Fool for Bill
York, Byron
"Fool for Bill" Fool for Bill GENE LYONS SAYS THE PRESS IS DEAD WRONG ABOUT THE CLINTONS AND WHITEWATER. AND HE'S NOT ABOUT TO LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF HIS STORY. BY BYRON YORK Scene One Gene Lyons was...
...Bassett is so f-ing important, if we f- this up, we're done," Ickes told fellow members of the Whitewater Response Team...
...The time had come for Emperor Newtie, sleeper spy, to push the self-destruct button...
...In fact, the Times had never put either the tryst story or anything else about Aldrich on the front page...
...A few months later, he expanded his argument-and attracted much more attentionwith a long article for Harper's entitled "Fool for Scandal: How the New York Times Got Whitewater Wrong...
...Just keep pointing your finger and accusing everybody else of `moral bankruptcy...
...Clinton failed to make the payments, and in 1983 the FDIC ordered Madison Bank to limit its issuance of loans of the type extended to Mrs...
...He ignored it...
...Lyons also charged that Stewart had misread the basic facts of Whitewater...
...The Post story, "White House Assails 'Made-Up' Book...
...Lyons maintains that the scandals are part of "a planned, coordinated smear campaign" by right-wing organizations such as Floyd Brown's Citizens United, Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, The American Spectator, and televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson...
...Appearing with a few sympathetic journalists-among them Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review, Tom Hamburger of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and John Camp of CNN-Lyons warmed to the occasion 38 October 199 6 • The American Spectator Blood Sport, in fact, does discuss the Pillsbury report on page 145...
...In 1978] Jim McDougal wasn't involved in the banking and S&L businesses at all," he wrote...
...They [Pillsbury] were doing it from a different perspective than what we're doing," Starr wrote in a letter reported by the New York Times...
...The book is filled with mistakes, he claimed, like this one about Susan McDougal: In Blood Sport, Susan [McDougal] becomes a little lost lamb...
...The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist had been watching the Senate Whitewater Committee hearings, but when he read about them in the New York Times, he was appalled by the paper's treatment of Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...36 October r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator Lyons never fails to contend that the New York `limes originally got the Whitewater story wrong...
...But a close reading of Lyons's work reveals that he uses precisely the same tactic in his quest to absolve the first family...
...Originally from New Jersey, Lyons has a Ph.D...
...When Bill Clinton first did business with him, Jim McDougal was already known as a slick operator...
...Lyons apparently neglected to read the following note on page 430 of Stewart's book: At the same time [as she faced Whitewater charges], Susan faces California state charges of embezzlement of nearly $200,000 stemming from her work as a financial manager for orchestra conduc tor Zubin Mehta...
...In a June 7,1995 column about Starr and Arkansas' then-governor Jim Guy Tucker, Lyons crowed, "Starr's got mud on his face again...
...the road is actually narrow and steep...
...Veniste...
...Stewart shouldn't feel too singled-out in Lyons's tiny-detail attack...
...People forget...
...When asked about his comments on Stewart, Lyons says, "I don't know James Stewart, so I can't say much about him...
...The charge leaves reporters dumbfounded...
...And naturally, they do not appear anywhere in Lyons's piece...
...The real story, he argued, is told not in Blood Sport but in a report made for the Resolution Trust Corporation by the law firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro-a report that Lyons contends fully exonerates the Clintons: [A]nybody who's read the Pillsbury Report (much of which has been on the public record since August 1995) knows that Stewart's version is, as people say in Arkansas, as crooked as a snake...
...But his words-or any reference to Ickes at all, for that matter-do not appear in Lyons's "reporting" on Schaffer...
...Lyons denounced the book as "one of the most incompetently reported, mendaciously narrated books dealing with a major American celebrity, much less the President and the First Lady, in a generation...
...Stewart had the Pillsbury Report at his fingertips months before his book was published...
...The rest of the journalistic pack, Lyons says, just went along for the ride...
...The Great Jeff Gerth Con Job...
...In some instances, the report concludes that wrongdoing might have occurred, but that it would cost too much to attempt to recover the losses involved...
...There was a baldfaced lie in there," Labaton says...
...Trout," he writes in a remarkable turn of phrase, "are the whole point of Whitewater...
...A failed history professor-he was denied tenure at Peckerwood State, or some school in Georgia-Newt has plotted and schemed his way to the top of the GOP...
...A conservative "revolution," returning the nation to "Hoovernomics" and the moral guidance of Fundamentalist divines who preached the flat-earth doctrine until they learned about satellite TV, seemed at hand...
...The office was in an old YWCA...
...We would not agree with all their conclusions...
...To call the Times' coverage 'prosecutorially biased' would be an understatement," Lyons wrote on May 29...
...It was in no way meant to be a definitive analysis of possible criminal activity...
...Harper's apparently liked Lyons's expose so much that it sponsored an October 1994 symposium at the National Press Club to promote it...
...when you use real characters and make up a fictive story, real people get hurt...
...While continuing his attacks on Gerth, he broadened his scope to include Labaton and Stewart...
...Given that high-minded concern, it is perhaps appropriate to bring up one final Gene Lyons column, one that has nothing to do with Whitewater...
...He reports just those details that support his position...
...Take his assault on James Stewart...
...But his error didn't stop him from launching another bitter attack on the independent counsel...
...Too many pesky details, I guess...
...Press Dilemma: Fact or Fiction...
...I did visit [Whitewater]," he wrote to Harper's editors, "traveling over Route rot to get there before turning onto [as he called it in Blood Sport] `a pretty rugged' road for the last mile...
...The $20,000 down payment was also borrowed, although the Clintons and McDougals never told Citizen's Bank that they had no equity in the deal...
...Details, details...
...Lyons says that's nonsense, because everybody knows the White River is a marvelous trout stream...
...In violation of the basic concept of "balance" taught in journalism 1o1, not a single question asked by minority counsel Richard Ben-Veniste, nor, to my knowledge, a solitary answer given by a witness in response to a Democratic query, found its way into the newspaper...
...one can imagine Newt appealing to his shadowy SDS "handlers...
...Lyons showed that he was willing to attack anyone who dared criticize them...
...The message: I know Arkansas, and they don't...
...Far from being the result of muckraking reporting by a vigorous and independent press, what "the Clinton scandals" amount to is possibly the most politically charged case of journalistic malpractice in recent American history...
...Nor does he mention that the Clintons have had to amend their income tax returns for five different years in light of Whitewater revelations, paying more than $20,000 in back taxes and penalties for their pattern of taking improper deductions and under-reporting income...
...It wouldn't be until five years laterby which time the Whitewater investment was already moribund-that he bought a controlling interest in Madison Guaranty...
...Stewart neglects to point out that even as she was standing trial in Little Rock last May on charges of fraud, she also faced an accusation of having stolen $150,000 from her California employer, symphony conductor Zubin Mehta...
...Lyons pointed once again to the New York Times-this time to its coverage of sensational charges made about the Clinton White House by a former FBI agent: Gossip, rumors, and unattributed slanders that would until recently have been confined to the fringe press-if published at allappear today in the news columns of the New York Times...
...Such details hardly support Lyons's implication that the Whitewater deal involved none of the financial shenanigans usually associated with S&L crooks...
...That fear was one of the main topics at a January 1994 meeting in the White House, as administration war-roomers brainstormed on how to contain the scandal...
...Since then, his work has appeared in Harper's, the Nation, and Texas Monthly, among other places...
...Civility After all his Whitewater battles, Gene Lyons says he is tired of politics...
...Attack Man Gene Lyons is more than just wrong...
...And Stewart, like Labaton before him, could only express frustration with Lyons's incorrect corrections...
...And page 431...
...Not true, said Lyons...
...Labaton called top editors at the Democrat-Gazette, and the paper issued a correction the next day...
...Tolerance, civility and reasoned discourse," he wrote in January of this year, "have grown increasingly difficult in our society...
...In 198o-when the Whitewater venture was still very much alive-McDougal bought the Bank of Kingston and changed 39 The American Spectator . October 19 9 6 "Trout," he writes in a remarkable turn of phrase, "are the whole point of Whitewater...
...Lyons once blasted a New Republic article that stated that the Rose Law Firm's offices in Little Rock were located in an old YMCA...
...41 The American Spectator • October r 9 9 6...
...Fast forward to 1995...
...Before long, Lyons was accusing the national press of creating the Whitewater scandal by willfully ignoring evidence that proved the Clintons did nothing wrong...
...We do have some facts that they apparently did not have...
...My ambition is to find something else to write about...
...For example, even though he has written thousands of words in an attempt to prove that former Arkansas Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer did no political favors for the Clintons, he ignores the fact that the president's top advisers were deeply worried she might finger Clinton if she talked to the press about Whitewater...
...The Clintons and the McDougals borrowed a total of $182,611 from the Citizen's Bank of Flippin and Union National Bank in Little Rock...
...I don't basically do politics," he declares, "and my fervent ambition, once this book is over, is to find something else to write about...
...Labaton pauses...
...Clinton...
...Now Lyons and Harper's have collected his work into a book of his own, entitled Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater...
...In the opening pages, Lyons extends his "Whitewater doesn't exist" thesis to cover all the Clinton scandals: Almost everything you may think you know about Bill and Hillary Clinton, the presidential libido, and the couple's allegedly seamy business dealings back in darkest Arkansas-from Gennifer Flowers to the entire Whitewater affair-rests on "facts" that are somewhere between highly dubious and demonstrably false...
...rising star in the State of Arkansas...
...It happened that Stephen Labaton was in Little Rock the day Lyons's column appeared-and he was more than a little surprised to read about himself in the paper...
...anytime he attacks Stewart on the book's content, he also throws in a few sour references to the author himself, whom Lyons has never met...
...Nobody would pay much attention if he were simply a well-meaning but misguided shill for Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...Lyons says it's actually a smaller road that goes there...
...Meanwhile," Lyons wrote, "Tucker's grit is earning him respect among many who figured he was history...
...Stewart added that he wrote in three different places that fishing is popular in the area...
...By June, he was calling Stewart "a hack with an ax to grind...
...Lyons wrote in March...
...Lyons calls it "far and away the most comprehensive and reliable account of what actually happened (and didn't) in virtually all aspects of the Whitewater matter...
...Trying to explain their various missteps, he came up with the fantasy that perhaps Gingrich had been a secret member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society back in the 196o's-and remained in the organization as a spy even as he appeared to lead the conservative revolution...
...McDougal loaned Clinton the rest...
...wrong...
...Well, shut my mouth," Lyons wrote in his next column...
...According to notes taken by then-White House communications director Mark Gearan, deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes expressed great concern about whether Bassett's story would support the White House's version of events...
...Lyons never fails to include his contention that the New York Times reporter who originally reported on the Whitewater Development Corporation not only got the story completely wrong, he also made up some of his allegations out of whole cloth...
...A puritanical credulousness appears to have replaced skepticism among many contemporary journalists," he wrote, charging that the watchdogs in the press will believe almost any accusation of corruption these days, no matter how scant the evidence...
...Pulitzer Prize," Lyons wrote, while noting at another time that his own work was "like a photo negative of Blood Sport, the difference being I check facts...
...40 October r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator "I don't do politics," Lyons declares...
...Scene Three In the July 1996 Harper's, Lyons turned his attention to James Stewart's Whitewater best-seller Blood Sport...
...He loaned $30,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton for the construction of the model home which was intended to boost sales of Whitewater lots...
...For example, in his analysis of Gerth's first Whitewater story, Lyons claims the mistakes started with the headline: "Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real-Estate Venture...
...Like many liberal columnists, Lyons believes there is a disturbing coarseness in American life-a life dominated by a conservative Congress, right-wing radio hosts, and an unprincipled press...
...in English from the University of Virginia and taught for several years before leaving academics in 1976 to become a freelance writer...
...He's obsessed with this stuff," says Stephen Labaton...
...in his scenario the right-wing plotters are joined by an unlikely group of co-conspirators that includes the reporters and editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...Nobody respects a politician who looks like he married his Mom," they must have answered...
...those that contradict his argument are nowhere to be found...
...BY BYRON YORK Scene One Gene Lyons was not happy...
...For a while you couldn't turn on a TV talk show without seeing Mr...
...And page 431...
...Lyons reviewed books for Newsweek for many years until he left the magazine in the 198o's to write a book, Widow's Web, which told the story of a sensational Arkansas murder case...
...Today Lyons works out of his Little Rock home, where he writes his once-a-week column for the Democrat-Gazette and also reviews books for Entertainment Weekly magazine...
...But Lyons's objections to Blood Sport are not limited to the book itself...
...Lyons is not content to criticize Blood Sport (wrongly) about substantive matters like the Pillsbury Report and Susan McDougal's legal troubles...
...and I had trouble sleeping that night...
...Its terms were even better: no money down...
...Lyons] said he had done meticulous research and combed the record very carefully and found that I never once quoted a Democrat or Richard Ben...
...But he defends his criticisms, saying, "the all-knowing tone in the book was basically phony...
...But a closer look reveals that Lyons's defense fails to mention the financial trickery that was part of Whitewater from the very beginning...
...By July 1978, Clinton had sold the land for $19,985, making a 75 percent profit...
...Stewart was reduced to defending himself on minutiae...
...its name to Madison Bank and Trust...
...The typical Lyons screed begins with an expression of the resentment he feels toward those who portray the state as a dark, corrupt backwater (although from New Jersey, Lyons has lived in Arkansas for more than twenty years...
...one bank official told the committee there was "no documentation at all" for the loan...
...His first piece on the Clinton scandals appeared in April 1994, when he published "The Great Whitewater Snipe Hunt" in the liberal Washington Monthly magazine...
...Scene Two Not long after, writing this time in the New York Review of Books, Lyons again denounced scandal-crazed reporters...
...Clinton himself lobbied Union National for the money, and former bank official Don Denton told the Senate committee that his bosses told him to make the loan because Clinton was an "up and coming political...
...Details, details...
...The transaction was, at the very least, quite irregular...
...Gingrich was worried about losing his conservative cover, Lyons theorized, when he "[dumped his] first wife -the matronly figure whom he informed of his divorce plans while she was hospitalized after cancer surgery...
...Mea No Culpa For someone who has been wrong as often as he has, Gene Lyons is not a terribly apologetic man...
...Then he throws in a bit of down-home, Andy Taylor contempt for those smart-aleck, big-city journalists who couldn't tell you the county seat of Marion county if their life depended on it...
...Is best-selling author James Stewart more dumb or more dishonest...
...was published on June 29 and hardly endorsed Aldrich's allegations...
...And his mood wasn't improved when the publicity barrage that accompanied Blood Sport put Stewart in the media spotlight...
...He could prove it, he said, because he had been taking notes: In my obsessive way, your humble, obedient servant here kept score...
...What really sets Lyons apart is his scorched-earth campaign to destroy the credibility of anyone who criticizes the president and first lady...
...See "Blood Spin," by James Ring Adams (TAS, May 1996...
...And by the way, he continued, "I also saw numerous signs along the roads advertising white water rafting expeditions...
...The reason, according to Lyons, is simple: he has actually read the documents of the case and knows they amount to nothing...
...One possibility might be a topic popular with supporters of the Clintons: the decline of civility in contemporary society...
...But he adds, "If that stings, it was meant to...
...On his Janet Cooke reference to Jeff Gerth, Lyons concedes that "it was hyperbolic...
...That very evening, Tucker was indicted on three felony counts...
...Consider the front page treatment that paper recently gave charges by an embittered former FBI agent, Gary Aldrich, that President Clinton-perhaps disguised in Groucho Marx glasses, nose, and mustache-has taken to slipping out of the White House for post-midnight nookie at the Washington Marriott...
...That article established him as more than a defender of the Clintons...
...Lyons invariably depicts himself as perhaps the only journalist in America who really understands Whitewater...
...The evidence mounts steadily for the latter...
...And that is tolerance, civility, and reasoned discourseGene Lyons style...
...After Clinton-who was at that time Attorney General of Arkansasmade a few payments of $155 each, the balance of the loan was paid off with a $9,000 payment in November 1977...
...Blood Sport, in fact, does discuss the Pillsbury report on page 145...
...But Lyons doesn't stop there...
...He also bashes the book on its most trivial details in an attempt to show that nothing in Blood Sport can be believed.' For example, Lyons wrote that Stewart-who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the Wall Street Journal-described the Whitewater property so inaccurately that he could not possibly have visited the site...
...You're a seer one minute, a simpleton the next...
...Senate investigators were unable to determine the source of that lumpsum payment...
...T]hese allegations of error on my part," he wrote in an angry letter to Harper's, "turn out to be errors on his...
...Stewart says rafting is the big attraction in the area...
...Lyons pointed out that James McDougal wasn't an S&L operator when the Clintons went into business with him...
...Between July 1995 and January 1996, there was a stretch of almost six months, covering dozens of hearings and scores of witnesses, in which Stephen Labaton, the Times' ace reporter at the Whitewater hearings, failed to quote a single Democrat...
...Gerth's work was even worse than Cooke's, Lyons said, "because when you simply invent a fictive character, nobody gets hurt...
...He says he wrote the column while in the middle of working on his book, and adds, "I have nothing to say for it, except that I was tired and made a ridiculous error...
...Like dozens of other examples Lyons had cited in recent months, Labaton's bias proved that the press-the Times, the Washington Post, the networks, the entire journalism establishment-was hopelessly prejudiced against the Clintons...
...On his attack on Stephen Labaton-which prompted the correction in the Democrat-Gazette -Lyons takes a different tone...
...Working out of his hotel room, Labaton did a quick Nexis search that revealed at least eleven articles in which he had quoted Democrats, including Ben-Veniste...
...And page 457• by mounting his most pointed attack to date on Jeff Gerth and the Times...
...This is not to suggest that Blood Sport does not have flaws...
...Stewart wrote that the highway went to the Whitewater property...
...Blood Sport depicts Arkansas Highway 1o1 as wide and well-paved, which Lyons says is all...
...That same year, the Clintons entered into the Whitewater deal...
...And while Lyons calls the report the last word on Whitewater, independent counsel Kenneth Starr disagrees...
...He wouldn't want the facts to get in the way of writing his conclusions...
...Lyons attempted to correct himself in a later issue of the New York Review, saying the front-page story had actually appeared in the Washington Post on July 1. But even that was wrong...
...By that time, McDougal had purchased Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, and he used funds from the S&L to pay some of Whitewater's debts...
...He pointed to rumors that Starr would indict Tucker, but said it was becoming clear that the independent counsel just didn't have the evidence to make it happen...
...Mr...
...Bill's Best Boy Gene Lyons is the nation's most dogged defender of Bill and Hillary Clinton-at least among those who are not directly on the First Couple's payroll...
...That article featured several rhetorical strategies that have since become stock devices in Lyons's anti-Whitewater crusade: Poor Little Arkansas...
...That study, however, was undertaken solely to help the government determine the cost-effectiveness of pursuing the Madison investigation...
...Before long, Lyons had joined the ranks of Whitewater talking heads on TV and radio...
...And page 457...
...So he went to the SDS for help: "But what will people say...
...The role of the New York Times and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Washington Post in creating and sustaining the Whitewater hoax can hardly be overstated," Lyons writes...
...The paper mentioned the book on its inside pages only, and even there did not report Aldrich's allegations of late-night assignations...
...In his new book, however, Lyons repeats the essence of his accusation-and he has not offered any explanation to Labaton himself...
...It's the worst mistake of my career as a journalist," he says...
...He has this Oliver Stone view of Whitewater, that there's this grand conspiracy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Jim Stewart...
...Gene Knows Best...
...And in June of this year, after the guilty verdicts came down-and Tucker was indeed history-Lyons could only lament that the outcome of the trial was "infinitely depressing...
...BYRON YORK is an investigative writer for TAS...
...According to the recently released final report of the Senate Whitewater Committee, Clinton bought 20 acres of land from McDougal's company in January 1977...
...Sins of Omission Lyons has accused Jeff Gerth of employing "the art of tactical omission to insinuate all manner of sin and skulduggery" in his description of the Clintons' actions in Whitewater...
...The purchase price was $11,400, and the terms were nice: McDougal asked Clinton to put down $400, "if you have it to spare...
...It's a technique that gives Lyons's work a facade of authority with readers not familiar with the whole story of Whitewater...
...And he says he is constantly surprised at the thinness of journalists' skins, and as far as Gerth is concerned, "I just don't understand why he's such a crybaby about it...
...Lyons's determination to believe just the sources he wants to believe has at times led him into embarrassing blunders...
...Though Lyons is correct to say that McDougal was not yet an S&L crook when the Clintons first joined up with him, his larger point seems to be that the Times was wrong to suggest the Clintons benefited from the crooked lending and financial practices that came to characterize the S&L scandal of the 198o's...
...And despite his self-proclaimed expertise on Whitewater, Lyons is remarkably weak on the so-called "Washington Phase" of the scandal...
...Pillsbury Politics Even as he ignores reams of material, Lyons insists that the Pillsbury Report-the multi-volume study commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) in its investigation of the Madison case-clears the president and first lady of all allegations of wrongdoing...
...He compared Gerth's work to that of disgraced former Washington Post writer Janet Cooke, who made up the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict on the streets of Washington, D.C...
...Not one Democratic senator-not Paul Sarbanes, not Chris Dodd, not Barbara Boxer-had a word to say at the hearings that the Times found worthy of recording...
...Reporters were so bent on finding some sort of presidential scandal, he argued, that they didn't search out the facts...
...Late last year he turned his attention to the Republican House of Representatives and Speaker Newt Gingrich...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
