President Clinton ended 1995 on a high note. He was up in the polls. Republicans couldn’t shake him loose on the budget, and, for once, official Washington was fixated on the ethics probes of Newt Gingrich. Then in the first two weeks of the new year, the president and his wife hit a series of jarring speed bumps, on Whitewater, the travel office firings, and Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit. “It gets to the point where you wonder what’s coming next,” confided one presidential aide.
His was the rare admission. Most White House officials, under instructions to sound confident, sought to project an unworried air. Their actions belied the image, however. Press secretary Mike McCurry, in a calculated attempt at spin control that backfired, opined that if his boss weren’t president, he’d lay Bill Satire out cold over a New York Times column questioning the First Lady’s veracity — which led to three days of stories in which Mrs. Clinton’s name and Safire’s phrase “congenital liar” appeared in close proximity over and over again. White House lawyers, both in-house folk and outside superstars like Robert Bennett, were so rattled that they resorted to peddling startlingly petty — and inaccurate — stories about former travel office chief Billy Dale.
Ever since the campaign of 1992, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton — and their surrogates — have greeted the release of unwelcome revelations about their Arkansas past with vague talk of some undefined Republican conspiracy. Isn’t it strange, they’ll ask, how these issues always seem to crop up just when the president is doing well legislatively? Or going up in the polls? Mark Fabiani, the Los Angeles lawyer imported to the White House to handle Whitewater inquiries, bravely sounded that note again this week. “This is 1996,” he said to me on Wednesday. “It’s no coincidence that the chairman of the Senate Whitewater committee is the chairman of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.”
The president, forced to defend his wife, dusted off an old line himself. ” I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, ‘If everybody in this country had the character that my wife has, we’d be a better place to live.'” A man can hardly go wrong defending his wife. History suggests this is particularly true of presidents. Yet the damage this time was not coming from enemies of the Clintons, but from past underlings and the First Family’s own file cabinets.
The first shoe dropped Jan. 3, in the late-night release of a memo written by Arkansan David Watkins when he still worked in the White House. Watkins, whose association with the Clintons goes back to their days in Little Rock together, was fired for misuse of presidential aircraft, and when he was let go he hinted that he knew where some skeletons were. The Clintons took care of him by putting him on the Democratic National Committee payroll, but it turned out Watkins had left behind a little stink bomb in the form of a memo on the travel office firings. Watkins’s memo said Hillary had told him of “her desire for swift and clear action to resolve the situation” — in other words, he says she told him to fire those seven people, a fact she denied yet again to ABC’s Barbara Walters last week. Watkins himself called the unusual memo a ” soul cleansing.” A lawyer in the White House counsel’s office was less charitable, referring to it as a “cover-your-ass special.” But what few seem to have noted about the Watkins memo is that it appears to have been written with a special prosecutor in mind.
Two questions keep coming up about the Watkins memo. The first has to do with the reason why this document, covered by a subpoena, was only turned over to Congress in 1996, more than two years after it was drafted. The second is: Is Hillary Clinton really this ruthless towards White House workers of modest standing? After all, not only were the Travel Office Seven fired, they were given just a few hours to clean out their desks, basically called crooks by then-White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, and subjected to an FBI inquiry to make the firings look kosher.
The White House claims whatever the first lady did — and they say she did almost nothing — she was motivated by worries about the taxpayers” money. Fabiani issued a statement containing the words: “The first lady’s concern about financial mismanagement in the Travel Office — a concern that in the end proved fully justified — has already been well-documented.” Oh? The concerns of financial mismanagement proved to be “fully justified” — a talking point repeated by McCurry and other White House loyalists? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Billy Dale was acquitted.
When I reminded a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office of this inconvenient detail, as well as the fact that Clinton himself had all but apologized to Dale publicly after the acquittal, the official began volunteering the details of Dale’s attorneys’ plea-bargaining offers. This same spin was employed by Robert Bennett, Clinton’s personal attorney, and by Don Fowler, the president’s hand-picked DNC chief. It was a disturbing tactic for several reasons. First, the familiarity of Clinton’s lawyers and Democratic party hacks with what are supposed to be confidential negotiations fueled the suspicion, always denied by administration officials, that Dale’s prosecution was orchestrated out of the White House. Second, the Clintonites misstated the terms of Dale’s plea bargain offer. It wasn’t to accept a conviction of embezzlement and four months in the clink. It was to plead to a misdemeanor count of having money in the wrong account and to accept no more than two months’ confinement.
Billy Dale is a retired civil servant, with some $ 500,000 in legal bills, whose career was ruined by the determination of the Clintons to replace him and his staff with Arkansas cronies. Instead of being left alone, he is still being hounded by those eager to divert attention from the first lady. It is instructive behavior from a president who told the American people they have a duty to “respect” the jury’s verdict in the O. J. Simpson case.
“This administration is a champion of creating the impression of wrongdoing,” Benjamin Ginsberg, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Study of American Government, told my colleague Susan Baer. “They’re more effective at creating the impression of wrongdoing than they are at doing wrong. They make it so tantalizing, and are so relentless in their efforts to cover-up, that you think there must be many bodies buried somewhere.”
Carl M. Cannon is the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.
