Good Old Boys
CLAUSEN, CHRISTOPHER
Second Thoughts GOOD OLD BOYS by christopher clausen Down in Dixie, where mores are different and the money began to flow too easily about the time Bill Clinton came of age, folks may be less...
...that they named, for some unfathomable reason, Copperfield's...
...In addition to a set of yearbooks from the Arkansas school system, they will need some experienced guides who can follow the local trails and interpret a local language that was never meant to be overheard by outsiders...
...Echoing this theme three weeks later in an editorial attacking the so-called Arkansas Defense—the argument that ordinary standards can't be applied to anyone from a hopelessly corrupt little state—the New York Times described the Clintons on the threshold of the Decade of Greed as "a well-meaning young couple who seemed to have an extraordinary indifference to, or difficulty in understanding, the normal divisions between government and personal interests...
...The bizarre context, however, is familiar to anyone who has lived in the smalltown South during the last quarter century or so...
...The lawyer and the surgeon got together and started a fancy restaurant (how can a restaurant fail at a time of rapid growth...
...That story often involves land, development, buildings, finance—solid, tangible goals coupled with incongruously naive means of reaching them...
...Across the worn-out fields where gaudy, half-empty new shopping centers stretch as far as the eye can see, temporary bankruptcy has become a way of life, almost a status symbol among the once and future high rollers who placed too much con-fidence in informal ties that had always served in the past...
...Either I must be some sort of academic troublemaker (they had heard of such people) or I had a tasteless sense of humor...
...As oral surgery started bringing him more income than he had time to spend, he looked about for a likely investment...
...Neither was the stock market...
...The lawyer soon had himself declared insolvent...
...The smart thing was to get in on it while it lasted...
...Arkansas, in the 47th slot, is ahead of only Utah, West Virginia and Mississippi...
...It was clear that most of them—with the exception of black students—did not believe me...
...Copperfield's led a fitful existence for a few months and then plunged spectacularly into bankruptcy...
...In contrast to Watergate, the most enlightening question this time may be "Who did he know and when did he know him...
...The total picture remains murky, along with the all-important question of whether the First Family did anything illegal in its web of dealings with land companies, savings and loans, commodities brokers, and the now world-famous Rose law firm...
...The amounts of money involved were puny by Michael Milken standards, yet everything is relative...
...Everybody else, whether they live 50 miles away in the state capital or 10 miles away in the county seat, is an outsider...
...The partners blamed each other, as partners in an unsuccessful enterprise tend to do...
...Bill Clinton, Mack McLar-ty, Vincent Foster, and the rest are characters in an old, old story...
...The antics of the good old boys have not brought general prosperity...
...He had known the oral surgeon for a long time...
...The '60s economic boom was spreading south into virgin territory...
...With his local knowledge and connections he could do better than that...
...Unfortunately for him, his skill at choosing business associates had not improved, and the hit man he ended up with turned out to be an undercover FBI agent...
...Whitewatergate is a paradigmat-ic story of the Newest South, that long-foreignpalatinate which rejoined the United States when legal segregation and the moral odium that accompanied it suddenly expired in the 1960s...
...It's hard for Northerners to grasp how quickly the institutions of a segregated society disappeared, not only from the law books but from custom and even memory...
...The local Republican Congressman was a member of the House Judiciary Committee and no doubt was returning some previous favor...
...The whole idea of segregation was so incomprehensible that they couldn't imagine it had recently existed in any place close to them...
...The County Sheriff, the State Banking Board, the Federal regulators will never catch up...
...Sometimes progress takes the form of amnesia...
...As it continues to become increasingly like the rest of the country, its politics, business dealings and characteristic forms of corruption will grow progressively less distinctive and interesting...
...During THE mid-'70s, early in the boom years, I had some dealings (strictly dental) with an oral surgeon in Roanoke, Virginia who had just begun to prosper in a big way...
...How could this have been...
...A category of people called "Friends of Bill" seems far more normal in its own cultural context than it does in Washington...
...There was at the same time in Roanoke a lawyer who had gained brief national prestige, though not much money, through having been one of the minority counsel in the Congressional Watergate hearings...
...The only people you can trust more than the ones you went to elementary school with (in Clinton's case untypically extended to include graduate education) are your kin by blood or marriage...
...Second Thoughts GOOD OLD BOYS by christopher clausen Down in Dixie, where mores are different and the money began to flow too easily about the time Bill Clinton came of age, folks may be less confused than most Yankees are at each new revelation about who did what on the banks of the Whitewater...
...Remember Bert Lance and Billy Carter...
...Now he began looking for the sort of helper who would make this investment pay off better than the other one...
...In the ensuing plea bargain he lost his one remaining asset, his license to practice, and disappeared from sight, a casualty of rising expectations...
...I can't tell you if they borrowed money from a third old pal in the banking business, but it would fit the pattern...
...Moreover, for all the wheeling and dealing, it remains a relatively poor region, with five of the 11 Confederate states still in the bottom fifth of the nation when ranked by per capita income...
...And everyone in a premodern society knows that outsiders are fair game...
...With the end of segregation in the South came an influx of investments, corporations and opportunities not seen since before the Civil War...
...Like many other parts of the region, southwestern Virginia was growing fast...
...He was a local boy, filled with confidence in himself and contempt for that part of the outside world through which money flowed...
...After all, the thinking goes, we're smarter than they are...
...The South's most colorful days may be in the past...
...We know where the bodies are buried (in a historically violent region the cliche sometimes takes on an unusual aptness...
...The oral surgeon, being in some respects a prudent man, had earlier insured his partner's life for a comfortable if not fabulous sum...
...It sucked up more money than you would think a restaurant could possibly lose in a small, prosperous Southern city...
...Lots of things were possible that nobody in the small towns and the Appalachian or Ozark hollows had ever dreamed of...
...Some good old boys, moreover, have always gone on to the legislature and higher without forgetting their friends...
...Corrupt nursing-home chains are a particularly ugly subset, exploiting as they do two levels of outsiders, the old people who inhabit them and the government that often pays the bills...
...One day 20 years later, I reminded a class of students at the Virginia public university where I taught that when their parents had been their age, the university was racially segregated by state law...
...Although corruption is not inevitable, such an environment is hardly conducive to abstract civic virtue...
...Whether or not it helps exculpate the Clintons, in some ways the South remains to this day a premodern society, not least in that personal loyalties frequently outweigh all other ties...
...The lines between public and private conduct are much less obvious than in a more impersonal, urban society...
...Of course, the scene is changing...
...The ways people tried to get hold of it showed similarities with the rest of the country, to be sure, but also plenty of local color—change and continuity in one resplendent barbecue...
...Meanwhile Robert B. Fiske Jr., the Whitewater special counsel, and one or more Congressional committees must try to thread their way through sociological thickets of an older growth...
...In the late 1950s the state of Virginia practiced Massive Resistance against the Federal government's efforts to integrate its schools...
...But the region's population—now heav-ily suburban, as in the rest of the country—is more fluid than ever before, not only because of people who leave but because for the first time in well over a century there is substantial relocation from other parts of the country due to the growing presence of national and international corporations...
...A concept like "conflict of interest" makes little sense—how could your interests conflict if you're pursuing them in partnership with good old boys you've known all your life...
...The bigger the possible rewards, naturally, the more luxuriantly this way of thinking flourishes...
...Roanoke is that kind of place...
...Savings certificates, despite their paying 15 per cent at that point, were not for him...
...Meanwhile condominiums and commercial real estate in Texas and the Deep South, often unsalable, are the most grandiose memorabilia of the savings-and-loan failures of the late 1980s...
...The Clintons," a perplexed William Kristol, director of the Project for the Republican Future, complained in early March, "have an extraordinary inability to distinguish public from private, official from personal...
...The outcome, as postmodernists are fond of saying, was overde-termined...
...James B. McDougal, the proprietor of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and chief partner in the Whitewater Development Company, was following a well-established tradition in his baroque financial dealings—including the collapse of both enterprises...
...In many places continued migration on that scale would break down the patterns of local loyalty and ways of doing business that help make the Whitewater affair so hard to follow...
...There was more of the stuff around, at least potentially, than ever...
...Whether the game is preying on the old and sick or merely fleecing Northern yuppies, entrenched patterns of behavior do not change overnight just because there is suddenly more money at stake...
...To take one unlikely example, more than half of all the people who moved away from New York City between 1985 and 1990 moved to the Southern states...
Vol. 77 • April 1994 • No. 4
