When Bill and Hillary Clinton turn themselves loose in the supermarket of ambition, others are meant to pay the bills. The couple began preparing their daughter, Chelsea, for her share of this debt when she was six, according to Mrs. Clinton’s jaw-dropping “we’re hoping that we have another child” interview with Time magazine. “At dinners,” Hillary tells Time, Chelsea’s father “would pretend to be running against Bill Clinton, and he would say something like ‘Don’t vote for Bill Clinton. He’s a terrible person, and he’s mean to people.’ Chelsea got big tears in her eyes. At a series of dinners, we would do this.” The youngster’s most important such tough-love lesson, presumably, came in January 1992. She was packed off to public school the morning after her father chose to tell a national television audience that he had sexually betrayed her mother. Chelsea was not yet twelve years old.
Cool customers, these grown-up Clintons. Icy, even. Little wonder, then, that they should continue to face the Whitewater scandal with such a publicly untroubled conscience. True, the easy-virtue political and financial culture of pre-1993 Little Rock sticks to their feet like a spilled soft drink. The warlike “accept no blame” psychology the Clintons impose on their White House has raised further questions of coverup illegality in Whitewater. And the muscular federal criminal investigation the whole mess has produced has now touched (and damaged) dozens of their past and present friends and associates. But still Bill and Hillary regret nothing they’ve done themselves.
In fact, they would like to believe — and would like the public to believe, as well — that Whitewater oddly flatters them. It is an entirely artificial controversy manufactured by “many people who for a number of years have been opposed to my husband and his policies,” Mrs. Clinton told PBS’s Jim Lehrer last week. You know, Jim: the GOP. And by pursuing Whitewater allegations, she suggests, these Republicans are actually paying eloquent tribute to the Clintons’ superior political morality. They “do not have their own vision for what this country should be, don’t have a positive program to help people get and keep jobs or provide health care, or better education, or keep the environment clean.” And so to disguise their embarrassment, Republicans fling mud. That’s what Whitewater is. Otherwise, “there’s no there there.”
No there there, indeed. The day Mrs. Clinton’s PBS interview was taped and broadcast, a federal Whitewater jury of ordinary Arkansans issued twenty-four crushing felony verdicts against their state’s governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and Jim and Susan McDougal. All three of them will almost certainly do time. Nine other defendants have previously pled guilty to Whitewater-related crimes, and five of them have already been sentenced to prison. Four further men have been indicted and still face trial. More indictments will probably be issued; Whitewater counsel Kenneth Starr is hiring prosecutors, not investigators. And poor Vince Foster, burdened at least in part by the pressure of Whitewater writ large, is dead. To the families of all these people, the ” there” of Whitewater could hardly be more real.
In a couple of weeks, Whitewater defendants Herbert “Herby” Branscum, Jr. and Robert M. Hill will each be tried on eleven felony fraud and conspiracy charges. Branscum and Hill own the state-regulated Bank of Perry County in Perryville, Arkansas. Bill Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign kept its treasury on deposit at this bank. And it was from this same bank, that same year, that Bill and Hillary Clinton personally borrowed $ 180,000. The couple reloaned all this borrowed money to the Clinton reelection effort, $ 100,000 of it in the campaign’s final week.
Neal Ainley, the Perry County bank’s former president, has pled guilty and been sentenced to probation for concealing from the Internal Revenue Service $ 52,500 in cash withdrawals by Bruce Lindsey, then the 1990 Clinton campaign’s treasurer and now a top White House aide. Ainley has testified that Branscum and Hill ordered him to do it. Lindsey’s cash withdrawals, including a $ 22,500 sum on the Friday before election day in 1990, were distributed, as the Los Angeles Times has delicately put it, “to leading members of Arkansas’s African American community” by someone named Carol Willis, a longtime Clinton aide who now works for the Democratic National Committee.
Shortly after his 1990 victory, Gov. Clinton began soliciting contributions designed to retire the $ 180,000 debt the campaign owed him, so that he might repay the Clintons’ personal $ 180,000 debt to Branscum and Hill’s bank. The government now charges that Branscum and Hill misused more than $ 13,000 in bank funds to make such contributions to Clinton, reimbursing themselves and various employees and relatives by means of phony expense vouchers and a cashier’s check.
Seven thousand dollars of this bad money was hand-delivered to Bill Clinton in his governor’s office on December 14, 1990. Ken Starr’s investigators apparently have gubernatorial appointment books that indicate the subject of this meeting, arranged by Bruce Lindsey, was a discussion of Herby Branscum’s wished-for appointment to the Arkansas state highway commission.
And the Whitewater grand jury has apparently heard testimony that toward the end of this meeting, after pocketing the funds, Bill Clinton said something like: “I don’t guess you guys would have any problem with my appointing Herby to the highway commission.” A few weeks later, on January 23, 1991, Herby got the job he wanted. He still has it.
Big deal, the Clintons essentially argue; unless and until someone in the White House is proved criminally culpable in Whitewater, the whole affair should remain politically off-limits, consigned to “no there there” unreality. It would be a convenient rule, if they could make it stick. No Whitewater indictment has yet — yet — been issued against a White House officer, and none that might be forthcoming is likely to produce a trial conviction between now and the November presidential election. Which may be all the good news the Clintons require for the maintenance of their increasingly incredible self-righteousness.
American voters tend to have different, higher standards, however. A lengthening list of Clinton acquaintances is ensnared in legal trouble for participation in activities designed to advance the first family’s fortunes. The Clintons may pretend not to care. They may genuinely not care. But the whole thing stinks: the bank and campaign scams, the travel office damage- control fiasco, the lost-and-found documents and lies and evasions. It will stink the worse as the investigative and prosecutorial effort moves inexorably forward this summer. And Americans do not generally like their presidential candidates to smell this bad.
Full, legal justice in the Whitewater matter may well be delayed until sometime next year. But in the meantime, if the scandal offends enough Americans to sweep Bill and Hillary Clinton out of the White House this November, that will be justice, too.
–David Tell, for the Editors
