Publisher's cheeky tell-all reveals greedy motivation

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer

Trash for right-wing cash," as the president's aides alliteratively screech, or a reasonably accurate if amateurish portrait of the reckless nature of the Clintons' "Arkansas-on-the-Potomac" regime? No doubt Regnery, the publisher of retired FBI agent Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access, is mighty pleased with itself. After all, the book is at the center of an election-year furor and at the top of the best-seller lists.

In Unlimited Access, Aldrich makes some explosive charges. The heart of the book concerns gross security breaches in the Clinton White House which the author, special agent at the White House for five years, observed firsthand. Hundreds of staffers had tainted personal histories involving drug use and credit problems, and in an effort to ensure that they continue to serve the administration, White House officials ignored the established clearance system observed by every president since Lyndon Johnson. "We were being asked to look the other way when we found serious character issues that would previously have meant immediate dismissal," writes Aldrich.

Unfortunately, Unlimited Access goes further: Aldrich makes a major uncorroborated claim about the president slipping out of the White House for "frequent" visits to a hotel room rented by a woman who "may be a celebrity." The allegation has helped sell the book. The signs are that Regnery demanded its inclusion as well as other tabloid material.

The cost has been great -- for Aldrich in terms of his credibility and also for the country. Americans have been denied an opportunity to read a straightforward account of the security mess at the White House, one free of salacious tittle-tattle and idiosyncratic and obsessive observations about the slovenliness of Clinton aides.

By including in Unlimited Access the unsubstantiated rumor about Clinton's clandestine nocturnal visits, Aldrich provided the president's aides with the opening they needed for the offensive. The author told Insight he had no way of knowing that the White House would use the Marriott anecdote to cast doubt on the rest of the book. Aldrich may have been naive, but Regnery should have had the foresight to realize the inevitable. After all, rumors of presidential trysts have been circulating around Washington for years without any publication leveling charges. (There was a time you couldn't go to the J.W. Marriott hotel in downtown Washington without tripping over suspicious-looking tabloid reporters clearly on the lookout for a disguised president.) The quick response of the White House proved that the caution shown by newspapers and magazines was well-placed.

But maybe that is what Regnery had in mind, planning all along to sacrifice their author to Mammon. Friends of Aldrich say he was pressed to report the salacious: The publishing house told him no one would want to read a book about the collapse of the security clearance system at the White House. He resisted as best he could.

Regnery let Aldrich down in other ways as well -- ways that would have helped make the 222-page Unlimited Access seem more authoritative. Until this book, Aldrich had written little that was intended for publication. He had submitted some articles to boating magazines and had touted ideas for books on violent crime to various publishers. By failing to tutor him, Regnery let Aldrich fall into the trap of drawing on his FBI background, writing a narrative that mixes the serious with the trivial. Grave national-security issues -- presidential aides with spotted personal histories and no FBI clearance had access to classified documents -- sit oddly with Aldrich's starched-shirt horror at the inappropriate fashion sense of certain Clinton aides.

No one doubts that the thirtysome-things of the Clinton White House are different in mores from the traditional types of the Bush administration. Such has been written about before and noted far and wide, here and overseas. But it doesn't really matter, not when dealing with a grave breakdown in White House security -- a breakdown, according to Aldrich, sanctioned by senior aides.

Aldrich admits that he took no notes and made no tape recordings of conversations with Clinton aides. Yet, Unlimited Access is full of direct quotations. Why are they there? Either the conversations should have been summarized or paraphrased, or a disclaimer should have been printed in the front of the book indicating that these were remembered exchanges that approximated dialogue. At any rate, the "quotations" are frightfully stilted. Could not some editor have polished them a bit?

Aldrich himself is prepared to speak only obliquely about Regnery. "I've heard that the bigger publishing houses are no better," he comments guardedly. "I've been told that writers always walk away feeling ticked off."

But for all the criticisms, Aldrich does provide some significant new information about what was happening in the Clintons' White House. There is plenty in the book for congressional follow-up. He fleshes out in detail the problems he faced in trying to do his job. This is the inside story of what the General Accounting Office established: That hundreds of aides were running around without security clearances. His travelgate chapter will catch the eye of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.