The great Whitewater snipe hunt - poor press coverage of the Whitewater Development Corp. scandal

Washington Monthly, April, 1994 by Gene Lyons

These Arkansas lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare. What they wanted was low comedy---and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy.

--Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Arkansas that Whitewater special prosecutor Robert B. Fiske, Jr. has jumped into--opening a Little Rock office and hiring a team of seven lawyers--has changed a great deal since Mark Twain was writing about it back in 1882, but it hasn't lost its zeal for low-grade political buffoonery. Almost everywhere except for a few square miles of Little Rock surrounding the Capital Hotel bar where out-of-town reporters drink, the conflict between Sunday-go-to-meeting prudery and honky-tonk raunchiness that typified frontier America continues unabated.

Given literacy levels among the lowest in the United States, this adds up to a populist brand of political warfare at about the level of professional wrestling. In a small, largely rural state with one real city, it also makes for fantastic--and highly entertaining--gossip. Almost everybody, it seems, has a neighbor whose second cousin knows an old boy who worked on the governor's dentist's car, and he says...

During the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial primaries, for example, tales were widely circulated about three of the four serious candidates--the two Republicans, and, of course, Bill Clinton. Only Clinton's Democratic opponent escaped suspicion. There was talk of whores, drunken orgies at duck hunting clubs, illegitimate children, abortions, hush money, even suicides. One prominent Arkansas politician was rumored to have had carnal knowledge of a convicted murderess inside her jail cell. In fact, it's hard to think of an Arkansas politician about whom scurrilous rumors haven't circulated. For most folks, evaluating this avalanche of smut is simple: Your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are guilty.

Even so, it would have made a buzzard gag, as Huck Finn might put it, to witness the press' role in publicizing Clinton-hater Cliff Jackson's production of Troopergate last winter. It has become customary in advanced circles to badmouth David Brock and The American Spectator for "trivializing the professional efforts of the Los Angeles Times and CNN," as Frank Rich put it in The New York Times.

But at least the Spectator version gave us the whole carcass--hide, hair, and hoofs--instead of the more sanitized versions that appeared elsewhere. As such, it's indispensable to the connoisseur of Arkansas political mischief. Making small pretense of objectivity, Brock passes on every accusation troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry could dream up. Even the troopers' inability to affix a single date and time to any of the president's alleged indiscretions--thus making it impossible for him to defend himself, as any rookie cop would understand--failed to faze the national reporters.

It took the Little Rock bureau of the Associated Press, by contrast, about 24 hours to learn that in 1990 Patterson and Perry had wrapped a patrol car around a tree while drank, allegedly lied to their superiors, then swore to a completely different version for personal gain in a civil lawsuit. Next it turned out that visitors' logs which the two troopers alleged Hillary ordered destroyed---ostensibly to hide Gennifer Flowers' visits--never in fact existed.

No sooner had the trooper farce played itself out than the TV talk-show pundits regretted its tawdriness but predicted that Whitewater would really bring the president woe. Republics smelled blood, somebody tacked on the dreaded "-gate" suffix, and business was soon booming again at the Capital Hotel bar.

Poor Arkansas. Long rankled by its hillbilly caricature, many Arkansans had dared hope the Clinton presidency would change things. But then here come reporters from places like New Jersey, New York, and Maryland--those paragons of clean government--to portray the whole state as a kind of ethical Dogpatch.

On what evidence? Well, 15 years ago the Clintons went into a real estate deal with a man who later bought an S&L, succumbed to manic-depressive illness, and ran it into the ground. In the process, the Whitewater land development deal went belly-up. And maybe S&L operator Jim McDougal illegally funneled $15,000 into Clinton's 1984 campaign fund. He certainly had the motive and the opportunity, as the cops say. So far nobody's shown what an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette sportswriter once called "a chinchilla of evidence" that the deed was done, much less that the Clintons knew about it.

To be sure, the White House handling of Whitewater has done much to invite trouble. Hillary Clinton should never have represented Madison before Arkansas regulators appointed by her husband, and critics who see it as symptomatic of a kind of moral arrogance are probably right. Of course, much of the trouble the Clintons are now experiencing--including charges of cronyism among the Rose Law Firm alumni who populate the administration--would have been avoided if Hillary had long ago decided not to practice the well-heeled corporate law that allowed her cachet to be used by Rose to attract business with the implication of access to the governor. And in Washington, the appearance of a Whitewater coverup--including removing files from Vincent Foster's office on the night of his suicide and the meetings between White House aides and Roger Altman, then the acting head of the Resolution Trust Corporation--was dumb, guaranteeing weeks of hostile coverage.