Editorials / Who's Afraid of L.D. Brown?/ Mena Spirited
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS Who's Afraid of L.D. Brown? by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. H arper's magazine held a kind of show trial the other day at the National Press Club. The burden of the apparat's labored efforts...
...Now the charges became lurid...
...Brown has not yet been broadcast, though it was ready about the time Kendall flew to New York, what have the Clintonites been saying about Brown that has kept the piece off the air...
...The burden of the apparat's labored efforts was that the New York Times's Jeff Gerth gravely exaggerated the Clintons' wrongdoing in his pioneering reportage of their shaky Whitewater Development partnership with James C. McDougal of the failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan...
...Bearing in mind that the Times is famously sympathetic to the Democratic Party, one has to wonder why it would be turning on a Democratic president with charges that, according to Harper's, are almost fabrications...
...in government jobs, and, as raised in the Economist magazine, dealings in illicit drugs...
...The next charge was that in the mid-1980s Brown flunked a CIA exam...
...My spies report that the tireless George Stephanopoulos recently was hounding the Washington Post to treat a news story unflattering to the president just so...
...The October 31 issue of Time magazine reports that "David Kendall, Bill Clinton's private lawyer, has been working very, very hard to keep Whitewater out of the headlines...
...Kendall is not the only one putting pressure on the media...
...Finally, the press corps might begin to wonder why Bill Clinton is so alarmed about the testimony of L.D...
...ABC went to Brown's boss, Colonel Tommy Goodwin, retired director of the Arkansas state police, and was told the charge was false...
...It is widely known that in 1993, when Clinton got word that troopers from hissecurity detail were talking to the press, he picked up a White House telephone and called trooper Danny Ferguson...
...And why after so many of the false charges against Brown have been refuted is ABC still reluctant to broadcast its story on Brown...
...The last one suggests that Clinton has actually sent aides back into Brown's CIA personnel file for dirt on him...
...Now that he has put his lawyer up to making false allegations against trooper Brown, Washington ought to be equally aroused...
...What does he think Brown might say...
...On Sunday, October 16, he flew from Washington to New York City to persuade ABC News not to air a piece about Arkansas state trooper L. D. Brown, who says he has given information to Whitewater investigators that may help substantiate a former Arkansas municipal judge's claim that Clinton pressured him into making afraudulent small-business loan...
...ABC was asked to look into the death of Brown's mother, the implication being that Brown might have had a hand in it...
...One of the charges raised by the Clintons' defenders at the Harper's show trial, and by other Clinton apologists in and out of the administration, is that "the press is out to get" Bill Clinton because he is doing so many progressive things...
...Well, we have had other progressive Democratic presidents, and they never found themselves entoiled in the vast web of scandals that have been discovered by the press this past year...
...All Washington was amazed that he made that call...
...12 The American Spectator December 1994 ABC discovered that the mother died in a domestic firearms accident twenty-three years before, when Brown was a boy...
...And of course Betsey Wright, Clinton's loyal henchperson, is always on the prowl to see that unfavorable news stories are spiked and that those who claim to have knowledge of the Clintons' errancies are maligned...
...As the ABC News story on L.D...
...One thing I am fairly confident of is that the answer to these questions and to the questions raised by Jeff Gerth will all come out, and soon...
...Joycelyn Elders...
...Brown is an experienced police officer, one of the best state troopers in Arkansas, and the possessor of a file abundant with superlative commendations, some from Governor Bill Clinton, one from Dr...
...This would not be the first time that Bill Clinton got involved in attempts to muzzle the press or shape news stories...
...Brown produced letters demonstrating that he was nominated to a CIA position and obviously had done well on all CIA examinations...
...All commissioned officers had to take the test, which Goodwin confirmed Brown passed easily...
...Of course, these last two charges had to come from none other than Brown's erstwhile boss, who knew him well back in the 1980s—Bill Clinton...
...Then ABC was told by Kendall that Brown failed a psychological test...
...Actually Harper's nit-picking over Gerth's work does nothing to discredit Gerth or his reporting...
...0 14 The American Spectator December 1994...
...The evidence that he has amassed clearly reveals very questionable dealings by the Clintons and the McDougals...
...Once again 1 resort to my spies...
...They tell me that Betsey Wright told ABC that Brown is a "pathological liar...
...Actually, it is not the press that is out to get the Clintons but the Clintons who are out to control the press...
...At least Republican administrations have not faced all these allegations at once...
...ABC found that the charge was false...
...For that matter, even the hellish Republicans have not faced allegations of campaign finance violations, bank fraud, real estate fraud, obstruction of justice, trafficking Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
