My Life

days together we maintained a friendly and productive working relationship.

THIRTY-EIGHT

While I was hard at work on foreign affairs, the new world of Whitewater was beginning to take shape at home. In March, Robert Fiske began his job in earnest by sending out subpoenas to several members of the White House staff, including Maggie Williams and Lisa Caputo, who worked for Hillary and were friends of Vince Foster’s. Mack McLarty set up a Whitewater Response Team, led by Harold Ickes, to coordinate responses to questions from Fiske and from the press; to free the rest of the staff, and me, to do the public work we came to Washington to do; and to minimize conversations our staff might have about Whitewater among themselves or with Hillary or me. Any such conversations could only expose our young staffers to depositions, political attacks, and big legal bills. A lot of people had already acquired a vested interest in finding something wrong; if there was nothing illegal in our long-ago land deal, perhaps they could catch someone doing something wrong in the handling of it. The system worked well enough for me. After all, I had learned how to lead parallel lives as a child: most of the time, I could shut out all the accusations and innuendo and go on with my work. I knew it would be harder to cope with for those who had never lived with the constant threat of arbitrary and destructive attacks, especially in an atmosphere in which there was a presumption of guilt attached to any charge. To be sure, there were some legal experts, like Sam Dash, who talked about how cooperative we were compared with the Reagan and Nixon administrations, because we didn’t resist subpoenas and we turned all our records over to the Justice Department and then to Fiske. But the goalposts had been moved: unless Hillary and I could prove ourselves innocent of whatever charges any adversary could come up with, most of the questions would be asked, and the stories written, in a tone of intense suspicion; the underlying current was that we must have done something wrong. For example, as our financial records found their way into the press, the New York Times reported that, starting with a $1,000 investment, Hillary had made $100,000 in the commodities market in 1979, with the help of Jim Blair. Blair was one of my closest friends; he did help Hillary and a number of his other friends in trading commodities, but she took her own risks, paid more than $18,000 in brokerage fees, and, following her own instincts, got out of the market before it dropped. Leo Melamed, the Republican former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, on which agricultural commodities are traded, reviewed all of Hillary’s trades and said there was nothing wrong with them. It didn’t matter. For years, the critics would refer to Hillary’s commodity profit as prima facie evidence of corruption. The presumption of wrongdoing was reflected in a Newsweek story saying Hillary did not put up her own money for her “sweet deal,” with an analysis that it said was based on the expert opinion of Professor Marvin Chirelstein of Columbia Law School, one of the nation’s leading authorities on corporate law and contracts, who had taught me at Yale and who had been asked by our lawyer to review our tax returns for 1978–79, the period of the Whitewater investment. Chirelstein disputed the Newsweek story, saying, “I never said anything like that,” and that he was “outraged” and “humiliated.”

About the same time, Time magazine ran a cover photograph purporting to show George Stephanopoulos peering over my shoulder as I sat at my desk fretting over Whitewater. In fact, the photo captured an earlier routine scheduling meeting at which several people were present. At least two others were in the original picture. Time simply cropped them out.

In April, Hillary held a press conference to answer questions about her commodity trades and Whitewater. She did a fine job and I was proud of her. She even got a laugh from the press corps when she acknowledged that her belief in a “zone of privacy” might have made her less responsive to press questions about her past personal dealings than she should have been, but that “after resisting for a long time, I’ve been rezoned.”

The presumption of guilt imposed on us was extended to others. For example, Roger Altman and Bernie Nussbaum were both heavily criticized for discussing criminal referrals issued against Madison Guaranty by the Resolution Trust Corporation, because the RTC was a part of the Treasury Department and Altman was overseeing it temporarily. Presumably, the critics thought Nussbaum could have been trying to influence the RTC proceedings. In fact, the discussions were a result of the need to answer press questions arising out of leaks about the Madison investigation, and they had been approved by the Treasury Department’s ethics counsel.

Edwin Yoder, an old-fashioned progressive columnist, said Washington was being overtaken by “ethical cleansers.” In a column on the Nussbaum-Altman meeting, he said:

I wish someone would begin by explaining to me why it is so very wicked for White House staff to want information from elsewhere within the executive branch about charges and rumors concerning the president….

Robert Fiske found the contacts between the White House and the Treasury Department to be legal, but that didn’t stop the smearing of Nussbaum and Altman. Back then, all our political appointees needed to be read their Miranda warnings three times a day. Bernie Nussbaum resigned in early March; he never got over my foolish decision to ask for an independent counsel, and he didn’t want to be a source of further problems. Altman would leave government service a few months later. They were both able, honest public servants.

In March, Roger Ailes, a longtime Republican operative who had become president of CNBC, accused the administration of “a cover-up with regard to Whitewater that includes… land fraud, illegal contributions, abuse of power… suicide cover-up—possible murder.” So much for the “credible evidence of wrongdoing” standard.

William Safire, the New York Times columnist who had been a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, and who seemed determined to prove that all their successors were just as bad as they were, was especially avid in his unsupported assertions that Vince’s death was linked to illegal conduct by Hillary and me. Of course, Vince’s suicide note had said exactly the reverse, that we had done nothing wrong, but that didn’t prevent Safire from speculating that Vince had improperly kept records damaging to us in his office.

We now know that a lot of the so-called information that fueled the damaging but erroneous stories was fed to the press by David Hale and the right-wingers who adopted him for their own purposes. In 1993, Hale, the Republican municipal judge in Little Rock, was charged with defrauding the Small Business Administration of $900,000 in federal funds that were supposed to have been used to make loans to minority businesses through his company, Capital Management Services (a later GAO audit indicated he had defrauded the SBA of $3.4 million). Instead, he gave the money to himself through a series of dummy corporations. Hale discussed his plight with Justice Jim Johnson, the old Arkansas racist who had run against Win Rockefeller for governor in 1966 and against Senator Fulbright in 1968. Johnson took Hale under his wing, and in August put him in contact with a conservative group called Citizens United, whose principals were Floyd Brown and David Bossie. Brown had produced the infamous Willie Horton ads against Mike Dukakis in 1988. Bossie had helped him write a book for the 1992 campaign entitled Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, in which the authors gave “special thanks” to Justice Jim Johnson.

Hale claimed that I had pressed him to lend $300,000 from Capital Management to a company owned by Susan McDougal, for the purpose of giving it out to leading Arkansas Democrats. In return, McDougal would lend Hale more than $800,000 from Madison Guaranty, enabling him to get another million dollars from the Small Business Administration. It was an absurd and untrue story, but Brown and Bossie peddled it hard. Apparently, Sheffield Nelson also helped, by pushing it to his contact at the New York Times, Jeff Gerth.

By March 1994, the media was wringing its hands about some documents shredded by the Rose firm; one of the boxes that held the papers had Vince Foster’s initials on it. The firm explained that the shredding involved material unrelated to Whitewater and was a normal procedure involving papers that were no longer needed. No one in our White House knew about the routine destruction of unneeded records unrelated to Whitewater at the Rose firm. Moreover, we had nothing to cover up, and there still wasn’t a bit of evidence to indicate that we did.

It got so bad that even the highly respected journalist David Broder referred to Bernie Nussbaum as “unfortunate” for allegedly tolerating arrogance and abuse of power that led to “the all-too-familiar words— investigation, subpoena, grand jury, resignation” that had “echoed through Washington again this past week.” Broder even compared the “war rooms” that managed our campaigns for the economic plan and NAFTA to Nixon’s enemies list.