the media like a violin.

In short, he is the modern politician par excellence — a master of seeming whose own center is impossible to locate, and may not exist. Since his career has been built on exploiting Americans’ hatred of the very class — professional politicians — of which he is the most illustrious member, this is somewhat strange.

Most of the stones in Gingrich’s life have been overturned by now, and much of the material here can be found in Connie Bruck’s New Yorker profile (Oct. 9, 1995), Gail Sheehy’s Vanity Fair piece (September 1995) or David Osborne’s illuminating early Mother Jones article (November 1984).

What “The Long March” does is pull the salient facts of Gingrich’s private life and public career into a coherent and damning narrative. More to the point, it puts that narrative on TV, the medium Gingrich used to ascend to power. (It was his McCarthyesque speech to an empty House, captured on C-Span, that launched his decisive confrontation with Speaker Tip O’Neill and made Gingrich a major player.) It makes effective use of interviews with Gingrich’s family, political allies and some former, disenchanted friends to present a polemical, but convincing, portrait of the second most powerful man in the country.

The key to understanding Gingrich, by this account, is to grasp the peculiar way that he sees himself. Ever since his lonely and unhappy childhood, Gingrich has regarded himself as a historical figure. Guided by the heroic, Reaganesque imagery of films like “The Magnificent Seven” and “Sands of Iwo Jima” (American politics continues its farcical devolution: Reagan may have been a buffoon, but at least he acted&nbspin those B movies), Gingrich began to consciously construct himself as that figure — one that bore an interesting resemblance to the chubby, clumsy youth’s distant military-man stepfather, whom he could never please. Gingrich is now the avatar of conservatism, but the specific political philosophy he subscribes to matters less than this deeply aggrandizing, self-projecting impulse.

The Walter Mitty origins of Gingrich’s habitual self-regard are less important than its consequences. If you see yourself as a character in a grand historical tableau, ordinary rules don’t apply. Hence Gingrich’s Achilles heel, his arrogance — arrogance that led him to accuse Jim Wright of an unethical book deal and then cut an even bigger one, to think he could shut down the government without political consequence, to bring in lobbyists for big business to draft legislation.

In a larger sense, it is Gingrich’s cold intellectual arrogance that suffuses the radical right’s social agenda. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan points out in a devastating speech in the Congressional Record (reprinted in the January 11 New York Review of Books), no one knows whether slashing welfare to the bone will actually produce the salutary changes in behavior that Gingrich and his glassy-eyed freshmen acolytes assert it will. The nation may be sick, but those who would heal it should follow the first ethical imperative of the physician: primum non nocere — first of all, do no harm. There is a cavalier, experimental quality to the Republican Revolution that recalls another exuberant 20th century social experiment — the one that took place in Russia.

Producer Stephen Talbot’s earlier Frontline special on Rush Limbaugh was criticized in some left-wing quarters for going too easy on Limbaugh. There is little likelihood that this program will face that criticism. (In the interests of full disclosure, it should be acknowledged that Talbot is the brother of SALON editor David Talbot, and that I know him. ) “The Long March of Newt Gingrich” is an unabashedly opinionated profile that makes little pretense of formal “objectivity” — while Gingrich loyalists, and right-wingers like Paul Weyrich, are interviewed, they are not asked to comment on the negative conclusions drawn about Gingrich.

But the program’s slant — emphasizing Gingrich’s opportunism, caustically dismissing his philosophy as “a gauzy romantic memory of a lost America to which he has attached a lifetime of eclectic ideas that have stuck to his fly-paper mind,” characterizing his Air Force One blunder as the appearance of “that impetuous child with the impossibly large sense of himself” — is not journalistically troubling. These are fair shots, well grounded in supporting evidence — even if that evidence is not always presented in this short program.

In fact, the one time “The Long March” falters is when it tries, towards the end, to conceal its own tendentiousness. After showing the woes that have befallen Gingrich since he took power, the narration suddenly takes the high road — too high. “The unwelcome truth that Newt Gingrich is beginning to confront is one that every revolutionary and every warrior must ultimately face,” intones the narrator, while Yul Brynner in his “Magnificent Seven” role strides across the battlefield and an old Mexican man says to him “Yes, the fighting is over, your work is done.”

This quasi-mythical, now-Newt-must-ride-off-into-the-sunset rhetoric is a smoke screen that obscures the program’s legitimate, if polemical, double aim: to paint a devastating portrait of the leader of the conservative revolution, and to link him to that revolution. You take out Newt, you take out the revolution. As the narrator says in the closing moments of the film, “What can be said for certain is that at this moment Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution are inseparably fused together. He has been its strength and he is now its frailty. Inevitably, America’s judgment of the revolution will be decided by its judgment of him.”

Wishful thinking, guys. As an opponent of the revolution, I hope that is the case, but just saying&nbspit is won’t make it so. The question, at bottom, is whether people will decide that the Republican Revolution is intellectually coherent and well-meaning, or whether it is a muddled pitch to the base instincts of resentment, fear and that great engine from which all things bright and beautiful flow, greed.

As their sudden loss of enthusiasm for the Contract With America shows, Americans are uncertain about the answer themselves — which means they don’t know quite why they voted Republican in ’94. A small percentage of the electorate are probably beyond all guilt (to invoke a favorite Republican “values” word) and don’t need even a free-market fig leaf to cover their righteous desire to stick it to the poor and pocket the savings. But most Americans, even if they’re understandably sick of being guilt-tripped by sanctimonious Democrats, are not willing to completely sign off on the painful Republican agenda unless they think the person telling them to do it is trustworthy. In the absence of such trust, they will be forced to search their own consciences for guidance.

Looked at from that perspective, Newt Gingrich is a terrible liability for the Revolution — not so much because of who he is, but because of what he makes Americans feartheymay be. It would be a supreme irony if Gingrich, who in his own life has so clearly failed to demonstrate a moral compass, was the instrument by which America discovered its own. It might even make him into a historic figure.

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Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya.

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