It Takes a Library . . .

At times like this, it seems as if Arkansas has spent most of the Clinton era in a courtroom. Waiting. Waiting for the arguments. Waiting for the plausible explanation. Waiting for the verdict. Waiting for the end. But certainly not waiting for Arkansas’s most famous and infamous son to save the day. Bill Clinton’s only presence in this courtroom is his name. Which is more than enough to keep legal briefs flying and tempers flaring.

If it weren’t for the students, there wouldn’t be much of a crowd at the state’s highest court this cold, gray February morning not a month into Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life. Just a few local reporters, Carpenter, a lawyer for the plaintiff, and the plaintiff herself — a blunt, 68-year-old, white-haired pain in City Hall’s out-stretched neck named Nora Harris.

She’s suing the city for the way it’s buying the 27.7 acres of land along the Arkansas River that one day — 2003? 2004? — will be the site of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, now bumped up to a $ 200-million project by the ex-president. Yes, $ 200 million. It’s the kind of development you don’t usually find in Arkansas. Even something really important, like renovation of the Razorbacks’ football stadium, runs a mere $ 106 million. But then, only half of the $ 200 million will be spent on the library. The rest? Well, there’s a Camp David-like retreat in Hot Springs to pay for, an endowment to fatten, and a whole post-presidential agenda to fund. The William J. Clinton Foundation, it seems, will pay for everything surrounding the presidential library except what actually surrounds the presidential library: the land. The city of Little Rock is on the hook, with a $ 16.5 million bond issue.

Meanwhile, on this same morning, Dan Burton’s House Government Reform Committee in Washington is finding out some interesting details about the Clinton Library. Namely, that Denise Rich, the ex-wife of America’s most famous pardoned fugitive, Marc Rich, has donated “an enormous sum of money” to the library fund. Or so says her attorney, for his client has opted to take the Fifth rather than testify. This prompts a congressional subpoena to make public the names of library donors.

Things aren’t quite so dramatic in Arkansas’s capital. Just persistent. The Rich money and what it may or may not have bought is hardly the first controversy over the Clinton Library.

The library is just one more instance of the polarizing effect William Jefferson Clinton has had on his home state. A presidential library would seem the kind of project to quicken the pulse of every civic booster. But not here, and not with this president.

Harris’s lawsuit against the city has been proceeding for almost three years now. She says the city is playing an illegal shell game by pledging general fund revenue to pay off a general revenue bond that financed the library land. She thinks there should have been a specific bond issue to pay for the land, which the city wanted to avoid for fear of having a Clinton referendum. The city has used general revenue to subsidize the struggling parks department in the past. That’s where the shell game comes in. It doesn’t use general revenue directly to pay off the bonds for the library land. Harris’s argument is that the city is doing this indirectly — general funds to the bonds, but with a detour through the parks.

The city keeps winning, Nora Harris keeps appealing, and plans for the library have been kept waiting. This self-described retired housewife isn’t the only resident of Little Rock who has taken the city to court over the library. Eugene Pfeifer III, a prominent real-estate developer and another City Hall gadfly, has sued Little Rock over its attempt to seize his three acres of land on the library site. Pfeifer’s suit, which is on appeal, has held up the groundbreaking for months.

Among other things, Pfeifer doesn’t like the way Little Rock officials decided to spend more than $ 12 million to acquire the site by using fees from the city’s parks, zoo, and golf courses — a move the city made without voter approval. “The decision was top-down, secretive, non-participatory, and many of the city directors didn’t know a thing about it on the night it passed and some still don’t have the details,” Pfeifer tells me by e-mail. “This decision to provide the land for the presidential library from our Parks and Recreation Department has raped our city zoo, parks and golf courses.”

Indeed, Little Rock’s zoo has been struggling for years and recently lost its national accreditation. And by pledging their money to the library, the city may be driving the parks into a deficit. This will probably mean a huge increase in fees or taxpayer money that goes into the city’s general fund for other basic projects. Either way, it’s not what the residents of Little Rock signed on for. The city maintains that it is within its legal rights to use the fees from the parks, golf courses, and zoo to pay for the library’s land and replace any shortfall from the general fund just as it has in the past.

At one especially ludicrous point in the Pfeifer case, the city tried to argue that the library wasn’t really a library but a park, so it could pay for the land with park revenues. It’s all rather . . . Clintonesque.

As Justice Donald Corbin puts it in a question to Harris’s lawyer, David Henry: “Aren’t we dealing with semantics?”

“Yes,” answers Henry, “the city is playing word games. Like putting a sign on a cow that says horse.”

One of the students suppresses a laugh. Hey, they are paying attention. So are the justices. To judge by their rough treatment of Carpenter, they seem to understand the Clintonesque game and the Clintonesque question: Is the city’s financing illegal or just slick? What it isn’t is simple. But nothing is simple when it comes to Bill Clinton and his home state of Arkansas.

A few days later, it’s raining cats, dogs, and subpoenas in Little Rock. The Clinton Foundation has been served; Gene Pfeifer checks in to tell me that he doesn’t expect his appeal to be heard till summer, and the actual construction of the library seems farther away than ever. The steady rain makes it feel colder than it is, and the drive from downtown to the future site of the Clinton Library takes longer than usual. Almost five minutes.

It’s easy to find the 27 acres destined for Clinton enshrinement. You just take a right at the Arkansas River and head east out of downtown until you run into absolutely nothing. That’s it. Desolate would be a kind description.

Only a few buildings remain on the land. Then again, only a few buildings were there to begin with. There’s a 19th-century train station of rust-red brick that will be preserved and transformed into a public policy center. Next to it, sitting a little too close, is a pea-green, metal building. Windowless, empty, condemned. May Supply Co. It’s Gene Pfeifer’s building. It’s not holding up well, but it’s holding up everything.

Jim Dailey must wince when he sees that building. He can barely get the words out when I talk to him later in the day. “We’ve removed quite a few buildings,” he says. “The only piece left is” . . . pause . . . “Gene’s.” Dailey has been mayor of Little Rock since 1994. He has presided over an unprecedented revitalization of the city’s core. Loft apartments, a river-front district full of yuppie beer halls and coffee houses, the expansion of high-tech businesses into downtown — the whole, gentrified, Jane Jacobs dream. Dailey has all the right connections for a politician looking to get ahead in Little Rock: He’s long been friends with Bill Clinton, he’s a life-long Democrat from a prominent local family, and he gets his political advice from Skip Rutherford, one of Bill Clinton’s closest friends and now the subpoenaed president of the Clinton Foundation.

But landing the Clinton Library in his city has been anything but a crowning achievement for Jim Dailey. The way the city acquired the land, the way it leveraged the parks and zoo, the way it caved in to Clinton paranoia and refused to let the people vote on a bond issue to finance the site . . . it’s all led inexorably to an erosion of public confidence in city government and, perhaps most predictably, another division along the Great Clinton Fault Line.

At one point, folks got so disgusted that they flooded City Hall with phone calls against renaming a main downtown thoroughfare Clinton Avenue. It was eventually shortened to just a few blocks leading to the library.

“The way we financed the land, I’ve thought about it a hundred times,” says the mayor. “With the available options, knowing we were being pushed to have some commitment . . . I still think having the presidential library here, despite the issue continuing to be part of the Clinton story, will be a wonderful addition to the city. There are a lot of pieces to this story that makes it a tough and agonizing journey. Knowing what I do today . . . “

The mayor trails off. Then, as if remembering his supporting role in this latest Clinton tragicomedy, he defends the decision not to put a vote before the people. “It would have been a mandate for or against Clinton,” he says. “The big issue was do we want to turn this into a vote of up or down on President Clinton?”

Little Rock’s leaders did not want that. After all, there’s no denying the economic benefit of a presidential library. City officials estimate the library will attract about 300,000 visitors and an extra $ 10.7 million a year. Its location near downtown has already drawn two major business developments, and longtime residents are thrilled to have anything built in this forgotten part of the city, where old water heaters and broken washing machines go to die. But, perhaps inevitably, the financing controversy has led to lawsuits and bad feelings — over a $ 200-million presidential library that should have been welcomed as the ultimate slab of nonpartisan pork. Bill Clinton hasn’t been pleased.

“There have been times . . . he’s vented a little bit,” says Dailey. “I agonized on my role as mayor in the midst of all [the Clinton scandals]. Bill Clinton is my friend, and I certainly don’t wear a halo. I tried to be as supportive of him as Webb Hubbell, another friend, but at the same time, I’m the mayor of the city . . . It was a difficult time for me.”

A difficult time that never quite draws to a close. When Bill Clinton visited Arkansas to address the state legislature during his last week in office, he surprised local officials by declaring the library a $ 200 million project — more than twice the original, $ 85 million estimate. Two days after his visit, the president cut the deal to have his Arkansas disbarment proceedings dropped. But the Pfeifer and Harris lawsuits drag on, and now the fund-raising prowess of a non-profit, tax-deductible foundation that may have to publish every donor’s name will be put to the test.

In a state like Arkansas and a city like Little Rock, where everybody knew everybody even before we all met in court, Skip Rutherford is the kind of local personality who is well-known for his well-knownness. Like a TV weatherman. He’s regularly described as a Good Guy, which is the highest of southern compliments, and even his ideological opposites usually have a good word for the Skipper.

He may be the aboriginal Friend of Bill, and he’s one of the few FOBs not to be tainted by scandal. Which is why it’s something of a shock to see his name on a congressional subpoena. “To Skip Rutherford, President, William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation. You are hereby commanded to produce . . . ” Will Little Rock never see the end of this?

In his capacities as a Clinton defender, both officially and un-, Rutherford has earned a reputation for always returning phone calls and never dodging questions. But on subpoena day, he uncharacteristically doesn’t get back to a reporter. Instead, his assistant, Jordan Johnson, calls back with the Clinton Foundation’s latest line: “I can neither confirm nor deny that Denise Rich contributed. We have got a subpoena. I can’t comment. We haven’t done anything differently. We’ve been using the two-term model set by Reagan.”

About the only thing Johnson can say is that the Clinton Foundation may still pay part of the rent for the ex-president’s offices in Manhattan, even if he moves to cheaper digs in Harlem. How will this new role for the foundation sit with donors? Johnson says he hasn’t received any complaints so far. Rutherford said he hadn’t, either.

But this arrangement surely came as a surprise to library contributors, especially those in Arkansas, who must have thought they were giving money for bricks and mortar in Little Rock. Joe Ford, a conservative businessman and CEO of Arkansas-based Alltel, a telecommunications company, pledged $ 1 million in 1999, specifically citing the project’s impact on downtown. When a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette asked how he felt about helping Clinton pay his rent in New York, Ford said simply, “We gave money to the Clinton library. We didn’t give to anything else.”

On the other hand, one prominent local Republican and non-donor to the library says that’s what post-presidential foundations are for — picking up the tabs and saving the taxpayers some bucks. “That doesn’t trouble me,” he says. “As a taxpayer, I’m delighted.”

But the Harlem office is the least of Rutherford’s worries. As another FOB facing a subpoena, he’s got a bigger controversy on his hands. The day after the foundation gets its full-disclosure demand from Congress, Skip Rutherford is traveling from Little Rock to Fayetteville, where he teaches a journalism class once a week at the University of Arkansas. His subject: crisis communications. He shouldn’t have any trouble finding material.

Kane Webb is assistant editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.