In an Oct. 22 story (“Media tune out torture death of Arkansas boy”), the Washington Times contrasted this lack of coverage with the treatment the murder of Matthew Shepard received. The AP carried stories relating to his death on its national wire, and news of the trial is being handled the same way. What these two stories have to do with each other is something only the Washington Times could discern. For clarification, the Moonie paper turned to Tim Graham, the director of media studies at the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog organization.

“Nobody wants to say anything negative about homosexuals,” Graham told the Times. “Nobody wants to be seen on the wrong side of that issue.”

Clear? The national media (the Washington Times also called NBC News) will make a big deal of it when a gay man is killed but not when gay men kill someone. Even a child.

This story has been percolating for a few weeks now. Salon received at least one e-mail on the subject (topic: “I dare you to print this!”) and the matter was entertained on the Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” earlier this week. But the question of the coverage the killing received got its biggest public airing at the weekly White House news conference Monday. Baltimore talk-show host Les Kinsolving asked White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, “Joe, since the president spoke out so commendably about the murder of adult homosexual Matt Shepard in Wyoming, I’m wondering what was his reaction to the repeated rape and murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising by two adult homosexual men in Arkansas?”

“I don’t know that the president is aware of that circumstance,” replied Lockhart.

“It was Page 1 of the Washington Times on Saturday,” Kinsolving said helpfully. “Don’t you read that paper, Joe?”

“No, I don’t normally do, nor do I think the president [does],” replied Lockhart. (At least he’s honest.) But Kinsolving persisted.

“As his media advisor, were you surprised that while the murder of an adult, Shepard, received enormous coverage in the big media, this multiple rape and murder of a child went so widely unreported?”

“I try to keep my media criticisms to myself,” said Lockhart.

Over at AP, spokesman Jack Stokes sounded a little perplexed by the whole question. “I was asked about that — the charges — before,” he said. “The insinuation was that these were both hate-crime stories. I still don’t understand the comparison.”

Indeed, Shepard’s murder was immediately seized upon as a hate-crime story and the element of homophobia keeps the story in the news today. Dirkhising’s death was evidently the result of rape — not generally considered a “hate crime,” even at its most generously defined. For national news to run with a rape-and-murder story, even when there is a child involved, it has to be even more extraordinary.

The murder and rape of a 10-year-old girl in Kansas this week was picked up nationally by AP, but only after a manhunt of several days involving hundreds of searchers and tearful TV pleas from the mother for her daughter’s safe return. (Her accused killer reportedly told a co-worker he “would like to kidnap a girl to rape, torture, electrocute, kill and bury.”) In Wisconsin, four teenage girls were captured and repeatedly raped, a story that almost made national headlines. But they were taken across state lines, held for two weeks and raped by as many as 20 men and boys. Furthermore, all the victims and suspects were members of the Hmong ethnic group.

The circumstances surrounding the death of Dirkhising, a seventh-grader in Prarie Grove, Ark., were more depressingly mundane. The men accused of killing him — Joshua Macave Brown, 22, and Davis Don Carpenter, 38 — were friends of his parents. The boy worked at Carpenter’s hair salon and had been spending weekends there.

“News stories published about the crime, to date, have not indicated the suspects are homosexuals,” the Washington Times complained. Though this could just as easily be flagged as a pedophilia story or a cautionary tale about parental neglect, the paper clearly believes that the real angle has to do with gay men and children. (You know how they are.)

So far this tack hasn’t quite caught on, though you can expect to hear more about it in the future. The false parallel is a classic rhetorical device, the sort of thing Ross Perot calls “gorilla dust.” The Times did find someone else to share its outrage, however. Former KKK wizard David Duke, who now describes himself as “a national white civil rights activist” suggested candlelight vigils for the murdered teenager.

Robe and hood optional.

Gore is referring to his current weak position in the polls compared with his likely opponent in the 2000 election, high-flying Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Gore hopes Bush has only one direction to go in the polls and that direction is down.

Thus, the vice president can insist that he’s quite content, for now, being the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics.

Not surprisingly, Gore’s allies blame the substance-averse, scandal-happy national media. They say that the conventional wisdom — that his campaign is lackluster and hobbled by infighting, that he has been stumbling everywhere he goes, and that as a public speaker Gore is only slightly more animated than a corpse — is just plain wrong.

Gore’s allies might just have a point. It’s hard to look at the last two years of Gore’s press clips and not see a fairly intentional effort on the part of journalists to turn the veep into a stiff, self-important caricature.

Take his most infamous utterance to date: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” from an interview he gave to CNN a few months back.

While this was obviously an overstatement, Gore actually does deserve a substantial amount of credit for the technology through which you’re reading this story. “Gore took a critical part [in launching the Internet],” says Dave Farber, a professor of telecommunication systems at the University of Pennsylvania. “He did misspeak, and everybody jumped on him, but he made a very significant contribution.”

Vinton Cerf, the Stanford researcher who sketched out a design for the Internet in 1973, seconds that emotion: “It is entirely fitting that the vice president take some credit for helping to create an environment in which Internet could thrive.”

Then there was the flap that ensued when Gore, during an off-the-record chat, boasted that the character of Oliver Barrett in Erich Segal’s “Love Story” was based on him. Pounce went the media. “Does he think, going into 2000, that this will give him a romantic glow, or a romantic afterglow?” snarked the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.

But Time Magazine’s Karen Tumulty, with whom Gore had the actual conversation, told a columnist that Dowd and others got the story wrong, that “Gore was telling us something that was basically true.”

Segal himself, in fact, has confirmed that Barrett is an amalgam of both Gore and his Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones.

Then there was the “farm boy” fracas in March, when reporters ripped Gore for an Iowa speech in which he exaggerated his own farming credentials. “In Iowa, Gore claimed that he was a farm boy who plowed steep hillsides with mules,” wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer in an editorial titled “King of Gaffes: Al Gore out-Quayles Dan.”

But as even conservative Gore biographer Bob Zelnick acknowledged in his fairly critical book, “Gore: A Political Life,” the veep did, indeed, spend “long weekends, summers, holidays, and his entire seventh year” in Carthage, Tenn., working on the family farm. Young Gore woke before dawn, fed the livestock, cleaned out the hog parlors and cleared a field one summer “with only a small hand-axe as his tool.”

The media’s newest anti-Gore flap, “Floodgate,” simply continues the anti-Gore trend.

On July 22, not far from Cornish, N.H., Gore, New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and a cadre of Democrats and reporters piled into canoes and started floating down the Connecticut River.

It was a fairly typical campaign photo op; Gore sat erect in his canoe, the perfect perpendicular man, as always. After finishing his 45-minute ride, Gore participated in a carefully staged press conference announcing an immense grant for the Connecticut River Joint Commission and others to implement various components of the American Heritage River Action Plan.

But then a Washington Times reporter in attendance stumbled onto a man who complained to him that environmentalists had been after the river commission to raise the water level of the river for some time to benefit the fish. The man was discouraged that it wasn’t until the vice president came to the river for a photo op that the commission finally acted, releasing millions of gallons into the river simply to ensure that Gore’s canoe didn’t scrape the rocks.

It sounded like another mini-scandal, but there was just one key problem: No one affiliated with the Gore campaign had anything to do with the decision to raise the river’s water level. The head of the river commission had come up with the idea in order to help along a photo op that was going to bring national attention to her cause. And, it should be emphasized, raising the river level was actually good for the environment.

But the curious fact that the river was flooded for the sake of a photo op — on behalf of a politician already stereotyped as being artificial, in a campaign already labeled as faltering — was too good to pass up.

The following day, a headline blared from the front page of the Washington Times: “New Hampshire able to float Gore’s boat.”

“Nearly 4 billion gallons of water were unleashed from a massive dam Thursday to raise the level of the Connecticut River in Cornish, N.H., so that Vice President Al Gore’s canoe would not get stuck during an environmental photo opportunity,” wrote the Times’ correspondent.

“Gore in Environmental Quandary,” ventured the Associated Press.

That afternoon, CNN’s “Inside Politics” reported that “Vice President Al Gore is facing political heat over the fact that millions of gallons of water had to be released from an up-river dam in order to provide enough for him to take a campaign photo-op canoe trip downstream during a regional drought.”

By the time the Gore motorcade reached a house party in Rochester, N.H., all the vice president’s men were in a tizzy, huddling and pacing and otherwise chagrined. Other reporters — by now under pressure from their editors — called Gore’s press secretary to get a comment on the matter.

“Critics Paddle Gore in ‘Dam’ Rowing Row,” screamed the New York Post.

“Campaign blasted for water release,” yelled the Charleston Daily Mail.

“A Canoe Trip Becomes a Political Misadventure for Gore,” said the New York Times, discreet as ever.

By the time I parted company with the Gore campaign that Friday afternoon, it was clear that any hope for positive stories from his two-day visit to New Hampshire — that his campaign skills have markedly improved, say, or that despite bad press, the Gore 2000 organization seems to be generating lots of excitement — were drowned out by “Floodgate.”

Even apart from the supposed gaffes, Gore suffers from the notion that he’s one stiff dude, a cigar-store Indian with a major pole up his ass. It started with his posture, which is pluperfect, like a backward parenthesis. His neck doesn’t seem to twist, so all his turns are from the waist, as if he were doing the ’80s break-dancing move “the robot.”

Despite these odd physical characteristics, Gore hardly seems stiff in a small group setting; in fact, he was perfectly capable of generating excitement at a gathering in a barn in Etna, N.H., on July 22, where he genuinely wowed the crowd. In fact, in small groups throughout New Hampshire that week — whether at house parties, or while conducting a seminar at a New Hampshire technical college, Gore conveyed an appealing personality, relaxed yet serious, wonky yet concerned and always quite charming.

He scored positive reviews from many of the pleasantly surprised voters who attended his events. “I thought he was very personable … and very comfortable,” said Polly Dale, a substitute teacher who leans Republican and saw Gore at the technical college. “I was very impressed.”

Gore told Salon that his comfort level on the stump “hasn’t been freshly examined [by the media] in a while. I don’t mind that; it’s OK. I joke from time to time that I benefit from low expectations.”

“My response is always ‘stiff compared to who?’” says Bill Turque, a national correspondent for Newsweek whose as-yet-untitled biography of Gore will hit bookstores early next year. “Who is this long line of great theatrical talents who run for president? There’s Clinton and Reagan, but after that, who are they talking about?

“Stiff compared to George Bush? To Mike Dukakis? To Bob Dole? Gore’s not the most fluid guy. For a long time he was very self-conscious about his age [he was sworn into the House at the tender age of 28], and also he talks about very technical things, like climate change, information technology, environmental restoration. But I think he’s capable of being very good campaigner.”

Friends and confidants of the vice president argue that whatever stiffness remains comes from Gore’s inability to feign sincerity. Whereas a 30-second encounter with President Clinton can make you feel like he’s your new best friend, Gore doesn’t do that. And Clinton, of course, is full of crap. Not that Gore never is; but while every pol has a degree of phoniness, it may be that Al Gore doesn’t have enough, at least not on the stump, to please his critics.

When he’s comfortable, the vice president can actually be quite a wise-ass. When I ask him what his biggest faults are, he says, with a twinkle: “I work too hard. I’m too kind. I care too much. If I were better balanced, I would have at least one unkind thought in my body.” Not bad, for a stiff.

If you forget the stuff about his image, there are still plenty of substantive criticisms to be fired at Gore. Among them:

• On important policy questions, Gore can be cautious to a fault, perhaps one result of having seen his father’s Senate career cut down by bold stances in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

• Gore become an overly aggressive fund-raiser during the last election cycle, pushing the law to the limit, despite his earlier statements in favor of campaign finance reform.

• In betrayal of the nickname former President Bush once gave him — “Ozone” — environmentalists think Gore has sold them out, and that he has abandoned his environmental principles.

• As an outspoken opponent of big tobacco — and someone who made a tortured speech before the nation about how his chain-smoking sister had died of lung cancer — his decision to hire as his media man Carter Eskew, big tobacco’s advertising superstar, seems outright hypocritical.

• He often speaks to people in ways they find condescending, and varies his manner only slightly whether he’s talking to kids at a day-care center or to their moms at campaign events with a wandering-mike shtick.

• In an era when the public seems to be seeking bipartisan cooperation from political leaders, Gore is a partisan Democrat from the old school.

So far, however, none of these faults are contributing to his media problems. What you hear, over and over, are the “Love Story,” Internet, and farm-boy flaps.

“Al Gore is like the fat boy in the schoolyard,” Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times in 1997, right after the “Love Story” fracas. “Tormenting him is so much fun that nobody can resist … Victims are necessary in schoolyards to satisfy the nastier angels of youthful nature. Victims in politics fulfill similarly shameful needs, but a politician, once draped in the trappings of victimhood, faces dangerous practical problems.”

One way you can tell another election season is approaching is to check out Gore’s waistline. That’s because he tries to get into shape before each new campaign gets under way. This year, for example, he’s already dropped about 15 pounds; his arms are veiny from weight lifting, his face is chiseled where it was previously puffy, and he looks to be in better shape than many of his Secret Service guys.

Gore approaches fitness the way he approaches everything — with pious studiousness and methodical dedication.

He was the same way back in the early 1970s, when he was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. “Journalism school [professors] and city editors, the advice they always give you is before you ever go on assignment, go to the library and look up the clips,” says Frank Sutherland, who worked with Gore at the Tennessean and is its current editor. “He is the only reporter I knew who always did that. He was always prepared for an interview; he never went into an interview cold.”

Despite reports of infighting at Gore 2000 headquarters, the vice president’s campaign actually seems to be running smoothly. It’s the hard-born result of typical Gore diligence, dedication and homework — plus, of course, the cushy benefits that come from being an incumbent.

In both New Hampshire and Iowa, the veep has been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of state officials. And though both states’ Democratic governors aren’t taking sides in the Gore-Bradley match-up, their spouses — Bill Shaheen, hubby to New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, and Iowa first lady Christie Vilsack — are full-fledged members of the Gore 2000 squad. Bradley made a strong drive to get the endorsements of Iowa’s two big labor unions, AFSCME and the UAW, but Gore snatched them both.

Gore’s also ahead in the polls. Among New Hampshire Democrats, Gore leads Bradley 48 percent to 32 percent. In the most recent poll of likely caucus voters in Iowa, Gore’s up 64 percent to 24 percent.

Besides being a dedicated worker, Gore has earned a reputation as someone always out a little bit ahead of the pack on the issues.

“The guy genuinely does look seriously around the corner and into the future on a lot of issues a lot people don’t pay attention to,” says Newsweek’s Turque. “In the early 1980s he was studying climate change and early global warming when that was not on people’s screens.

“In the early ’80s, he was also very interested in changes in computer infrastructure, in what he called the information superhighway,” Turque adds. “He would talk in congressional hearings about the day when everyone would have PCs in their homes. At his best, there’s almost a prophetic edge to the guy.”

One reason Gore’s always ahead of the curve is that he reads so much. The names he drops are not those of celebrities, but of authors.

Even though he failed to complete two separate graduate programs — law school and divinity school — Gore is every bit a scholar, which is why he comes off so very teacherly, rattling off figures and numbers and studies all the time.

“If he has a fault, it’s that he will explain something to death for you,” editor Sutherland says. But then again, in the early ’90s the then-senator came to the Tennessean to teach them all about global warming. The lesson lasted an arduous hour and a half, Sutherland says, but “when he was finished, we all understood what he was talking about.”

His scholarly edge manifests itself elsewhere in his life too. As first disclosed by biographer Zelnick, after having three daughters, Gore devoted himself to Dr. Landrum B. Shettles’ “How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby,” a serious text that recommends that, to procreate a son, the prospective father wear boxers, drink coffee immediately before sex, and attempt impregnation during the high-alkaline moment of ovulation.

In October 1982, Albert Gore III was born.

When Albert III was injured in a severe car accident in April 1989, Gore withdrew from politics somewhat, and boned up not only on his son’s injuries (he has since recovered) but also on environmental issues, for what would become his bestselling enviro-tract, “Earth in the Balance.”

But Gore’s clean-as-a-whistle reputation took a hit when he teamed up with Clinton. As one of Clinton’s most valuable assets on the ’92 campaign trail, as well as at the policy-making table, Gore was an able, on-message Tonto to Clinton’s Kemosabe. But when Gore’s work ethic and unquestioning Democratic partisan loyalty were channeled into the Clinton-Gore-DNC fund-raising apparatus, suddenly the diligence of the heir apparent got him into trouble.

His April 1996 fund-raising at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple was especially crass, and his wormy attempt to extricate himself from the media fallout was clumsy. At the very least, he skated around the edge of the law, and afterward, Gore had only himself to blame for the fallout from this incident.

When Bradley hammers Gore on campaign finance reform, as he has done especially hard in the past few weeks, he’s therefore pushing on a vulnerable and largely self-inflicted wound.

Gore knows he is in a dirty business. He’s aware that politics is soaked with compromises and necessary evils, and he seems to have come to terms with that a long time ago. At a New Hampshire house party last week, in response to a young man who had inquired about the rewards of public service, Gore said, “It is self-government. People in it are just … trying to do the best we can. [People] make mistakes. But the cumulative power of the American experiment has thrilled the entire world, because people like you are willing to make it work — in spite of all the difficulties.

“There’s something in our American system about the exchange of ideas,” Gore went on, “that can be translated into tangible changes in the way we live our lives together that’s just different from any other country that came before us. And if you’re willing to put up with what it takes to be a part of that — I’m telling you, if you keep your heart right, the rewards are just beyond measure.”

For months now, Bradley’s been jabbing Gore for only seizing upon only the little issues and not thinking Bradleyesque deep thoughts. That cuts both ways, of course: New Hampshire House Minority Leader Peter Burling, a Democrat who’s endorsed Gore, described a one-hour meeting with Bradley this way: “I knew I was in the presence of remarkable intelligence, but I can’t say I fully understood what he was talking about.”

Still, Bradley is on target when he derides Gore as hampered by caution. On the stump, Gore talks about niche issues like suburban traffic congestion, better preschool education and prescription drug benefits for seniors using Medicare.

In Congress, he picked similar small issues, taking on the makers of contact-lens solution and baby formula. Sutherland says that when he asked Gore, ‘Why do you pick these issues?’ Gore replied: “Because I can do something about them.”

Gore is quick to point out that there are grander themes at stake in this election, however. Whatever his “practical idealism” shares with Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” in rhetoric and overall squishiness, Gore argues that the differences couldn’t be more stark, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The next president, he points out, will probably appoint three Supreme Court justices. So, as he tells a crowded barn in Etna, N.H., “the future of many of our individual rights is at risk.”

He and Bush differ on “policy toward crime and handguns,” he says, arguing his belief in photo-licensing and waiting periods for handgun buyers, while “the other side wants more concealed weapons.”

Gore opposes the tax cut the Republicans in Congress are pushing, wanting to use the budget surplus “to extend the life of Social Security” and “bring about revolutionary changes in our public schools.”

Gore argues that the success of his “practical idealism” can be measured in its accomplishments, not its rhetoric.

“The best thing that President Clinton and I have done is to translate the lofty ideals that have always been at the heart of the Democratic party into a practical program that has made it possible to really achieve goals that were once felt to be beyond our reach,” he told Salon. “Although we still have so much work to do, I feel that we’ve been able to restore some measure of confidence in the promise of self-government in a time that that confidence has begun to wane.”

In contrast to the boyish, impulsive Clinton, the quick-tempered, formerly hard-partying Bush and lofty dreamer Bradley, Al Gore is staking out ground as the grown-up in chief. The administration’s policies show “the kind of patience and common sense that make it possible to really achieve [Democratic] ideals,” he says. “Our anti-crime program, our economic program, our education program, you can go right down the list. We have made a lot of progress in a lot of areas where people were beginning to think there was no realistic hope.”

Clinton’s (and Gore’s) accomplishments aren’t just a net plus, of course. In Gore’s last run for the presidency, in ’88, he was prisoner only to his own record and caution; now he’s a prisoner of Clinton’s foibles, too. Every Republican candidate links Gore to Clinton and, by extension, to Monica, to the China scandal, to Whitewater — hoping to exploit the national weariness for this administration.

Which in the end may be Gore’s biggest problem. As one of the few candidates with a legitimate claim to service in Vietnam, intelligence, a fairly moderate record, much-improving campaign skills and a strong political organization, you’d think Gore would be doing better in the polls than he is so far.

But Clinton may be the one monkey he can’t get off his back. Gore has done a bit to distance himself from Clinton but there’s really only so much he can get away with. At the Etna barn party, one New Hampshirite told Gore that he wished he had stood by Clinton even more, telling the country that Clinton “was your friend.”

“He is my friend,” Gore said in response. “I’ve had a closer working relationship with him than any vice president. My philosophy is, ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner.’ If you have a friend who makes a mistake, that doesn’t destroy the friendship.”

No, I thought to myself, but it might just destroy your candidacy. And it might help explain why everybody always seems to be picking on you, too.

“I can tell you that when the court recused Judge Woods, it raised a lot of eyebrows among legal ethicists,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University Law School, who labeled the court’s decision “unjustified and a wild stretch.” “I really can’t think of an incident in the recent past, by which I mean the last 20 years, in which there has been a formal motion by the government to recuse a district judge in a criminal case,” Gillers said.

Woods’ removal in March 1996 came several months after the judge had quashed Starr’s indictment of Tucker in a crucial pretrial motion. In his motion to remove Woods, Starr cited newspaper articles about Woods that contained questionable and erroneous information in part generated by individuals associated with the Arkansas Project, a four-year, $2.4 million campaign to investigate and discredit the president that was funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

There is no indication that Starr knew of the origin of the questionable information, but after examining papers belonging to one of the operatives of the Arkansas Project, Judge Woods demanded an official investigation of the apparent attempt to “successfully interfere with the proper workings of the judicial system.”

In a written statement issued April 10, Judge Woods said: “It is important to me, and I believe to the integrity of the judicial process to know whether any person in the justice system (including those in the Office of Independent Counsel) or in the legislative branch was aware of machinations to affect and determine what judge would preside over the Tucker case.”

The papers in question belong to Parker Dozhier, a Hot Springs, Ark., bait-shop owner and Arkansas Project employee. The papers and other notes and documents kept by Dozhier were provided to Salon by Caryn Mann, who lived with Dozhier from 1994 to 1996. Mann has told FBI agents and reporters that Dozhier made payments from Arkansas Project funds, funneled through a foundation that publishes the American Spectator magazine, to key Whitewater witness David Hale.

The Justice Department has requested an investigation of the alleged Hale payments, which Hale, Dozhier and other officials connected with the Arkansas Project and the American Spectator have denied happened.

According to documents obtained by Salon, materials used by Starr in his motion to disqualify Woods included newspaper articles that appear to have relied heavily on allegations circulated by Dozhier and others involved in the Arkansas Project. Asked about the use of news articles to make its case against Woods, Debbie Gershman, a spokeswoman for the Office of Independent Counsel, told Salon: “It is traditional for prosecutors to use information in whatever form it may take.” She declined any further comment.

Starr’s indictment of Tucker in June 1995 related to alleged bankruptcy fraud involving a Texas cable television firm. It was not related in any way to Whitewater, the Clintons or Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and preceded the better-known Whitewater-related indictment of Tucker and James and Susan McDougal. Recently, Tucker pleaded guilty to a single count in the bankruptcy fraud, and the case awaits further disposition.

Woods had been assigned to the case by a computerized lottery after another federal judge declined to take it. The independent counsel initially voiced no objection to Woods hearing the case.

Shortly after the indictment, attorneys for Tucker (and two business associates in the cable firm who were charged with him) moved to strike the indictment on the grounds that Starr had exceeded his original mandate as Whitewater independent counsel. But well before any motions were entered, a public campaign against Woods had commenced.

The opening salvo came on June 23, 1995, in the form of a lengthy op-ed article in the conservative Washington Times by Jim Johnson, a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice and avowed segregationist who is a longtime adversary of Woods. In the article, Johnson described Woods, among other things, as a Clinton crony who was corrupt and had narrowly escaped indictment for misusing highway funds in the 1950s. Johnson wrote that the late Orval Faubus, the segregationist Arkansas governor, told him, “Henry was measured for prison stripes, and now he wears the purple.”

Johnson’s accusation of cronyism appeared to stem from the fact that Woods knew the Clintons socially and had appointed Hillary Clinton to a panel overseeing integration of the Little Rock public school system, which Johnson bitterly opposed. But there is no evidence that Woods ever used his position as a federal judge to favor the Clintons. In one major and highly politicized case involving a controversial nuclear power plant, Woods ruled against the wishes of then-Gov. Clinton’s administration and in favor of Arkansas Power & Light, the state’s electric utility.

Nor is there any basis for Johnson’s charge that Woods was involved with the misapplication of highway trust funds. In fact, there is no record that Woods faced any legal problems during his tenure as a judge.

Johnson also referred in the article to ties Woods allegedly had to Little Rock investment company Stephens Inc., which Johnson described as the largest commodities broker in the country. In fact, Stephens does not trade in commodities. Nor is there any record of a political relationship between the company, which openly supported the segregationist Faubus, and Woods, who supported school integration.

The article also claimed that Woods’ 1980 appointment to the federal bench was the result of an election-year bargain between Stephens Inc. and former Arkansas Sen. David Pryor. In fact, it was U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers who pushed for Woods’ appointment. Johnson went on to write that a “Stephens subsidiary” loaned Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign $3.5 million. In fact, the loan was made by Little Rock’s Worthen Bank, in which Stephens had divested its minority holding several years before the loan was made.

Despite these inaccuracies, Johnson’s claims were extensively quoted in a subsequent article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and echoed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, notably in an article by Journal op-ed page writer Micah Morrison.

A page of contemporaneous notes from Dozhier’s files show numerous references to both Woods and Johnson, often known as “Justice Jim.” The notes say, “Woods’ charge is to protect the President by taking care of Tucker.” They refer to “JJJ papers,” an allusion to papers placed by “Justice Jim” Johnson in the archives of the Arkansas Historical Commission that contained derogatory material about Woods.

Another page shows Johnson’s telephone number along with the following notation: “Wesley Pruden [editor of the Washington Times, in which Johnson's story appeared] told me Wesley sent material to M.M.” It is not known whether the initials refer to the Journal’s Morrison, although according to Mann, Morrison spent many hours at the Dozhier bait shop.

Morrison did not return repeated phone calls requesting comment. Pruden acknowledged that he had met with Johnson on several occasions but denied passing on any material to Morrison and insisted, “I never talked to Parker Dozhier in my life.”

Pruden is a Little Rock native whose father served as chaplain to the racist White Citizens Council there during the 1950s and was closely associated with Johnson in resisting federal school desegregation orders.

In 1966, Johnson was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, losing a close election to his Republican opponent, a loss he blamed in part on opposition from Woods. During the campaign, Johnson said that “the crime of desegregation” was worse than “the crime of rape” and “the crime of murder.” Dozhier, who, according to acquaintances, shared Johnson’s intense dislike of blacks, was an aide to Johnson during that campaign.

Two decades later, Judge Woods further infuriated Johnson. In 1989, in response to a lawsuit filed by black state legislators, Woods voided the notorious “Johnson Amendment” to the Arkansas state constitution. The 1956 measure, authored by Johnson, empowered the governor of Arkansas to resist what it called the U.S. Supreme Court’s “unconstitutional” 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision.

The Arkansas Project documents provided to Salon by Mann include a derogatory memo about Woods — authored by “pd,” as Dozhier was known to his associates — that was faxed to the office of Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., Aug. 28, 1995. Markings on the fax indicate that it was routed to Faircloth’s office from the office of Stephen Boynton, the Virginia attorney who controlled the Arkansas Project money for the American Spectator foundation. Boynton frequently visited Dozhier’s bait shop along with Hale and others involved in the Arkansas Project.

The Dozhier fax, which was addressed to Faircloth aide Jim Highland, claims that Clinton and Woods plotted to fix the Tucker case in order to hamper Starr’s probe. “Now Judge Woods is considering a motion by Tucker’s defense team regarding the [independent counsel's] jurisdiction on the indictments against Tucker,” the memo says. “Tucker is in the position of offering testimony which would send the President to prison.” There is no indication that Tucker possessed any such information.

Around the same time, Woods was informed by federal judicial officials that Faircloth’s office had requested 15 years’ worth of the judge’s financial disclosure statements. The request came from David Bossie, a veteran anti-Clinton activist and researcher who then worked for Faircloth, the most implacable Clinton critic on the Senate Whitewater Committee.

According to Mann, Dozhier was, during that time, in constant contact with Bossie. Mann said that she saw at least six faxes from Dozhier to Bossie. Dozhier’s notes also show that he had been investigating the judge’s financial background and his business dealings. Bossie declined to comment. A source close to Bossie pointed out that a federal judge’s financial disclosure statements are a matter of public record; the source also said Bossie recalled speaking to Dozhier on a small number of occasions, which the source said was part of Bossie’s job as a congressional investigator.

In an interview with Salon, Highland denied knowing Dozhier and said he did not recall receiving the memo about Woods. Dozhier declined comment, saying, “You have told enough lies on me already.” Johnson told Salon, “I have no interview for you.”

In his April 10 statement on the matter, Woods recalls that Faircloth’s request for his financial records came “just days before oral arguments on a motion to dismiss the indictment in the Tucker case, scheduled for September 5, 1995.” After learning of the request, the judge called together the counsel for all parties in the case and told them he considered it “a crude attempt to intimidate me, since it was well known that Senator Faircloth had more than a passing interest in the Whitewater investigation. I assured counsel that such an attempt would in no way affect my handling of the Tucker case, one way or the other.

“No party requested that I remove myself from the Tucker case on the basis of the Faircloth contact, or on any other basis,” Woods said in his statement.

After Woods ruled in Tucker’s favor, Starr appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the judge’s decision and to remove him for displaying “the unmistakable appearance of bias.” Starr argued that Woods’ friendship with Hillary Clinton should disqualify him from any further role in the Tucker case, even though Tucker was a longtime political rival of Bill Clinton and his indictment had nothing to do with any business dealings of the Clintons.

In oral argument before the appeals court, the independent counsel referred to newspaper and magazine articles about Woods and his connections with the Clintons. The appeals court then asked Starr to produce those articles in a supplemental brief. Among the clippings produced by Starr in response were the Wall Street Journal article by Morrison and articles from the Arkansas newspapers that quoted Johnson’s charges. In the articles, heavy emphasis was placed on Woods’ relationship with the Clintons, in particular his visit to the White House on the night Republicans captured the Congress in November 1994.

Gillers, the NYU legal ethicist, explained that in using press reports, Starr was trying to demonstrate how Woods was perceived by the public. “He was arguing that based on the press reports and perhaps other information, the public’s perception of the judge’s impartiality was compromised, not that the press reports were necessarily correct,” Gillers said.

The appeals court granted both of Starr’s requests March 11, 1996, without permitting Woods to answer any of the accusations about his alleged “bias.” In its opinion, the court cited both the articles quoting Johnson’s allegations, and the article written by Morrison in the Wall Street Journal, which the court characterized in its ruling as “a daily periodical with national — actually international — circulation.”

The judge’s removal was unprecedented, particularly because Starr had made no request for Woods to recuse himself prior to his ruling on Tucker’s motion to quash the indictment.

The appeals court said it had removed him “not because we believe Judge Woods would not handle the case in a fair and impartial manner, we have every confidence that he would, but only because we believe this step is necessary in order to preserve the appearance as well as the reality of impartial justice.”

In a dissenting opinion, two judges on the 8th Circuit panel warned of the dangers of permitting “the perceived impartiality of a judge to be held hostage by the writings or reporting of the media without concern for the accuracy of those reports or potential explanation … relying on newspaper and magazine reports as proof of substantive fact has no support in the rules of evidence.”

After the ruling that disqualified him, Woods remarked to the Los Angeles Times, “I have the distinction of being the only judge in Anglo-American history, as far as I can determine, who was removed from a case on the basis of newspaper accounts, magazine articles and television transcripts.”

And yet, there is about Richard Mellon Scaife a seeming unease with his own person that even friends have commented on through the years. Almost pathologically shy — he removed his name from Who’s Who more than 15 years ago and has since sat for only a handful of interviews — he is, at the same time, given to a pattern of unpredictable behavior that has continued despite his having stopped his formerly heavy drinking.

“He has a love-hate relationship with a lot of people, including himself,” said a former close acquaintance. “He is at once the most wonderful, generous guy and the most hateful and vindictive one.” Added another person who has observed Scaife close-up in Pittsburgh, “Whenever he dislikes someone, it’s not enough to fire them; they can never work in this town again.”

Either because they fear his power or his temper, or because they want something out of him, almost all those who know Scaife, 65, are unwilling to say anything critical about him publicly — that is, if they agree to talk about him at all. That reluctance, combined with his own penchant for secrecy, has made him the most shadowy figure in the Clinton scandals, even as evidence of his role as a funder of investigations into the Clintons’ activities has grown.

The man whom Time magazine, in its latest issue, calls “the ultimate patron” of the Clinton haters has been identified by Salon and the New York Observer as a key funder of the $2.4 million Arkansas Project, a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones’ sexual harassment case against Clinton.

In fact, Scaife’s part in the Clinton chronicles represents the second time that he has been a secretive major player in efforts to profoundly alter the course of politics and public policy in America. In the 1970s, his money fueled the “New Right” movement that sought to replace the perceived “liberal establishment” in Washington and the media with a new, conservative order.

“The victories we’re celebrating today didn’t begin last Tuesday,” Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner Jr. told a meeting of supporters in 1994 just after the Republican sweep of the House of Representatives. “They started more than 20 years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America. These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives.”

Gingrich, who was also at the meeting, hailed Scaife as “a good friend and ally for a very long time.”

Just where Scaife’s political views come from is a mystery to many people, including his only sibling, Cordelia Scaife May, from whom he is estranged. Their mother, Sarah Scaife, was a cold and often sarcastic woman, according to May, but apart from knowing Barry Goldwater, she showed no particular interest in current affairs.

“My father didn’t like Roosevelt, but as head of Pittsburgh Coal he sat across from John L. Lewis in labor negotiations and had enormous respect and, I think, liking for him,” said May.

Dick Scaife didn’t read much while they were growing up, she said, but he did have a great interest in newspapers, especially out-of-town papers, which he collected and displayed on specially made racks at the family’s country estate. Reflecting on those years of governesses and formal family dinners, May commented, “I don’t remember any laughter in that house.”

During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia’s father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington. Perhaps it was this once-removed brush with intrigue that led to Dick Scaife’s growing fascination with conspiracies of all kinds. “He’s the kind of person who looks under his bed every night before they go to sleep,” said a longtime family acquaintance and prominent Pennsylvania Republican. In the early 1980s, Scaife told a Philadelphia Inquirer interviewer that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of his heroes, and that the most influential book he had read was “The Spike,” co-authored by former Newsweek correspondent and Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, in which a young reporter finds himself cast as a pawn in the Soviet Union’s master plot to take over the world.

It was also in Washington, according to Mellon family biographer Burton Hersh, that young Dick began to pay attention to the workings of government. Scaife told Hersh that he had “made it a kind of hobby to meet as many senators and congressmen as I could.”

Later, there would be boarding school and then Yale, from which he was expelled after a drunken party. He ended up at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father was chairman of the board of trustees. After getting a bachelor’s degree in English in 1957, he was put to work first in the Scaife family business and later in Mellon enterprises. Within a few years, both of his parents were dead and Scaife had inherited an enormous fortune whose value is currently estimated by Forbes as about $1 billion (a significant underestimate, according to one reliable source).

But it was clear that Scaife, like his father before him, would never be given any true power within the Mellon banking and industrial empire. So he turned to other pursuits, acquiring a few newspapers, attempting unsuccessfully to buy his way into politics (he gave $1 million to Richard Nixon in 1972 but never got more than a minor appointment from any president) and taking effective control of the trusts and foundations that his mother had established.

Among Scaife’s acquaintances at this time were Glenn Campbell, head of the conservative Hoover Institution, and Frank Barnett, a shadowy figure with links to the CIA. With their encouragement, Scaife began directing the vast resources at his disposal — most particularly the donations of his family’s trusts and foundations — to fight the “Soviet menace.” Later, joined by a number of younger conservatives, some with ideas, others with money, Scaife would become the biggest funder of the New Right, spending millions of dollars a year to help establish the Heritage Foundation and a host of other think tanks focused on marketing conservative ideas both to Congress and to the public.

Other Scaife-funded groups dedicated themselves to watchdogging the media, training federal judges in conservative economics and litigating on behalf of causes such as opening up federal lands to oil and gas exploration. At the same time, Scaife gave generously to candidates who believed in these policies, a two-pronged strategy that proved triumphant in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan,

“It seemed to me that he operated very strongly on the strength of
passionate impulse,” said James Whelan, editor of the now-defunct Scaife-owned newspaper the Sacramento Union. “My sense of Dick is that there was not a depth of conviction about the causes he supported,” said Whelan, who went on to edit the Washington Times. “They were rather strongly felt prejudices — which isn’t necessarily something bad, but not the same as conviction.”

Whelan said that he tried to get Scaife to buy a major national news
organization — something favored by Nixon aides who wanted someone more friendly at the helm of the Washington Post — but failed owing to what he regards as Scaife’s insecurity. “You know insecure people frequently are bullies with those they can bully, but then [in other situations] they will act a bit meek,” Whelan said.

Less than a decade after Reagan’s election came the fall of the Berlin Wall — and with it, the right’s most powerful ideological raison d’être. In short order, however, culture replaced communism as the great battleground, and Clinton — the draft-dodging, skirt-chasing, pot-smoking symbol of all that was wrong with America — became its new Satan. It is no surprise that Scaife’s contributions to Clinton-bashing have ranged from underwriting efforts around the conspiracy theories of Vincent Foster’s death — which Scaife called “the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton administration” — to supporting the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, which advised Paula Jones and helped find her lawyers at crucial moments. Scaife, whose charitable entities now give away approximately a half million dollars a week, also underwrote projects that included retaining investigators to look into Clinton’s alleged drug connections. A life regent of Pepperdine University in Southern California, Scaife donated more than
$1 million for a new public policy school there. The man offered the job as the new school’s dean: Kenneth Starr.

Reflecting his continuing obsession that the
republic is in mortal danger, if not from one quarter then another, Scaife told the Heritage celebration in 1994 that “the ideological
conflicts that have swirled about this nation for half a century now show clear signs of breaking into naked ideological warfare.”

Such pronouncements might be dismissed as merely the overheated rhetoric of a man with more money than historical or political sense if it weren’t for the fact that Scaife has shown that he has the power to bend the nation’s agenda to his will. It is only now, with Attorney General Janet Reno considering an investigation into the alleged payments to Whitewater witness Hale, that there seems to be any possibility that light may finally be shed on Scaife’s role in this and perhaps other undertakings.

Some years ago, Pat Minarcin, editor of the defunct Pittsburgher magazine, published by Scaife, mused that while the United States operates on a system of checks and balances, “With inherited wealth the very idea of checks and balances is anathema. People who inherit their wealth have got everything they want all their lives. So they don’t know about things like responsibility.”

Then, in a comment that may yet prove prescient,
Minarcin added, “It’s at the heart of what’s going to bring Dick down some day.”

“Right,” Jim scoffed, “then how come it’s still all over the radio?”

How indeed? Inside the Beltway, the Arlington cemetery story had been discredited as a lame attempt at partisan political poisoning. Here in Connecticut — and it seems elsewhere — the poison is still potent. How this particular phony scandal grew such sturdy legs is a grim but instructive tale of how presidential character assassination is as alive and kicking now as when President Clinton first entered the White House five years ago.

First, the smear:

On Nov. 18, an advance copy of Insight, a magazine operated by the ultra-conservative Washington Times, was circulated to various right-wing talk-radio hosts across the country. Featured was an article by managing editor Paul Rodriguez alleging that “dozens of big-time political donors or friends of the Clintons” received waivers to have themselves or family members buried at Arlington National Cemetery, America’s most hallowed burial ground. Interestingly, the article, titled “Is There Nothing Sacred?” failed to mention a single name.

On the same day, Rep. Terry Everett, R-Ala., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, issued a press release “reaffirming the interest of his subcommittee” in the Arlington National Cemetery allegations. Adding a congressional imprimatur to Insight’s allegations, Everett noted that his subcommittee had “found some questionable waivers made in recent years.”

Over the next two days, far-right talk-radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, repeated the Insight magazine charges on the air across the nation. On Nov. 20, a White House denial of the Insight report was carried by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major press outlets. As happens with such stories, the denial was dwarfed by the details of the charges themselves.

Despite the denials, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson began waving the bloody shirt. “This has to represent one of the most despicable political schemes in recent history,” he said in a Nov. 20 statement. “The ground at Arlington has been sanctified by the blood of those who served with pride, fought and died, and gave themselves to preserve the American ideal of liberty. For this hallowed ground to be so debased in the pursuit of campaign cash is a perversion of common decency.”

With an “Arlingtongate” now in the making, House Speaker Newt Gingrich piled on, attacking Clinton over the alleged burial waivers and threatening to subpoena people. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., released a letter to Clinton in which he asked the president to “respond personally to the public” regarding the allegations. Specter also wrote that “it appears that this is a matter which will warrant a Committee hearing.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Now for the facts:

On Nov. 21, Secretary of the Army Togo West issued a statement — which somehow got lost amid the media feeding frenzy — that listed the names of 69 individuals who received waivers to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery since 1993, when Clinton took office. Of the 69,
Clinton granted a total of four waivers — for former Supreme Court
Justice Thurgood Marshall; Elvera Burger, the widow of Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger; J.W. Seale, a U.S. Army veteran killed while on an undercover mission in Peru as a Drug Enforcement Agent; and Henry Daly, a Marine Corps veteran killed in the line of duty while serving as a Washington, D.C.,
policeman.

It was West who granted the other 65 waivers, the majority to spouses who, like Mrs. Burger, were buried with their husbands, or to individuals whose distinguished military or other government service warranted exceptions.

Moreover, a check of Federal Election Commission records showed that of the 69 names, only one — former Ambassador Larry Lawrence — was a donor to the Democratic National Committee. Lawrence’s family received permission to bury him at Arlington because he had served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, had been wounded in a German torpedo attack on his ship just prior to D-Day and had died while serving as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland.

One more thing:

Rep. Everett, who raised the unfounded smear to the level of congressional concern, admitted that he has known about the 69 waivers since June, when the Pentagon routinely turned over
its records to Everett’s subcommittee. Amazingly, as Rep. Everett further acknowledged, he never bothered to check the names
against Federal Election Committee records to corroborate whether any had actually been political donors.

And what of RNC chairman Jim Nicholson? Did he try to check his facts before calling the late Ambassador Lawrence, the wounded World War II veteran who died at his diplomatic post in Bern, “a major Democratic donor who never served in the Armed Forces”? And come to think of it, whatever happened to Insight’s “dozens of big-time
political donors or friends of the Clintons” who supposedly received waivers to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery?

When I got back to Washington from
the Thanksgiving holiday, I called Rep. Everett, RNC chairman Nicholson and Rodriguez, the author of the original story. And I called and called again. I left four messages on the voice mail of Everett’s spokesman, Mike Lewis, and two each with the secretaries of Nicholson and Rodriguez. To date, they have not returned my calls.

And why should they? They’ve already accomplished what they
intended — to sow another seed of Clinton scandal in the
American public’s mind. Who cares if it’s true? The real point is, will it stick?

Maybe the next time I call the Republican National Committee or Rep. Everett’s office, I’ll tell them my name is Jim, that I’m an Air Force veteran from Connecticut and that I want to make a campaign donation in support of their efforts to keep Arlington pure and unpoliticized. That ought to get my calls returned.