The Great Whitewater Snipe Hunt

...For most folks, evaluating this avalanche of smut is simple: Your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are guilty...

...Next it turned out that visitors' logs which the two troopers alleged Hillary ordered destroyed—ostensibly to hide Gen-nifer Flowers' visits—never in fact existed...

...According to The New York Times, Schaffer—a striking woman whom an NBC-TV crew ambushed outside her Fayetteville office evidently in the hope of linking Troopergate and Whitewatergate in viewers' minds—was S&L mogul McDougal's personal choice for the job...

...Almost everywhere except for a few square miles of Little Rock surrounding the Capital Hotel bar where out-of-town reporters drink, the conflict between Sunday-go-to-meeting prudery and honky-tonk raunchiness that typified frontier America continues unabated...

...During the newspaper war many scalps were taken, among them Attorney General Steve Clark's, a Clinton ally...

...In a small, largely rural state with one real city, it also makes for fantastic—and highly entertaining—gossip...

...Federal prosecutors turned him down, and the White House says he invented the story...

...It took the Little Rock bureau of the Associated Press, by contrast, about 24 hours to learn that in 1990 Patterson and Perry had wrapped a patrol car around a tree while drunk, allegedly lied to their superiors, then swore to a completely different version for personal gain in a civil lawsuit...

...But the Clintons did deduct a good deal of their Whitewater investment, according to a story by Bill Simmons of the Little Rock AP...

...So here's how it came out in a recent, typically garbled piece in The Washington Post: "State regulators told Madison officials it was legal to sell preferred stock and to market limited partnerships in shaky real estate projects, plans that eventually fell through...

...In fact, Schaffer says she's never met McDougal or his wife, never talked to them on the phone, and never heard Bill Clinton mention their names...

...Hale was never a Clinton intimate, but a lowly municipal court judge (misdemeanors and preliminary hearings only...

...Although a lifelong Democrat, Hale was actually appointed in 1981 by then-Republican Governor Frank White...

...In the interim, of course, came the 1988 elections—which virtually all those in Congress, the Reagan administration, and the Bush campaign wished to see completed before the magnitude of the S&L crisis became evident to voters...

...As such, it's indispensable to the connoisseur of Arkansas political mischief...

...The excuse that Bill Clinton made him do it provoked general hilarity...

...In the process, the Whitewater land development deal went belly-up...

...Even minor financial corruption brings public wrath...

...Clinton's political destruction, after all, has been the winning Democrat-Gazette1 s main agenda for about 15 years...

...Since then, like all Arkansas judges, Hale has been elected...

...A year later, McDougal himself was tried by a Reagan-appointed prosecutor and acquitted of bank fraud in a Little Rock federal court with much attendant publicity...

...The whole idea was the Dallas-based, Republican-administered Federal Home Loan Bank Board's to begin with...

...With a reputation for political opportunism, Hale's indictment practically inspired a celebration among local criminal defense lawyers...

...No sooner had the trooper farce played itself out than the TV talk-show pundits regretted its tawdriness but predicted that Whitewater would really bring the president woe...

...Probably the most telling error in the coverage devoted to Whitewater concerns Hillary Rodham Clinton's dealings with Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer...

...And maybe S&L operator Jim McDougal illegally funneled $15,000 into Clinton's 1984 campaign fund...

...Making small pretense of objectivity, Brock passes on every accusation troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry could dream up...

...That Clinton served six terms as Arkansas governor untouched by financial scandal seems to count for nothing...

...Of course, it is always possible there is a smoking gun in the documents Fiske has subpoenaed, but most veteran journalists here think that when all is said and done, Whitewateigate will turn out to be a giant snipe hunt—a waste of time and energy...

...It also fronts the only access road on the west side of the river between Crooked Creek and the Buffalo River, a distance of 30-odd river miles, most of it either National Forest or National Park land...

...But the smart money here in Little Rock says hold your bets...

...To be sure, the White House handling of Whitewater has done much to invite trouble...

...Omitted from the national conventional wisdom about Hale is almost everything locally significant...

...has jumped into—opening a Little Rock office and hiring a team of seven lawyers—has changed a great deal since Mark Twain was writing about it back in 1882, but it hasn't lost its zeal for low-grade political buffoonery...

...But just about the last thing that strikes the national press is the first thing that strikes the majority of Arkansans...

...Hillary Clinton should never have represented Madison before Arkansas regulators appointed by her husband, and critics who see it as symptomatic of a kind of moral arrogance are probably right Of course, much of the trouble the Clintons are now experiencing—including charges of cronyism among the Rose Law Firm alumni who populate the administration—would have been avoided if Hillary had long ago decided not to practice the well-heeled corporate law that allowed her cachet to be used by Rose to attract business with the implication of access to the governor...

...The answer, as folks say in real estate, is location, location, location...

...On what evidence...

...Indicted for bank fraud in another case, Hale, "a Clinton-appointed judge," as Time and The Washington Times have archly referred to him, tried to cop a plea by alleging that in 1986 Clinton pressured him to lend $300,000 to McDougal's then-wife, Susan...

...The coincidence that investigators searched Hale's Little Rock office on the same day Vince Foster killed himself has conspiracy theorists all worked up...

...And in fact, it was legal—or would have been had Madison Guaranty ever actually applied...

...Long rankled by its hillbilly caricature, many Arkansans had dared hope the Clinton presidency would change things...

...But doubtless aware that it couldn't satisfy disclosure requirements, the S&L never did...

...It is paralyzingly beautiful...

...Caught by the press padding his expense account for expensive dinner dates, Clark was tried, convicted, sentenced, and eventually sued for repayment...

...As it tends to do under attack, the Clinton administration has made a hash of Whitewater, drawing itself up in horror when it ought to be fighting back, changing tactics and altering its story almost daily, and generally doing all it can to invite the suspicion it so resents...

...Republicans smelled blood, somebody tacked on the dreaded "-gate" suffix, and business was soon booming again at the Capital Hotel bar...

...But at least the Spectator version gave us the whole carcass—hide, hair, and hoofs—instead of the more sanitized versions that appeared elsewhere...

...To wit, how unlikely it seems that Bill and Hillary Clinton—the depths of whose mutual political ambition can scarcely be fathomed by ordinary mortals—would go in the tank for so little money...

...Even so, it would have made a buzzard gag, as Huck Finn might put it, to witness the press' role in publicizing Clinton-hater Cliff Jackson's production of Troopergate last winter...

...A few telling examples: • Although reports in March indicated the Clintons may owe more taxes on Whitewater than they have already paid, earlier this year, Whitewater stories centered on why, if the Clintons lost $69,000, they didn't deduct enough from their taxes...

...It turns history on its head to suggest, as the reporters and the Republican critics do," writes longtime Arkansas political reporter Ernest Dumas in the Arkansas Times, "that regulators in the Reagan administration in the mid-80s were trying to shut down an insolvent S&L run by a rogue operator while the government of Bill Clinton connived to keep it afloat" Within a year of ha1 now-famous 'Dear Hillary" memo, Dumas shows, Schaffer gave Madison's board "a virtual ultimatum to remove McDougal, which it did...

...There was talk of whores, drunken orgies at duck hunting clubs, illegitimate children, abortions, hush money, even suicides...

...Coverage in the newsmagazines has been particularly incoherent, with weekly reminders of the story's forbidding complexity—as if reporters who can explicate Balkan ethnic conflicts find themselves stymied by a $230,000 real estate scam in the Ozarks...

...But if the journalists are so much smarter, why can't they get their facts straight...

...It has become customary in Gene Lyons lives in Little Rock and reviews books for Entertainment Weekly...

...What they wanted was low comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy...

...It took the FHLB another 14 months to do so...

...When all's said and done, Whitewatergate will likely peter out like previous Arkansas-based smears, and the national press will all turn simultaneously, like a school of fish, to the next damned thing...

...One prominent Arkansas politician was rumored to have had carnal knowledge of a convicted murderess inside her jail cell...

...Simmons took out the couple's tax returns from 1980 to 1990, checked the itemized deductions, and there it was: $41,000 interest on Whitewater loan payments over several years...

...And in Washington, the appearance of a Whitewater coverup—including removing files from Vincent Foster's office on the night of his suicide and the meetings between White House aides and Roger Altman, then the acting head of the Resolution Trust Corporation—was dumb, guaranteeing weeks of hostile coverage...

...Much Ado Well, one thing some of us know is that Whitewater is old news to local journalists and voters...

...But the $41,000 was there for any diligent reporter to find (Of course, now that the potential scandal is that the Clintons may have written off too much and not too little, the press may leap on Simmons' story as evidence of the Clintons' duplicity—even though the charge was completely different just two months ago...

...Or would sound investments have been allowed, too...

...In the process, very few stones were left unturned...

...This may be the first time," writes Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post, "that a politician's decision not to take a tax write-off is perceived as suspicious...

...He certainly had the motive and the opportunity, as the cops say...

...After all, what do we know...

...Not so, Schaffer told the weekly Arkansas Times...

...She's told this to New York Times reporters over and over again, she insists, and can't imagine why they take McDougal's word over hers...

...Schaffer then sent Hillary a memo agreeing that yes, in the abstract, the putative scheme was legal...

...a nasty, protracted circulation war spanned almost all of Clinton's time in public office...

...Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Arkansas that Whitewater special prosecutor Robert B . Fiske, Jr...

...Until 1991, Little Rock had two statewide daily newspapers...

...Given literacy levels among the lowest in the United States, this adds up to a populist brand of political warfare at about the level of professional wrestling...

...With a Peat Marwick audit showing the company insolvent in December 1987, Schaffer immediately asked the FHLB to take it over...

...During the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial primaries, for example, tales were widely circulated about three of the four serious candidates—the two Republicans, and, of course, Bill Clinton...

...Almost everybody, it seems, has a neighbor whose second cousin knows an old boy who worked on the governor's dentist's car, and he says...

...The universally accepted story that Hillary Rodham Clinton petitioned Schaffer to approve a preferred stock offering that would have allowed Madison to shore up its equity reserves, and that Schaffer did so, turns out to be false...

...His most recent book is Widow's Web (1993), a nonfiction account of two murders that shook Arkansas politics and journalism in the early eighties...

...BY GENE LYONS rhese Arkansas lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare...

...Nevertheless, the press loves a scandal, and just about every factual and logical error in the national press has run in a prosecutorial direction...

...Whatever their character flaws, nothing known about either Clinton indicates they'd break the law for money, even conceding Hillary's apparent self-pity about Clinton's small gubernatorial salary and her clear desire—remember she chose to work for the lucrative Rose firm—to make a higher salary herself...

...Clinton's Republican opponent, Sheffield Nelson, raised the issue during the 1990 gubernatorial campaign...

...In fact, it's hard to think of an Arkansas politician about whom scurrilous rumors haven't circulated...

...Question: Did Schaffer stipulate only "shaky real estate projects...

...Poor Arkansas...

...Then there's the David Hale connection...

...So if there had been a Whitewater scandal, chances are the Little Rock papers would have found it long ago...

...So far nobody's shown what an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette sports writer once called "a chinchilla of evidence" that the deed was done, much less that the Clintons knew about it...

...But what happened was that in 1985, Hillary wrote a brief asserting that the stock scheme was permissible under Arkansas law...

...advanced circles to badmouth David Brock and The American Spectator for "trivializing the professional efforts of the Los Angeles Times and CNN," as Frank Rich put it in The New York Times...

...Why the Clintons didn't write off the entire $69,000—the sum which Hillary, at least until mid-March, maintained they lost in the deal—is unclear...

...But then here come reporters from places like New Jersey, New York, and Maryland—those paragons of clean government—to portray the whole state as a kind of ethical Dogpatch...

...Well, 15 years ago the Clintons went into a real estate deal with a man who later bought an S&L, succumbed to manic-depressive illness, and ran it into the ground...

...The entire hook for a recent Time piece, for example, turned on the supposed mystery of how 230 acres of Whitewater land could escalate in value from $440 to $1,087 in a single year...

...Even the troopers' inability to affix a single date and time to any of the president's alleged indiscretions—thus making it impossible for him to defend himself, as any rookie cop would understand—failed to faze the national reporters...

...Only Clinton's Democratic opponent escaped suspicion...

...Unlike the roadless Ozark forest land that made up most of the original 3,600-acre tract surrounding Whitewater, the Clinton acreage has about a half mile frontage on the White River—arguably the prime trout fishing stream in the lower 48 states...