Casual
BARNES, FRED
Casual The RRT and Me Iwas a target of the Clinton campaign’s rapid-response team. My offense was small. I asked James Carville, the president’s loyal political strategist, a touchy...
...I said to Carville...
...The next day, a fax (on “Clinton Gore 96” stationery) arrived at CNN from Diane Blair...
...Historians in Arkansas said he was “making it up,” I asserted...
...I just don’t know what you’re talking about...
...I might as well have been asking about Sri Lankan cuisine...
...Two of the fires, wrote the DemocratGazette, weren’t arson, and no cause was determined for the other...
...Carville said he “didn’t know about that...
...It was written by an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, thus a colleague of Diane Blair...
...No, I didn’t immediately beg Ted Turner for time on CNN for a correction...
...Her husband, Jim, is better known...
...I’m not familiar with it,” he said, “but I’m sure churches were burned at the time...
...In light of the attached, don’t you think a personal apology to the President is in order...
...That was it, I thought...
...But I’d be delighted if the RRT explains why the president, at best, ballooned a small, unconfirmed item into a big-time political pronouncement...
...When President Clinton’s name is sullied, by bigshots or peons, the RRT goes on red alert...
...I didn’t reach for the phone and dial 456-1414 (the White House’s number...
...A black minister in Hot Springs recalled that his church burned in 1963...
...The White House quickly clarified Clinton’s remark, saying he was talking about “some black community buildings” that were burned...
...Should I apologize...
...Soon the yip-yap drifted to another subject...
...I think not...
...In fact,” she went on, a church burned in Hot Springs when young Bill was 17 and “there is a strong possibility that it was a racially motivated arson...
...That was followed by the White House’s release of a list of three black churches that burned...
...What was he talking about...
...I asked about a dubious Clinton statement...
...But not to the RRT...
...It’s a big job...
...What exactly had Clinton said...
...A letter appeared in the Washington Times citing the Hot Springs burning as proof Clinton’s memory was “not faulty...
...The letter was also one of the attachments the RRT sent me...
...I turned to Nexis...
...Sensing vulnerability, I persisted...
...So they didn’t fit Clinton’s description of racist retaliation...
...But no...
...The other was the Democrat-Gazette story mentioning the Hot Springs church...
...He’s the guy who did the cattle-futures deals for Hillary and turned her $1,000 into $100,000...
...In our country during the ’50s and ’60s, black churches were burned to intimidate civil rights workers,” he declared in his weekly radio address on June 8. “I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child...
...Local authorities said there was no evidence of arson, and the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Little Rock decided an investigation wasn’t warranted...
...Clinton was a high-school kid there at the time...
...But I’d have to ask the president, and, anyway, why was I bothering with something that happened a long time ago in Arkansas...
...Diane Blair said I’d accused the president of lying about church bombings in Arkansas...
...True...
...Remember when church burnings were a problem, black churches around the South...
...She sent along two newspaper clips...
...However, blacks in Hot Springs believed the fire was set because the pastor, James Donald Rice, was trying to organize a chapter of the NAACP in town, the DemocratGazette reported...
...I asked James Carville, the president’s loyal political strategist, a touchy question on CNN’s Crossfire...
...You may not remember her, but she’s an Arkansas pal of Hillary Clinton, a history professor at the University of Arkansas and, at the moment, the chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...The president said he had vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in Arkansas...
...I wasn’t vindicated yet...
...Before I could, the RRT struck again, this time with a note from Carville...
...Fred Barnes...
...Attached were the same clips Blair had sent my way...
...The president’s recollection caught the interest of the Little Rock newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette...
...I know you will want to make an on-air correction of your factual error...
...The CNN show was about the character issue in the presidential campaign...
...I figured I’d better look into the subject first...
...Little did I know the RRT was mobilizing...
...The next day, the paper wrote that nobody in Arkansas shared Clinton’s memory, not the state historian, not the head of the state NAACP, not the former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention...
...Well, it turns out that never happened...
...My question was innocent enough...
...That left the matter murky, like so many issues on which Clinton’s truthfulness has been challenged...
...Now you might think this would have gone under the radar of the rapidresponse team (RRT for short), that the responders would have been too busy with Bob Dole’s TV ads or Haley Barbour’s barbs...
...I enjoyed the show,” he said...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 4
