Tuesday, October 7
It was just like old times. As the Thompson hearings into the campaign- finance scandals resumed this morning, the hearing room buzzed like a county fair on Kiss a Heifer Day. Outside, the queue of normal people waiting to get in was longer than I’d ever seen it. Inside, the biggest of the media’s bigfeet (Al Hunt! Mary McGrory! What’s-his-name!) milled about, greeting and laughing and back-slapping like long-lost pals, as if they hadn’t just seen one another on TV all weekend. Reporters of the more earthbound variety packed the press tables. The cause of all this commotion was the appearance at last of Harold Ickes, the president’s former deputy chief of staff. From his perch at the White House, as the world knows, Ickes oversaw the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, which, as the world also knows, has birthed scandals the way a cat has kittens. Ickes is fatuously smart and contentious, with a volcanic temper, so his testimony was expected to yield good theater if nothing else. (I can hear the bigfeet rehearsing already: “Well, Mark, I’m afraid the hearings this week generated more heat than light.” Much arching of eyebrows. Much wagging of chins.)
I say the hearings “resumed” today, but in fact they never really stopped. It just seemed that way. Several weeks ago, following a rollicking good performance by the multinational businessman (and Clinton donor) Roger Tamraz, Senators Thompson and Glenn abruptly shut down the “investigative” portion of the hearings in favor of expert testimony about the urgency of campaign- finance reform. I attended the first of these hearings last month, and as I walked in I saw the room was almost empty: no cameramen, no spectators, two reporters. In the seats reserved for White House counsel a solitary woman sat, reading Iron John. And most ominous of all: There in the witness chairs were Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. It’s true that these two campaign-finance experts are intelligent men, but it’s likewise true that computer-generated climatological models have demonstrated that together they are responsible for fully 40 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that threaten the very survival of the planet. I made a hasty exit, and in the weeks that followed you couldn’t find a news story about the Thompson hearings with a microscope.
All this will presumably change with Ickes. The Iron John lady was gone this morning, and in her place was the chief White House counsel Charles Ruff. He wasn’t a scheduled witness, but like Lucy Ricardo he had some ‘splainin’ to do. Over the weekend the White House had miraculously discovered and produced at least 44 videotapes that Ruff had previously told the committee didn’t exist. The tapes that didn’t exist but now do exist were of the notorious White House coffees, which weren’t fund-raisers but raised several million dollars in funds. (This White House is totally postmodern.) How to ‘splain the tapes’ spontaneous generation? Ruff didn’t testify, but he told reporters, by way of clarification, that they wouldn’t believe how hard his overworked, understaffed staff works. “Seven days a week, 16-, 18-, 20 hours a day,” he said. And he did look tired. No president has ever worked harder than Bill Clinton at telling people how hard he works. Apparently it’s catching.
The commotion over the tapes was so preoccupying that Ickes never did get to testify; after several hours of senatorial speechifying, with the Republicans complaining about the White House and the attorney general, and the Democrats complaining about all the Republicans’ complaining, he read his opening statement in late afternoon, before the committee adjourned for the day. To my utter amazement, I found myself feeling slightly sorry for him. Fanned out behind Ickes were no less than nine attendants, the bulk of them lawyers, presumably, including the bulky Robert Bennett, whose rates are stratospheric — as high as $ 550 an hour. By day’s end, the witness had probably dropped close to $ 10,000 in attorneys’ fees alone, and he had yet to answer a single question. Plus he had to eat in the Dirksen Building cafeteria. I’m not sure even Harold Ickes deserves this.
Wednesday, October 8
Chairman Thompson has taken much criticism for his conduct of the hearings and the investigation — from Democrats who scorn his partisanship, and from Republicans who scorn his bipartisanship. “It doesn’t bother me,” he says over and over, again and again. But he must surely have been happy this morning. The Washington Post devoted most of its op-ed page to reprinting his opening statement from yesterday. It was worth reprinting — an impromptu attack on the White House, shaded with a kind of controlled anger and phrased in a plainspoken eloquence that senators seldom achieve. “Just a parting comment,” he drawled in closing, “and I guess it’ll probably be about worth what’s being paid for it, but I feel compelled to say it, anyway. There’s a missing player in most of these discussions. I think it’s the President of the United States. . . .
“This committee has tried to be fair to you, Mr. President. I’ve taken an awful lot of criticism because I’ve tried to be fair to you. And I haven’t done it just for you. I’ve done it because I thought the American people expected it of me. And now I think the American people expect you to step up to the plate and take responsibility, because surely nobody wants this to go down looking like a successful cover-up of much more serious activities. No one who loves their country wants that.”
This was excellent stagecraft, and in fact Thompson’s only PR triumph after months of hearings.
And then, this morning . . . a PR catastrophe. The chairman opened the questioning of Ickes by dwelling on the recently exposed scheme, between the Teamsters and the Democratic National Committee, to launder money through the election campaign of Teamsters president Ron Carey. “Now I don’t want to seem like I’m surprising you,” Thompson said, and then proceeded to surprise everybody by announcing that three of the principals in the scheme had met with President Clinton in the White House residence days before the plan was executed. A few days after that, two of the three met again with the president, also in the residence. The implication: Clinton was in on it too! Several reporters rushed from the hearing room to file bulletins, just the way they do in the movies. The unflappable Ickes seemed momentarily flapped.
By lunchtime, however, after rebuttal questioning from the committee’s Democratic counsel, the charge had gone out of this potentially explosive story. The first of the “private” meetings, it turned out, was a fund-raising lunch in the Blue Room, attended by at least eight other guests, including such unlikely conspiratorialists as the general counsel of the Burlington Northern Railroad and the chairman of the Cheyenne Arapaho Nation. The second “meeting in the residence” to which Thompson alluded was a state dinner for the president of Ireland attended by 400 people. Imagine a conspiracy with 400 Irishmen.
At the lunch break reporters were furious. A hapless Republican staffer stood sweating in the hallway outside, taking shouted questions. The question was no longer “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Did the chairman knowingly create a false impression? Did he know the meetings weren’t private? Did he understand he was recklessly implicating the president in a criminal conspiracy? What did Fred Thompson know and when did he know it?
Like the president, the chairman was apparently the victim of “bad staff work.” He had been misinformed, embarrassed by incompetent or sluggish aides. It all sounded familiar to Lanny Davis, the White House counsel who monitors the hearings. I’ve never seen him so happy. Lanny does not have many good days. But this was turning into a very good day. “I trust that the senator did not intend any unfair innuendo,” he told reporters. “But I do hope that the next time we at the White House may inadvertently overlook something, he will give us the same benefit of the doubt that we have given him.” His eyes twinkled.
“Do you like that line?” he asked.
Thursday, October 9
I decided to spend the day on the House side of Capitol Hill, watching congressman Dan Burton’s rival campaign-finance hearings, and I take back every bad thing I ever said about the Dirksen Building cafeteria and the United States Senate in general. The House, unimaginably, is even drearier than the Senate — the offices more crowded, the hearing rooms shabbier, the elevators slower, the food worse.
The first thing you notice about congressmen is that there are so many of them. The Thompson committee has 16 members. The Burton committee has 44. There is a difference in deportment and couture as well. Senators, as a rule, favor French cuffs and those fancy striped shirts with white collars. They have expensive hair and excellent posture. Congressmen, by contrast, tend to wear ties that reach only halfway to their belt buckles. They take their coats off a lot and roll up the sleeves of their perma-press shirts, as though they were back home at the car dealership dickering with the boys about sticker prices over a nice cool can of Yoohoo.
Chairman Burton himself is an elegant dresser, as befits a chairman. This morning he sported a silk tie and double-breasted suit with a puffy scarlet pocket square of the richest silk. The effect is impressive, though it can’t obscure the fact that he is, fundamentally, a Hoosier. He is also a Clinton- hater of the first order. He has dwelled long and lovingly, for example, on what Clinton obsessives like to call “the mysterious death of Vincent Foster,” and he views the campaign-finance scandals in the most extravagant context of criminality. He has staffed his team with veterans of the D’Amato Whitewater committee — a career move that offers another example of the singular Washington phenomenon of failing up.
Their handiwork was on display today, the first full day of Burton’s hearings. The first witness was the sister of Charlie Trie, one of the many Clinton friends and fund-raisers who have fled to China. The sister was a demure, nervous woman who spoke halting English. The partisan lines were quickly drawn. Democrats apologized to her for her inconvenience and then spent 10 minutes each saying how sorry they were that they were taking up her valuable time. Republicans, for their part, took turns doing their imitation of Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, the movie where he pushes the old lady down the stairs in a wheelchair. “Could you repeat question, please?” the sister asked Congressman Chris Shays, after he’d stumped her with a quadruple-compound question. “I’m not going to repeat any question,” he snarled.
It seems impossible that anyone could have made the Thompson hearings seem a model of efficiency and truth-seeking, but Chairman Burton and his Democratic counterpart, Henry Waxman, have achieved the impossible. Their contempt for each other is palpable and probably deserved. The hearing dragged on into the early evening. The Republicans interrupted the Democrats with “parliamentary inquiries,” which were seldom parliamentary or even, for that matter, inquiries, and the Democrats responded with dilatory tactics of their own. “I think it really must be said,” Congressman Barrett of Wisconsin told Trie’s sister, “that you’ve made a mistake in judgment. You know, I have made mistakes in judgment in the past. I am confident that I will make them in the future. I know when my constituents compliment me on the job I’m doing, I say, Don’t worry — I’ll make a mistake someday and then . . .”
As the hearings progress, on both sides of the Hill, they raise yet again the question that Aristotle, in Book Two of the Politics, said was ever the enduring issue of representative democracy: “Holy smokes, where do we get these people?”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
