Webb's Dirty Lingerie
Adams, James Ring
Webb's Di Lingerie more than expected in his affecting new memoir--especially about free-spirited times with Vince and Hillary at the Rose Law Firm. It would make a swell French movie. BY...
...The Firm and Its Clients Hubbell portrays his troika as dissidents to the materialistic tone set by the firm's Securities Section and its leader, Joe Giroir...
...The "Iraq-gate" report was written by John Hogan, one of Attorney General Reno's main advisers on the campaign finance non-investigation, and it showed the same reliance on legalism to dodge the interesting questions...
...The ultimate purchasers of the stock were the Riadys and a corporation controlled by "Mr...
...we asked...
...Since Kennedy later One unanswered became associate White House counsel before taking heat for the Travel Office fias question is why co, he was widely identified as the "fourth horseman" of the Vince-Webb-Hillary Hubbell gave up a group...
...Already the Rose firm's biggest earner, Giroir pushed through The American Spectator • February 1998 a reorganization that split In private it seems up fees only within the division of the firm that earned them...
...At the Senate Whitewater hearings, he was asked about his contact with San Francisco private eye Jack Paladino, the official damper of "Bimbo eruptions...
...BY JAMES RING ADAMS Bill's old golfing partner reveals much W ebb Hubbell by his own account is one of the biggest liars in Washington...
...He answered to a severe internal taskmaster, driving his secretaries to distraction with his constant corrections and impossibly detailed expense accounts...
...Hubbell, along with Rose partner Allen Bird, were key in sweeping the BBS debacle under the rug...
...The book has many gaps, some glaring, some subtle, but almost all of interest to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr...
...Foster, he writes, impressed his male colleagues by his serious demeanor and meticulous work...
...He blames Ward for saddling him with a money-losing warehouse, requiring monthly mortgagepayments to Ward, which started his own financial problems...
...And Hubbell's memoir certainly fails to dispel the impression, popular in Little Rock, that this self-consciously prestigious outfit was the model for John Grisham's portrait of corruption in The Firm...
...The three were the core of the firm's Litigation Section...
...There was no decision," Hubbell writes...
...But, as Hubbell indicates, this pipeline originated at Worthen and the Rose firm in the mid-eighties...
...The call in question, explained Hubbell, concerned "genealogical research...
...Hubbell writes not only about himself, but about his two closest friends and law partners, Vincent Foster and Hillary Rodham Clinton, giving the first inside glimpse of the human pathos behind their careers...
...In college, for instance, a tackle in the first game of his senior year seriously injured his knee...
...The truth, I believe is there is nothing we could have done...
...He was further drained by his work on a lawsuit on behalf of his father-in-law's parking meter company, POM...
...Much has been made of Hillary's sacrifice in following Bill to a less than accepting Arkansas, but the college town setting of Fayetteville must have seemed like a cakewalk compared to the smug double standards of Rose...
...Giroir had structured an elaborate house of cards involving a $19 million letter of credit from MBank of Dallas (formerly Mercantile Bank, with its own rich history of troubled loans to major Democratic Party fundraisers...
...But the Stephens family and the Indonesians did more than rescue Worthen...
...Hillary told Webb years later "that the years 198788 were the two hardest years of her life—and that included the nasty year of the presidential campaign...
...He was suffering from a disease called depression...
...Hubbell doesn't need Machiavelli to know that the appearance of frankness is the best way to dissemble...
...The insurance man, who provided coverage for the father's construction projects, replied, "But Webster, if young Webb goes to Tennessee, how are you going to get bonded...
...Since both of Hubbell's homes have made the untruth into an art form, and the genre of autobiography is by its nature selective and self-serving, his book calls out for an extremely cautious reading...
...During the Senate Whitewater hearings, he stated that he had recused himself from the case, without revealing the nature of the conflict...
...Although a June 17 editorial entitled "Who Is Vincent Foster...
...Perhaps Vince Foster's tragedy might have been averted if he and his critics had had more chance to take each other's measure...
...The Indonesians in short saved Bill Clinton's political career...
...Bill Kennedy, he said, was a protégé of Giroir position that suited and supposedly Joe's agent in keeping control of the firm...
...According to Hubbell, senior partner C. Joseph Giroir, Jr...
...Even the book's cover photo montage, perhaps with subtle irony, presents a cheesy illusion...
...when he lost the case, Rose was saddled with further hundreds of thousands in expenses...
...Late the previous week, Worthen had placed $52 million of Arkansas state pension funds in a New Jersey government securities firm named Bevill, Bresler and Schulman (BBS), which had gone bankrupt on Easter weekend...
...Turning Points During this turmoil, Hubbell says he began paying his personal credit cards from the Rose expense fund...
...Bill and Hillary did their personal investing with the tawdry Jim and Susan McDougal, their partners in the Whitewater Development Corporation, but Giroir cut his deals with Jackson and Wilton Stephens, two of the most important investment bankers west of Wall Street...
...Since one of Hubbell's governing traits is loyalty to his friends—and he is entirely believable in saying that—it's very likely that he will continue defending this milieu in spite of the legal consequences...
...The degree of politicization that Hubbell brought to an already vulnerable Main Justice is a major study in its own right...
...This little-known but crucial figure moved in the upper circles of a state establishment that largely distrusted the Clintons...
...His role also fit Bill Clinton's pattern of governing, i.e., to control crucial departments by inserting a loyalist at the number two or three slot with enough power to pull the strings...
...He writes of an intimate dinner at the White House with the Clintons and the actress Mary Steenburgen: "At times like these, when I was very tired, I sometimes had a hard time keeping my mask on straight...
...defining tragedy of the Clinton era, although Hubbell indicates that all three of the troika ended badly in Washington...
...Partners outside of that Bill and his Securities division were left with scraps and deepening resentment...
...It's just not the same, Hub," he told Webb in one of their last talks...
...Capitol's Statuary Hall...
...In his recent book tour, he has certainly been making up for lost time...
...It has happened before in the White House...
...Hubbell's relatives have read his book, and family harmony has suffered...
...The suicide of Vincent Foster on July 20, 1993 was the pivotal moment for the Clinton Administration...
...He also omits one very public moment of pathos, when he and Breslaw appeared at the same House Banking Committee hearing in August 1995...
...Hubbell corrects that reading...
...Hubbell accepts full responsibility, but he devotes pages to the wrongs that he says forced him to this "passive-aggressive" response...
...But he paints many of his contemporaries there as greedy boors...
...Hubbell and Foster received constant complaints from other partners about her clothes, her thick eyeglasses, her lack of makeup, and her insistence on using her maiden name...
...The new information here concerns Hubbell's role in the clean-up...
...So Hubbell and his colleagues would have had clear detail about the networking that eventually brought the Riadys to Little Rock...
...We've already seen how Hubbell misdated the Worthen bank crisis, confusing the chronology for 1985 and 1986...
...The stress of over-work, unaccustomed conflict, and public criticism and perhaps disillusionment with his friends could easily have triggered whatever it is in the brain's chemistry that causes suicidal depression...
...Vince hardly said a word the rest of the evening....He pulled his chair back and turned himself away from the rest of the table...
...But he shied from personal confrontations and once in a while indulged a "wild streak...
...He mentions April Breslaw, the RTC lawyer in charge of the civil suits against Madison, but he omits the fact that she approved his inflated billing and interfered with the criminal investigation of Madison conducted by Jean Lewis...
...It was Foster, writes Hubbell, who recruited Hillary Rodham for the Rose firm...
...It presents several levels — a personal tale of fall and redemption including the sub-genre of prison journal, a tragic chronicle of three friends destroyed by Washington, and a political memoir...
...Also a good student, he won football scholarships to the University of Tennessee and the University of Arkansas...
...That December he pled guilty to mail fraud and tax fraud, in a plea bargain with the Independent Counsel...
...I had long felt like an outcast at the Rose firm, but never like this...
...His network of friends gave him his "first taste of the vaunted Arkansas `interconnectedness,' that has been so vilified by the outside media...
...He and his family lived well beyond their means, rolling over credit card debt...
...Hillary was outgoing to her friends, capable of laughing at herself and inspiring intense loyalty...
...Hubbell admits helping Betsey Wright compile the most damaging documents on the Clintons, including Hillary's past work at Rose—to help her answer press inquiries, he says...
...But the problem of the Clinton scandals was not created by right-wing conspiracy theorists or media obsessions.' Hubbell makes painfully clear that Clinton's Arkansans had little grasp of the etiquette that guards national institutions against abuse of power...
...One unanswered question for the reader, and possibly for Hubbell, is why he gave up a position that suited him so well...
...Continued on page 86) 33 Adams/Hubbell (Gontinuedfrompage 33) Webb definitely knew the difference...
...If the Worthen collapse had saddled the Teachers Retirement System with a $52 million loss, Clinton's scheme would surely have failed, and he would not only have lost a powerful political fundraiser, he might well have been driven from state politics...
...Yet this genial, easy-going surface covers a pool of bubbling lava...
...Gawky, self-conscious and pathetically hoping to be liked, he deliberately downplays his more threatening attributes—his six-foot-four bulk and his formidable intelligence...
...Hubbell's two closest friends and allies at Rose were Vincent Foster and Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...Additional information about his role in damage control emerged in another setting, allowing Hubbell to demonstrate his remarkable ability to keep a straight face...
...He even thought about running for U.S...
...One fears that he will soon be accumulating material for a sequel in the same vein as this revealing but saddening confessional...
...But even these barings of the soul can't fully be taken at face value...
...A prominent insurance man and booster of the Razorback team asked the elder Hubbell where Webb was leaning, and was told that the son might follow his father's footsteps with the Tennessee Volunteers...
...Her real self was forced to live so far inside her that she sometimes didn't know who she was...
...In 1987 the federal government tried to recoup some of its deposit insurance fund payout to FirstSouth by threatening to sue the Rose firm...
...In marrying his beloved Suzy, he also acquired a formidable father-in-law, Little Rock businessman Seth Ward...
...and two, are there UFOs?' He was dead serious...
...He seems to have modeled his country boy mumble on Hanna-Barbera's Deputy Dawg...
...But Giroir was working with an Indonesian client even more important than Riady...
...Although Hubbell reports that he and Foster looked askance at Lyons when they first met him, he later found his company so engaging that hemade an expensive and time-consuming side trip to Denver just to chat with him: In October, on my way to California to look into a rash of hate crimes, I stopped over in Denver to give a speech...
...His bulk and his father's football training made him a star defensive end at Hall High School, where his schoolmates included current White House aides Bruce Lindsey and Marsha Scott...
...Hubbell doesn't mention Jack Stephens's grand vision of a Little Rock–Jakarta axis, with business interests along the Asian rim...
...Webb's Vie En Rose The Oldest Law Firm West of the Mississippi, as Rose never tires of styling itself, might seem a strange place to express youthful idealism...
...Maybe when people stop using his death for their own purposes, we can focus finally on the disease that shortened his life...
...Vince and I were summoned to Washington to be lectured by FSLIC officials," writes Hubbell...
...Hubbell misses almost no chance to express exasperation with Ward's overbearing demands on his time...
...All of The American Spectator • February 1998 us found ourselves in prisons of one kind or another—Vince to his perfectionism, me to my materialism and the mistakes it has caused, Hillary to the public persona she was forced to live in...
...To his utter dismay, at the annual allocation meeting, the other partners wanted to deny him the lucrative fee he had negotiated as part of the insurance payout to Worthen...
...The details of this disaster have been discussed at length in previous TAS articles (see "What's Up in Jakarta...
...own game, at least according to Hubbell...
...Hubbell took the wake-up call, he says, one Monday morning in April, 1986, when he was called to the conference room at Rose and "found Joe Giroir and other partners looking ashen, as though they had just been told of a death in the family...
...Consider Hubbell's counter-attack on the "conspiracy industry" that flourished after Vincent Foster's suicide: "Vince, Hillary and I were accused of having something to do with the notorious Italian BCCI scandal...
...FSLIC is the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, later swept away by the national savings and loan crisis...
...Hubbell downplays his importance at Justice, but it's clear he was the strong man at the department, partly through his personality and partly through his access to the president...
...As Hubbell describes them, his father-in-law's business ethics could best be called flexible...
...Hubbell refers briefly to a mystery man in the Worthen deal, "a Mr...
...promise that made it simply the Rose firm...
...But he fascinated the women around him by the quiet twinkle in his smile and his unfathomable reserve "as if to say, I'll never tell...
...October 1992...
...The suicide of Vince Foster emerges as the JAMES RING ADAMS is an investigative writer for TAS...
...His friends Vince and Hillary apparently felt the same betrayal, since they had made joint calls to FSLIC denying that Rose had any conflicts...
...This writer once looked up his tenure in the Arkansas Reports and was astonished by the number of long, carefully argued opinions Hubbell managed to write in his four months...
...These personal revelations help explain Hubbell's hang-dog air, but the meatiest parts of his book come when he turns to his law career, and life in captivity at the now notorious Rose Law Firm...
...This friendship, reminiscent of the Truffaut movie Jules et Jim, is entirely appropriate to record because of the history that would unfold from it, and Hubbell handles the narrative with convincing sincerity...
...Lim.'" Soedono Salim is the muslimized name adopted by the billionaire Liem Sioe Liong, the "godfather" of Indonesia's ethnic Chinese business clique (including the Riadys) and a key player in Southeast Asia's "Bamboo Network...
...One secretary quit, he says, when her boss "called her into his office and asked her to hold out her hand so he could flick his cigarette's ashes into it...
...When Clinton finally plunged into his presidential campaign, Webb's main contribution was to answer questions about Hillary's work at Rose...
...The paper instead ran an outline of a head covered by a large question mark...
...The rest of the bail-out came from Jack Stephens, as an advance against a future stock offering...
...Hillary agreed, but in a long conversation tried to explain how deeply hurt she was by the issue...
...Its apparent inevitability gives the book a dra32 Fe br uar y 1998 • The American Spectator matic structure unusual in political memoirs...
...In retrospect, Hubbell saw this intense reaction as a warning of future trouble...
...Grisham is after all a distant cousin to Bill Clinton...
...interviewed her, then the wife of the newly elected state Attorney General, with his smelly bare feet 30 February 1998 • The American Spectator propped up on his desk...
...He describes a miserable post-college year as Southwestern Bell's Wire Chief in Mena, Arkansas, reading Herman Hesse and listening to Simon and Garfunkel in bachelor isolation...
...He was pale, shaking...
...The feds not only wanted money from Rose, they shut down a promising source of revenue that Foster had been developing, ironically doing legal work for the savings and loan clean-up...
...But the most lasting effect was to entangle him in a morass of conflicts, including Hillary's involvement with Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan...
...Actually, this would have been the Monday after Easter in 1985, and Hubbell's confusion is worth discussing later on...
...This is the Indonesian connection that burst into the headlines in the 1996 campaign and still has a role in the allegations that Hubbell received "hush money" from clients like the Riadys' Lippo Group after his resignation...
...As he anticipates, it may hold further unpleasantness...
...Hubbell says he came into his own at Little Rock...
...But he blandly denies any hint of impropriety or cover-up...
...This shock brought to a head all of the in-fighting at the firm and, writes Hubbell, turned it into "a kind of hell...
...But it also sheds light on the internal politics of the Rose firm and some important incidents that the participants might prefer to remain murky...
...He does, however, devote many passages to rebutting attacks on the Clintons and himself...
...This habit ultimately became a half-million-dollar theft from his partners and clients, including the federal institutions handling the savings and loan clean-up...
...We caught up with each other's lives and laughed about the media's fascination with Whitewater...
...He argued against strong opposition to make her the Rose firm's first lady lawyer...
...In the early eighties, Giroir was buying up banks around the state, in preparation for the merger that created the Worthen Banking Corporation...
...His spin and much of his language echoes cover stories he has already given to Congress and, one presumes, Starr...
...Hubbell writes that Vince Foster engineered the com public perception...
...His father came from New England (exact location unspecified) and played championship football at the University of Tennessee...
...Vince also felt pressured by Hillary, who was now aloof and imperious...
...The reader has to exercise what we might call triangulation, the type of analysis described in the spy novels of John le Cane, not the political positioning of Richard Morris...
...To Hubbell and the Clintons, the Stephens brothers were the acronym JAWS, and the Clintons struggled for years, with decreasing success, to stay out of their control...
...Hubbell also traces some of his law firm's famous conflicts of interest to Ward's importuning for free legal services, a topic later of great importance...
...Red flags warn that a more complete version might not seem so anodyne...
...Giroir Hillary were the even tried to rename the firm Rose and Giroir, eliminating the names of the reverse of the older generation of partners...
...At the same time, his civic service cut into his law practice...
...Hubbell glides over most of these details, but he dwells on the shock suffered by Joe Giroir...
...In one nerve-wracking mission in 1981, Hubbell was asked by Bill Clinton to help his political comeback by suggesting to Hillary that she start calling herself Mrs...
...Webb,' he had said, 'if I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me...
...Under threat of a suit and possible criminal action, Hubbell resigned from Justice in March 1994...
...Hubbell had just started his prison term and was clearly looking to Breslaw for some word of greeting...
...Hubbell spurns the cheap attempt of some Clinton aides to blame Foster's death on criticism from the Wall Street Journal...
...Leaving aside his financial failings, he was a victim of his background in more ways than one...
...As Hubbell reminisces, one figure remains curiously aloof, Bill Clinton himself...
...In the first years at Rose neither Foster nor Hubbell saw that much of the rising politician...
...One, who killed JFK...
...As the Rose firm disputed expenses from the POM suit, it began to look into his other billings...
...But Giroir's ambitions ranged far beyond the new Rose headquarters in the renovated downtown YWCA (an acquisition he had urged on his partners), and they eventually led to disaster...
...Hillary and Vince had adjoining offices and often worked late while Webb tended to his civic duties...
...The reader comes away with a far deeper, more nuanced feel for Hubbell, his friends and his Arkansas milieu, and a great deal more sympathy for them...
...The third, which will probably be the most closely read, is by far the least reliable, written under the shadow of possible further indictments...
...Recently named the firm's chief operating officer, Hubbell took the brunt of everyone's anger...
...Rose lawyers were able to persuade the court that Stephens was an innocent bystander, in a sealed brief reportedly signed by Vince Foster and Hillary Rodham...
...He devoted most of the next six months to negotiating a $20 million pay-out that helped stave off federal plans to shut down the bank...
...Perhaps a peak in blandness comes in Hubbell's brief account of a meeting with Clinton lawyer Jim Lyons, the campaign point man in explaining away the White-water investment...
...But the day of reckoning was coming...
...During his tenure at Justice, President Clinton directed his department to get to the bottom of allegations of a Bush administration coverup on the BNL case...
...In private, it seems that Bill and Hillary were the reverse of the public perception...
...In hindsight, Hubbell gives a plausible explanation, now accepted in outline by most reasonable people...
...Much of this money carried federal guarantees, and some of the purchases may have been diverted to his attempt to build an arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons...
...Writes Webb, "That's the other side of the vaunted Arkansas interconnectedness...
...The investor group was later part of the BCCI scandal that led tothe indictment of Washington "wise man" Clark Clifford...
...But he became deeply involved when the dream went pool...
...Vince finally confronted Giroir, who still held the title of Rose chairman, and brokered a deal in which Giroir gave up that post if Webb stepped down as chief operating officer...
...His coaches said he was badly needed for the season and could play with cortisone shots, or he could undergo surgery and end his college football career...
...Some of Giroir's bank-buying, it transpired, had been financed by FirstSouth Savings and Loan of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which in 1986 became the country's first billion-dollar S&L failure...
...He has also published his memoirs, Friends in High Places (Morrow, $27.50...
...He and Hubbell, for instance, liked to attend "lingerie modeling sessions" then popular among Little Rock businessmen...
...As for Bill, Hubbell provides the following revelation in describing how he recovered from his disastrous 1988 Democratic Convention speech with a successful appearance on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show": "Bill was wonderful — funny, self-effacing, human...
...senator as a Republican, until Bill Clinton talked him out of it...
...recently released an attack on what he sees as Hubbell's own flexible application of lawyer-client confidentiality...
...Hillary backed out at the last minute, sending Vince into a bizarre sulk...
...A younger lawyer named William Kennedy stepped up to be managing partner...
...He said he didn't have an ashtray...
...Hubbell all but makes an open appeal for clemency to the two people who control his future, President Clinton and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr...
...He belongs in the stratosphere of global deal-makers, one would think well beyond the Rose firm's league...
...She cut him cold and walked to the other end of the witness table...
...The personal material, however, is as vivid and introspective as a confessional novel...
...This recusal may date to a chore performed by the Rose litigation section back in 1979, which extricated Stephens Inc...
...He could hardly talk...
...In Jules et Jim, it was the girl that both men loved, played with such fire by Jeanne Moreau, who met a bad end...
...Rose proudly traces its lineage to the 1840's and its name to U.M...
...Instead, Hubbell focuses on the internal investigation of the firings of the career staff at the White House Travel Office...
...1 Conspiracy buffs in the press would have a hard time outdoing the president himself, to judge from one of Hubbell's most bizarre anecdotes...
...Private demons must always have torn at this deeply reserved and driven perfectionist...
...The book ends with his federal prison term, presented as a personal redemption...
...He held the thing together by involving the Rose firm in a blatant conflict of interest...
...In the early eighties, Hubbell was appointed to the Little Rock City Board, elected mayor and named by Governor Clinton as acting Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court...
...His idea of rebellion was to enroll in the University of Arkansas Law School, seeking an outlet for his idealism in a career in one of Little Rock's big establishment law firms...
...These passages generally end with a sarcastic attack on Clinton's critics...
...One of these traps was Hubbell's own choice...
...It emerges that he wasn't even raised as a Razorback (although he was born in Little Rock...
...When it seemed that tabloids would print rumors of the affair during the 1992 Gennifer Flowers flap, Foster was devastated...
...But what of First Lady Clinton, who in Hubbell's perspective has receded into a Hell of her own...
...His statement looks like an egregious conflation of two separate cases...
...Brother-in-law Seth "Skeeter" Ward, Jr...
...86 February 1998 • The American Spectator...
...Now I was seething, too," writes Hubbell...
...A few months later he and Foster forced Giroir from the firm...
...31 Hubbell was asked to see if Worthen's insurance would cover a part of the disaster...
...It also instilled habits of political and economic back-scratching that proved disastrous in a Washington already prone to corruption...
...Arkansas "interconnectedness" tolerated the use of financial pressure on Webb's father to recruit him for the Razorbacks...
...Giroir kept Stephens as a client He reemerged last year as a major deal-maker for the Riadys...
...But these errors manage to muddy a potentially embarrassing story line...
...I use that word deliberately...
...Hubbell joined in the bonanza of savings and loan work, developing close ties with lawyers at the new Resolution Trust Corporation...
...Hubbell is tormented with resentment of his father-in-law, his law firm, and the Arkansas social elite...
...After a pro bono stint in 1976 setting up a legal aid clinic in Fayetteville, he came back "raving, uncharacteristically, about a smart female law professor he had worked with up there...
...This is what went through his mind as he composed his resignation statement: "Of my many regrets at that moment, I remember thinking that I hadn't accomplished something the President had asked me to do when I was first elected...
...He portrays himself as an out28 February 1998 • The American Spectator sider whose two closest friends, Vince and Hillary, were also hiding behind masks in a society from which they felt estranged...
...But Kennedy played his him so well...
...Lim" and his son as well as various Stephens trusts...
...It bears the marks of prison therapy, in its struggle to accept responsibility for the fraudulent conduct in Hubbell's law practice that led to his resignation from the Justice Department and his guilty plea to two federal felonies...
...Now the number three man at Justice, he emerged as a major figure in the government, holding the department together and dispensing wise counsel at inter-agency meetings...
...The BBS debacle came just as the Arkansas legislature had placed a hold on Bill Clinton's ambitious plans to politicize the state employee pension funds...
...Clinton...
...When they did later on, they never penetrated much beyond his mask...
...A sense of entrapment by this coercive complex of social, business, and political ties underlies the rest of his narrative...
...To be fair, Hubbell didn't mean to write a public policy study...
...He also reports that he stored ten boxes of these files in his basement during the first months in Washington, even searching them for material on a man claiming to be Bill's half-brother...
...did sting, Hubbell reports that Vince was angry mainly because the White House press staff had failed to provide his picture to the paper...
...But the first victim of tragedy was entirely unexpected...
...We all had relationships with our spouses that, for different reasons, prevented totally frank discussions...
...The Italian scandal involved the state-owned Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), whose Atlanta, Georgia branch made more than $4 billion in supposedly unauthorized loans to Saddam Hussein's Iraq through the 1980's...
...The Hubbell facade draws heavily on his shambling physique and abject countenance...
...The dislocations hit Webb harder because of his "deep inferiority complex" about his physical appearance...
...The three began meeting daily behind closed doors, sparking rumors they were plotting to take over the firm...
...I later wondered if the question mark felt too close for comfort," Hubbell writes...
...He told me again that she'd said, 'Fix it, Vince!' or 'Handle it, Vince!'" This talk followed a dinner that June planned as a get-together of the three old friends...
...I'm sure she loses sleep over it, as I do...
...By all accounts, Bill hit a low in the aftermath of his 1980 electoral defeat, and Hubbell drops delicate hints that this was the start of the widely rumored affair between Hillary and Vince: "When I think back on our relationship, the two-year period when Bill was out of office seemed to be the time of our greatest intimacy...
...Hubbell speaks with respect of a handful of distinguished older partners...
...Right at the beginning, Hubbell warns that he projects a false front, even with his closest friends...
...Each in his way estranged from the prevailing atmosphere, they relied on each other's moral support and companionship...
...In real life, he has a very hard time laughing at himself...
...Webb Hubbell, L'Etranger Hubbell's account of his ungainly, self-conscious youth may be a calculated play for sympathy, but it is genuinely affecting...
...But life goes on for Webster Hubbell...
...Hubbell's involvement with the BCCI was even more personal...
...Hubbell underscores the coming tragedy...
...We both felt angry, embarrassed, betrayed...
...September 1995, and "Clinton's Bert Lance...
...In this Arkansas-Washington version, the two male friends are destroyed and the woman lives on...
...The question of the "Betsey files" gets a similar partial treatment...
...The exhilaration of the campaign and the move to Washington masked Hubbell's financial problems...
...Even after the coup at Rose left Webb, Vince and Hillary as dominant partners, Webb never earned enough to pay back his borrowings...
...The BCCI, on the other hand, was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, chartered in Luxembourg, headquartered in London, capitalized by Arabian oil sheikhs and run by Pakistanis, which defrauded depositors nearly everywhere in the world except for Italy...
...I've thought many times how difficult that was for Bill to do...
...His brief stint on the court was the happiest point of his career, and he did an excellent job...
...One symptom is the glaring mistake, so basic it could be merely typographical...
...As an industrial engineer designing power plants, the elder Webster Hubbell moved around Tennessee and Alabama before settling his family in the Arkansas capital when Webb was in eleventh grade...
...When will it all end...
...But Hubbell declines to blame Foster's death on Hillary: I think Hillary, like many others of us, questions whether, if she had spent more time with him, she could have affected the outcome...
...I hope, especially for Hillary, that the next stage of her life will bring her the freedom to be who she really is...
...Long lunches at an Italian restaurant hideaway gave them respite from the firm's factionalism and backbiting, but also inspired the inevitable gossip...
...A special technique of deciphering is needed...
...I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting...
...But a revelation comes in his account of choosing his college...
...I stayed the night at Jim's house...
...Rose, one of the two Arkansans in the U.S...
...But his personal affairs had begun to unravel...
...He didn't much like Washington either, but that brief misery pales next to his vivid account of his earlier career...
...By noting the glaring omissions, the heavy attempts to play dumb, we can focus on the areas where Hubbell has something to hide...
...He writes that his anxiety started as early as age six, when he overheard his father telling guests that "Webb has nigger lips...
...Vince, he said, felt guilty that his associates Bill Kennedy and David Watkins were taking the fall for a mess he blamed on himself...
...The SEC charged Stephens and a subsidiary called Systematics with attempting illegally to take over a Washington, D. C. bank along with a group of Arab investors...
...from a messy lawsuit...
...Hubbell admits to a mistake in not cultivating the media more on his arrival in Washington...
...These errors and garbled storytelling share another feature...
...What Webb Leaves Out These thoughts end the book, rounding out a surprisingly successful literary structure...
...Likewise, Webb garbles the details of the criminal referral on Madison Guaranty that disappeared into the Justice Department when he was its de facto head...
...He is probably in the first rank in Arkansas...
...The largest shareholders in the new holding company, then the largest in the state, were the Stephens family and a tycoon from Jakarta, Indonesia, named Mochtar Riady...
...Salim": "I never heard him referred to as anything but 'Mr...
...Yet the book is rewarding and even in places moving, if one accepts its limits...
...He stayed on the team and permanently damaged his cartilage, missing a chance to play pro ball for the Chicago Bears...
...A vivid Hubbell peers over the shoulders of what looks like a cardboard cutout of the First Couple, like a tourist at one of those novelty photo shops...
...Hubbell appeared to flourish even after Foster's death...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
