I was a target of the Clinton campaign’s rapid-response team. My offense was small. I asked James Carville, the president’s loyal political strategist, a touchy question on CNN’s Crossfire. Now you might think this would have gone under the radar of the rapid-response team (RRT for short), that the responders would have been too busy with Bob Dole’s TV ads or Haley Barbour’s barbs. But no. When President Clinton’s name is sullied, by bigshots or peons, the RRT goes on red alert. It’s a big job.
My question was innocent enough. The CNN show was about the character issue in the presidential campaign. I asked about a dubious Clinton statement. ” Remember when church burnings were a problem, black churches around the South?” I said to Carville. “The president said he had vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in Arkansas. Well, it turns out that never happened. What was he talking about?”
I might as well have been asking about Sri Lankan cuisine. “I’m not familiar with it,” he said, “but I’m sure churches were burned at the time. I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sensing vulnerability, I persisted. Historians in Arkansas said he was ” making it up,” I asserted. Carville said he “didn’t know about that.” But I’d have to ask the president, and, anyway, why was I bothering with something that happened a long time ago in Arkansas? Soon the yip-yap drifted to another subject. That was it, I thought. Little did I know the RRT was mobilizing.
The next day, a fax (on “Clinton Gore 96” stationery) arrived at CNN from Diane Blair. You may not remember her, but she’s an Arkansas pal of Hillary Clinton, a history professor at the University of Arkansas and, at the moment, the chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her husband, Jim, is better known. He’s the guy who did the cattle-futures deals for Hillary and turned her $ 1,000 into $ 100,000.
Diane Blair said I’d accused the president of lying about church bombings in Arkansas. True. “In fact,” she went on, a church burned in Hot Springs when young Bill was 17 and “there is a strong possibility that it was a racially motivated arson.” She sent along two newspaper clips. “I know you will want to make an on-air correction of your factual error.”
No, I didn’t immediately beg Ted Turner for time on CNN for a correction. I figured I’d better look into the subject first. Before I could, the RRT struck again, this time with a note from Carville. “I enjoyed the show,” he said. “In light of the attached, don’t you think a personal apology to the President is in order?” Attached were the same clips Blair had sent my way.
I didn’t reach for the phone and dial 456-1414 (the White House’s number). I turned to Nexis. What exactly had Clinton said? “In our country during the ’50s and ’60s, black churches were burned to intimidate civil rights workers,” he declared in his weekly radio address on June 8. “I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child.”
The president’s recollection caught the interest of the Little Rock newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The next day, the paper wrote that nobody in Arkansas shared Clinton’s memory, not the state historian, not the head of the state NAACP, not the former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention.
The White House quickly clarified Clinton’s remark, saying he was talking about “some black community buildings” that were burned. That was followed by the White House’s release of a list of three black churches that burned. Two of the fires, wrote the Democrat-Gazette, weren’t arson, and no cause was determined for the other. So they didn’t fit Clinton’s description of racist retaliation.
I wasn’t vindicated yet. A black minister in Hot Springs recalled that his church burned in 1963. Clinton was a high-school kid there at the time. Local authorities said there was no evidence of arson, and the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Little Rock decided an investigation wasn’t warranted. However, blacks in Hot Springs believed the fire was set because the pastor, James Donald Rice, was trying to organize a chapter of the NAACP in town, the Democrat-Gazette reported.
That left the matter murky, like so many issues on which Clinton’s truthfulness has been challenged. But not to the RRT. A letter appeared in the Washington Times citing the Hot Springs burning as proof Clinton’s memory was “not faulty.” It was written by an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, thus a colleague of Diane Blair. The letter was also one of the attachments the RRT sent me. The other was the Democrat- Gazette story mentioning the Hot Springs church.
Should I apologize? I think not. But I’d be delighted if the RRT explains why the president, at best, ballooned a small, unconfirmed item into a big- time political pronouncement.
FRED BARNES
