The real blood sport: the Whitewater scandal machine - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by Amy Waldman

In fact, it's Kenneth Staff--who has invaded Little Rock with 20 prosecutors and 50 IRS and FBI agents--who has the unlimited resources of the U.S. government at his disposal. Conservatives who vociferously oppose big government have been conspicuously silent on the independent counsel's vast reach and resources, and the way the federal government's power has been brought to bear on the people of Arkansas. That issue was implicitly raised in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, who documented the independent counsel's attempts to secure cooperation from potential witnesses by threatening them with prosecution.

With stories like Mayer's, the press coverage of the Whitewater investigation has begun to turn; The New York Times has clearly scaled down its Whitewater coverage recently, and Mayer's story, among others, prompted the Times's editorial page to call for Starr's resignation. What's remarkable, though, is that of all the revelations about Starr that the editorial cited, not one had been uncovered by the Times (or The Washington Post, which has also continued to make Whitewater a front-page story). Information about Staff's extensive private legal work--for clients ranging from the Republican National Committee to the ultra-conservative Bradley Foundation to Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.--was first reported by The Washington Times's Frank Murray last September (proof that the "machine" is not a monolith). It took The Washington Post and The New York Times six months even to mention Starr's conflicts. The Post and Times have yet to report an intriguing chain of events first noted by the Associated Press (and detailed in the Monthly's March issue): Sen. Lauch Faircloth, an avid Clinton opponent, and Judge David Sentelle lunched; Sentelle replaced Robert Fiske with Starr, Faircloth hired Sentelle's wife.

Similarly, it was neither the Times nor the Post, but Joe Conasan and Murray Waas in The Nation, who broke the story about a much more serious Starr conflict: his investigation of top RTC officials even as they were suing his law firm, Kirkland Ellis, for doing legal work for a failed savings and loan. The Times at least editorialized against it; at the time this issue went to press, the Post had made only an obscure reference to it in a larger story about Starr.

Indeed, almost all of the, revelations about the wizards behind the curtain of the scandal machine have come from The Washington Times, The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Review of Books, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Times, and The Washington Monthly. None of this has come from opinion-making papers like the Times and Post. The mainstream national press seems to have misplaced its skepticism about the Clintons' opponents, perhaps because it's been so extraordinarily skeptical about the Clintons themselves. (Republican staffers seemed dumbstruck when I asked about the timing of the hearings and about communication between D'Amato and Staff, which suggests that they hadn't encountered those questions before.