Is Little Rock Corrupting Washington? C'mon
Meacham, Jon
Is Little Rock Corrupting Washington? Cmon Take a look at the national capital and you'll find more sweetheart deals, conflicts of interest, and back-scratching than small town Southerners ever...
...It came from none other than his chief ethics officer, C. Boyden Gray...
...Nobody in the eighties was more inside-Washington than Baker, so if Washington insiderdom is automatically held in higher ethical regard than Southern mores, we are in real trouble...
...But the point is he is just as enmeshed in his world as the Clintonites are in theirs...
...Although Chelsea Clinton hasn't been accused of cronyism yet, the children of Washington's powerful are as well-skilled in the art of using family connections as their mothers...
...I think it sends the right message...
...As an invaluable source of leaks, Baker built up an enormous reservoir of good will...
...Lloyd Cutler...
...There are three things in life," Edward Bennett Williams, the consummate Washington lawyer, used to say...
...George Will commands about $20,000 for his appearances (Will's current wife, by the way, Mari Maseng Will, is a former Bush staffer whose p.r...
...When Ellen Prox-mire gave a surprise birthday party for her husband, then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, did she give it at their house...
...Washington has long been home to apparent conflicts of interest, lawyer overbilling, sweetheart deals, and scheming political spouses...
...Cmon Take a look at the national capital and you'll find more sweetheart deals, conflicts of interest, and back-scratching than small town Southerners ever dreamed of BY JON MEACHAM Increasingly, there is a sense in Washington that the Arkansas political culture does not work in the White House...
...It was a quiet deal, and became public only when Johnson tried to make Fortas chief justice in 1968...
...In 1970, after Clifford had been LBJ's last secretary of Defense, he served on the board of the National Bank of Washington...
...The second reason is the one that's more troubling...
...Yet there was little press comment on the Brown charges, or on the lobbying culture that could lead to Brown's straightfacedly defending one of the meetings with the Vietnamese—which occurred in the Commerce Department—as a "social visit...
...around the time John Tower was having problems with his nomination to become secretary of Defense...
...Yet save for a single report in the summer of 1992, nobody picked up on Bush's possible conflict of interest...
...Back to the presidents...
...On some days he logged more than 24 hours of billable work...
...Sununu ducked it, and Roberts failed to follow up...
...But a case study in how Washington insiders conducted themselves long before the Arkansans showed up—and in how the press is cowed largely into silence by Beltway satraps, Democrat or Republican—unfolded when George Bush named his old friend James Baker secretary of State in 1988...
...The counsel indignantly replied that he thought, for $20,000, he deserved a more complete explanation of the recommendation...
...Right...
...At the time, The Washington Monthly revealed that the miners' pension fund was deposited in a non-interest-bearing account, with the result that the money benefited the bankers and the union executives instead of black-lung victims and their widows and orphans...
...the terminology is "friends and relatives," not "cronies" and "back-scratching...
...In 1965, when Johnson pressured Fortas onto the Supreme Court (salary: $39,500, or a tenth what they had been making together), Agger was furious...
...Many political families indulge in comfortable deals...
...Appier billed those clients, in 1990 alone, for 5,325 hours...
...What, exactly, does it say about Washington that "no one would question" Cutler...
...At the time, Bill Clinton was the incumbent attorney general and ahead in the polls in his first campaign for governor...
...At that point, Baker, a master political infight-er, swung into action...
...The stock was held in a "qualified blind trust," which meant Baker knew what he owned, though not the current size of the asset...
...So the new man at Interior would owe Clifford a favor—or at least a returned phone call—for getting him the tickets, and would no doubt look favorably on Williams, the provider of the gift...
...First, his friends tried to pay for an inaugural party for Brown by attracting corporate sponsors at $10,000 each—corporations Brown would be dealing with officially at Commerce...
...Not the same as Washington...
...After hearing Clifford out on BCCI without question, King came back after commercial: King: Clark Clifford is our guest...
...They ended up canceling the bash...
...The Times was reportedly planning a Sunday story by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, then a Monday morning column by Safire...
...not on the take, perhaps, but marinated in a culture that discourages seeing how business is truly done...
...Is this world fading, as men like Clifford and Cutler grow old...
...Hardly a blip...
...That forced the Times' hand...
...This makes the press' condescension both ahistorical and hypocritical—and the more Washingtonians get away with assuming the capital's ethical murki-ness is due to the Arkansas invasion, the less they have to examine their own sins...
...And Boggs' other brother-in-law is a Princeton political scientist, offering a conduit to a major Ivy League university...
...News & World Report, thus affording Boggs' clients a subtle connection to major print organizations as well...
...In the eighties, Jamie Whitten, Jr., representing the barge industry, lobbied for the Ten-nessee-Tombigbee Waterway before his father's House Appropriations Committee...
...Son of a New York lawyer who was a partner of Mayor LaGuardia's, Cutler went to Yale and then Yale Law...
...He also allied himself with Edward Bennett Williams, the criminal lawyer and Redskins owner whose clients included Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Baker, John Connal-ly, The Washington Post, Oliver North, and Michael Milken...
...Consider this sequence of events, as reconstructed by The Washington Post's Walter Pincus in 1989: When Baker became Reagan's chief of staff in 1981, he owned $3.5 million worth of stock in Texas Commerce Bancshares Inc., which rose in value to $4.2 million by 1985, the year he switched jobs with Donald Regan to become secretary of the Treasury...
...Nor are all Washingtonians who are connected to other Washingtonians crude influence peddlers...
...Lobbying the vast new federal government the New Dealers had helped create and interpreting, for well-paying clients, the rules and regulations they had written while in office...
...the culture had taken care of its own...
...Over on "The McLaughlin Group," Eleanor Clift chimed in, "I think the White House has begun to turn the corner...
...Together, Fortas and Agger made about $300,000 in those years, or close to a million dollars a year in 1994 terms...
...Nothing has been charged or proven...
...Clinton's seventies' commodities speculation which, with the advice of a lawyer for Tyson Industries, turned, as a USA Today headline trumpeted, "$1,000 into $99,537...
...In exchange, Fortas had to attend a single annual meeting...
...Senator Fritz Hollings defended Brown's representation of the repressive Haitian Duvalier regime with this morally dubious point: "Let the record show that before I got to the Senate, I used to represent murderers...
...And at worst it's protective coloration for the people who schmooze along the Potomac for bigger money and higher stakes...
...firm represents the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Association...
...Murphy reports that two weeks to the day after the first check was sent, Fortas was writing the White House to boost two of Wolfson's companies—both of which were under federal investigation at the time...
...Laying blame elsewhere deflects attention from Washington, the country's real center of ethical sloppiness in which the press is thoroughly mired...
...In other words, the same rules he had been operating under in the eighties...
...And what was the new business of postwar Washington...
...two former Federal Reserve attorneys...
...He recused himself from Texas Commerce's direct affairs, but nevertheless was dramatically involved—as a Treasury secretary would be—in general banking matters, including testifying in favor of legislation that made interstate banking mergers easier...
...Reagan, the Washington press was charmed and conned by her bof-fo turn at a Gridiron Club dinner as "Secondhand Rose," a spoof of her own expensive tastes...
...I think it sends a message that I am someone who is a good advocate, who gets things done...
...When Brown, a lawyer/lobbyist with Patton, Boggs & Blow and former Democratic chairman, was nominated to be Clinton's secretary of Commerce, he sailed through a three-hour confirmation hearing...
...Nothing has been charged and the government has, to my knowledge, not said anything...
...It had all the elements of a major scandal: money (the holdings...
...Claiborne Pell, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote Baker an almost sheepish letter asking about the stock...
...Take a hard look at what the Washington media say about the Clintonites and you cannot escape the not-so-subtle disparaging message—a cultural dismissiveness that says, Oh, what else can you expect from a crowd of hillbillies...
...In setting the terms for the fee—ostensibly to compensate him for occasional advice to Wolfson's philanthropic foundation and companies—Fortas arranged for Agger to receive the $20,000 each year after his death...
...But when asked about his own fees to speak to lobbying groups, Kondracke refused to disclose his finances, har-rumphing that it would be "an exercise in voyeurism and an invasion of privacy...
...Its leading lights include veteran fixers Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss, and, until last year, Ruth Harkin, the wife of Senator Tom Harkin...
...LBJ became a millionaire only after he went to the modestly salaried Senate...
...The Times wrote, "Their behavior may not have been illegal, but it was reckless and politically unattractive...
...Morton Kondracke, of "The McLaughlin Group," is another journalist whose immersion in the political culture is so complete that it is hard to separate him from the people he is supposed to cover...
...In important ways, the rules of the Arkansas bar are actually much tougher than the ones that apply in D.C...
...You could argue that 1970 predates Watergate and the rise of a more investigative, informed press...
...They took a long time to fire Bernie Nussbaum," remarked the Times' Gwen Ifill on "Washington Week," "and when they finally did, they had to bring in someone who no one in Washington would question...
...What is spit on in one case is venerated in another...
...But consider Thomas Hale "Tommy" Boggs, Jr., of Patton, Boggs & Blow, arguably the most influential lawyer-lobbyist in Washington and the access his 1,500 active clients could get through his kith and kin...
...Allen even bought up all the surrounding land to make sure the Eisenhowers wouldn't be bothered by potential neighbors or development...
...His firm currently works for Aetna and the American Petroleum Institute, among other blue-chip clients, who retain the firm not only for sound legal work but for Cutler's cachet and connections...
...So while it's virtually impossible to demonstrate quid pro quos, the net cultural effect is a capital atmosphere of intimacy and shared interests in maintaining the status quo...
...and one high-level Senate staffer who was also a former assistant secretary of Defense...
...Meanwhile, Baker continued to be active in Third World debt issues while he was a knowing stockholder in Chemical, the third-largest U.S...
...Research assistance for this article was provided by Stryk Thomas...
...But the clear connections between Bush's private wealth and the friends he named to high office have never been the target of cultural or pejorative comment...
...The Scripps Howard news service identified a dozen such congressional children who were lobbying in Washington, including Laurie Michel, the daughter of House Republican Leader Bob Michel, who represents a French drug company, and N. Hunter Johnston, son of Senate Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Bennett Johnston, who lobbies for General Atomics Corp...
...Now I'll have to make all the money in the family and support him...
...But the enormous irony in assuming Little Rock is corrupting the national capital is this: If the Arkansans ever needed a how-to guide on operating in an ethical twilight, they would look to Washington, not Baton Rouge or Atlanta...
...William Appier, of the 500-lawyer firm of Mc-Dermott, Will & Emery, which is a registered lobbyist for 51 corporations and trade groups, including the Electronic Industries Association of Japan, recently stole $1.1 million from his firm in legal fees and another $16,000 from clients to pay for meals and travel...
...This is largely because Bush and his friends, especially Baker, are Washington creatures, and what they did—while no different from what Mrs...
...Even Eisenhower had exceedingly generous rich friends such as Robert Woodruff, the chairman of Coca-Cola, and George Allen, a Washington millionaire, and a circle including two cattlemen, two oilmen, two distillers, two golf champions, two realtors, and three bank presidents...
...Clifford landed Phillips through its chairman, "Boots" Adams, whom Clifford met through a mutual friend—Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr...
...This second wave also coincided with a sharp rise in Washington's cost of living, which made well-paid lawyers and lobbyists all the more socially prominent, since they were the people who could afford the high cost of housing and fill the space created by that era's office building boom in Washington...
...But journalists are forgetting—or, worse, simply not noting—that the back-scratching arts the Clintons are accused of importing from down South have been practiced here with unmatched skill for years...
...So even though Whitewater will inevitably fall off the radar screen (there are already signs of that happening) Washington's patronizing disdain for Southern clubbiness—and the appearance of possible conflicts in two-career marriages—is laughable coming from pundits like Fineman, whose wife, Amy Nathan, practices with Akin Gump, a well-connected, socially important law firm that has a very permeable wall between lawyering and lobbying...
...Once again, it casts a bad light on their private lives in Little Rock...
...That he was suffering from "narcissistic personality disorder...
...It's not the same...
...Take a look at Cutler's career, however, as Mark Green, Ralph Nader's then-colleague, did in 1975, and mostly what you notice is that he is plugged in to every conceivable niche of Washington life, Democrat or Republican...
...Dumping on Little Rock—"that could never happen here"—is at best a distraction...
...Reared in a thrifty home, married to a spouse with a casual attitude about money, she developed a perhaps excessive concern for her family's finances...
...And this alone is a stunning story in this capital city...
...Washington assumption: Hillary's greed led her to take advantage of her husband's position in a tiny capital where it was business-as-usual for people with interests before the state to help politicians with their personal finances...
...As a partner in Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Cutler has made millions representing corporations like General Motors, IBM, and CBS...
...Roberts is married to Steven V. Roberts, formerly of The New York Times and now of U.S...
...For example, when yet another veteran Washingtonian, Lloyd Bentsen, was in the Senate, he tried to found a fundraising breakfast where supporters could pony up $10,000 apiece for eggs and a chat with the then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee...
...For example, in a 1987 meeting with the Brazilian finance minister, who was at the time urging Third World debtors to default, Baker strongly urged the opposite course—which obviously advanced the interests of debt-holders, especially Chemical...
...When Boggs' father, Hale, was in Congress (1947 to 1973), a client could buy some access to the powerful gentleman from Louisiana and the later House Majority leader...
...It might not have been as good, however, if Bush had not become vice president when he did...
...Brown, like BCCI, shrewdly hired a lawyer who knew the inside ropes: Reid Weingarten, a former Justice Department white-collar crime prosecutor who successfully put away John Jenrette in Abscam, among others...
...the Coast Guard proposes a rule requiring a second hull to protect against oil spills...
...It's the god-damnedest thing," Agger said to Johnson aide Douglass Cater and his wife at a White House reception...
...Steadily, doing well financially replaced doing good as Washington's primary cultural force...
...But in February, on the Friday before the Times published, Pincus and Bob Woodward of the Post got wind of the competition's plans and called Gray, who cooperated in a preemptive story—one that was softer than the Times'' would have been and which focused on the fact that Gray, as White House counsel, was reluctant to put his assets in a blind trust—that ran in the Post on Saturday...
...Is there room for both of you in this administration...
...three former federal prosecutors...
...Appier, a former Justice Department lawyer, asked clients—including companies he represented before the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission—to send checks for his services directly to him, not the firm...
...For example, Margaret Carlson's Time story focused, amazingly, not on Baker's conflict but on Gray's non-problem: "Last week Bush got a whiff of trouble in what he had promised would be a squeaky clean administration...
...They're on a first-name basis with each other...
...The Bakerites were probably gambling that the distinction would be buried, still embarrassing Gray and shutting him up about Baker's holdings...
...Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times, on the day Webster Hubbell resigned Washington is simply shocked—shocked—at the loose morals the upstart crowd from the South has brought to the capital...
...It goes on and on...
...Baker answered by fax, saying, "I will recuse myself from participation, on a case by case basis, in any particular matter in which, in my judgment, it is desirable for me to do so...
...The press' reaction...
...New Dealers came to the capital to do good, but in the forties men like Tommy Corcoran, James Rowe, and Abe Fortas—men once driven by idealism to defeat the Depression and Hitler—left government to go into private practice...
...And of course, it was possible that one of Wolfson's cases would end up affected by a decision of the Court...
...And while Mrs...
...Of course, this does not excuse the Clintonites for things they may have done wrong in Arkansas or in Washington...
...The New York Times editorialized, "[T]he genius of the Federal system does not reside in importing to Washington the faults and idiosyncrasies of the state capitals...
...They have the money...
...Both approved...
...He is new here and he has not seen the Redskins play and is anxious to do so.' In Washington, still culturally deprived in the 1960s, the hottest draw in town was the pro football team, and the man who controlled the best seats was Ed Williams...
...That's all here, in Washington, not off in Dixie...
...Nope—at Tommy Boggs...
...They also advised him on his other investments, including purchasing the Gettysburg farm, refurbishing its colonial farmhouse, and equipping it with livestock...
...Washington assumption: Before the Clintons arrived from Dogpatch, official Washington was a sophisticated, ethical nirvana...
...He advised the incoming Clinton administration on which lawyers to hire for regulatory agencies that monitor industries Wilmer, Cutler represents...
...The bank was then controlled by the United Mine Workers and its president, Tony Boyle, who was widely suspected of—and eventually convicted of—having arranged the murder of his predecessor, Jock Yablon-ski...
...For one, it's easy for reporters who grew up with "The Andy Griffith Show," dimly remember reading All the King's Men in school, or who have seen Blaze, the wonderful Paul Newman movie about Earl Long and his stripper girlfriend...
...In 1988, a new Justice Department ruling required such a waiver for any holding that might pose an appearance of a conflict of interest, effectively changing the rules under which Baker had been playing in the Reagan administration...
...Clifford became a trusted Kennedy family lawyer after he forced ABC to retract Drew Pearson's claim on "The Mike Wallace Interview" that Profiles in Courage had been ghostwritten...
...Webb Hubbell...
...In 1942, Cutler quit his Wall Street firm to come to Washington to work in FDR's Lend Lease program and has never left...
...Phillips Petroleum...
...Sounds a lot like what the press is calling "incestuous" in Little Rock, doesn't it...
...Carlson passed over Baker in a single clause...
...No one in half a century has been a better example of this than Clark Clifford, who was Truman's closest aide but left the White House in 1950 to follow in Tommy Corcoran's footsteps as a private lawyer...
...And later last year, a Vietnamese businessman claimed that Brown had been paid $700,000 after Clinton's election to help lift the trade embargo against Vietnam...
...Lott quickly ran down Brown's laundry list of influence-peddling, concluding: Lott: How do you respond to the fact that all of this background and these things perhaps send the wrong message as we begin with this new administration...
...They're running out of cronies, and that's a good thing," Clift opined on "McLaughlin...
...He has counseled many...
...Fortas' old firm, Arnold & Porter, one of the city's most eminent, is just one example...
...Nevertheless, note the press' swooning reaction to the second coming of Lloyd Cutler...
...Not a word of disapproval about Baker's vast potential conflict of interest as a federal official, which was the real, substantive sin at issue...
...The seaminess of that place attaches itself to the Clintons through Hubbell, somebody they brought with them....' No matter how "seamy" Little Rock law might appear to be, Washington is worse...
...Baker the insider was unscathed...
...California friends bought the Reagans a retirement house in Bel Air...
...Gray indicated that he would not waive the rule and would probably ask Baker to sell the stock...
...A major source of press outrage this season has been Mrs...
...The implication is that cronyism is an exotic dish just recently imported to the capital...
...Congress' reaction...
...For one, law firms in Arkansas are not allowed to set up working partnerships with non-lawyers (read: lobbyists...
...In 1952, Clifford went to the Democratic National Convention to work for the nomination not of Adlai Stevenson but of...
...King: OK...
...Brown: Well, I would disagree, Senator, that it sends the wrong message...
...In The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot wrote this spring, "Far from shedding the Arkansas political culture, the Clintons have brought it with them, complete with cronies, a mind-set for cutting ethical corners, and the arrogance that often comes from governing a one-party state...
...But just because the First Lady could joke about it does not mean the story should have gone away...
...When Newsweek finally got to the bank stock story almost five weeks after Pincus broke it, it too was entirely spun in Baker's favor...
...Clinton may indeed be guilty of middle-class, yuppie greed, her machinations aren't on par with what happens in Washington—a point the press has consistently failed to make...
...Washington assumption: Only Arkansas lawyers, especially from the Rose Law Firm, are used to loosey-goosey ethics, depend on personal connections, and overbill clients...
...Baker's camp apparently tipped off The New York Times' William Safire to the fact that Gray, while serving as counselor to Vice President Bush, had been paid as much as $50,000 a year to serve as chairman of his family's $500 million communications company...
...The book is Counsel to the President...
...When Clifford was indicted in 1991 for allegedly fronting for the drug-profiteering and money-laundering BCCI, The Washington Post's Haynes Johnson remarked on PBS, "One of the great monuments of our times, Mr...
...By the early seventies, as a result of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Richard Nixon's largely unacknowledged continuation of Johnson's federal regulatory zeal (the EPA and OSHA were founded in these Republican years), lawyering's triumph as the capital's main occupation was complete...
...It's no wonder, then, that middle-of-the-road reporters—the Robertses are just two examples—are so deeply embedded in the folkways of their city that they are inclined to overlook its shortcomings...
...Kerr Dog This is not surprising, given the way business is conducted in Washington and the values it prizes...
...Clinton did with cattle futures and her sundry mutual funds—struck journalists as ordinary establishment business dealings...
...Appier is in the process of being disbarred...
...On "Inside Washington," National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg sighed this spring, "Everybody scratches everybody's back in Little Rock...
...His first client...
...In May 1987, Chemical Bank of New York took over Texas Commerce under those new laws in what was, at the time, an unprecedented banking merger...
...Joe Cosby, a Washington agent who handles journalist bookings, says lecture invitations require that the reporter "be on television" and "be conservative...
...It's a tiny little community...
...The deal had to be approved by the Federal Reserve Board, and parts of it had to pass muster by two federal officers who had been appointed by then-Secretary of the Treasury James Baker: the comptroller of the currency, Robert L. Clarke, a Houston friend and political ally of Baker's, and FDIC chairman William Sei-dman, with whom Baker had served in the Ford administration...
...Nevertheless, thanks to press secretary Sheila Tate's p.r...
...For that to be true, he had to have worked more than 106 hours for 50 weeks (he took a two-week vacation in the summer), or a total of eight hours a day on weekends and 18 hours a day on weekdays...
...Mentor to a generation of lawyers, including Gray and Zoe Baird (the former, Bush's White House counsel...
...Once a New Dealer, he later represented the auto companies in trying to fend off safety laws...
...And remember Nancy Reagan's habit of keeping gifts of designer dresses, jewelry, perfumes, handbags, and watches...
...According to Stephen E. Ambrose, the leading Eisenhower scholar, "the gang" made Ike a member at Augusta National, built him a cottage there, and installed a stocked bass pond for fishing...
...Ifill, of the Times, said, "in the world that is Arkansas politics and in the legal world, a lot of that intersected...
...Bush, head of Reagan's Task Force on Regulatory Relief, kills the rule after Hollywood and others lobby against it...
...Fortas, finding himself facing impeachment rather than promotion, resigned...
...They ran their Gray piece in the late Saturday editions (which are not distributed nationally), and Safire wrote a snarling column the next week chiding Gray for media manipulation...
...On CNN's "Capital Gang," Robert Novak called Rose "the rogue law firm in Little Rock...
...Money, power, and public relations...
...As a vice presidential aide, what Gray did was legal, but would have been barred if Gray had worked for the president...
...investigators and reporters by lying and suppressing evidence is that Congress found in 1991 that "Most of what BCCI's lawyers, lobbyists, and political advisors did was within the standard bounds of legal practice in Washington...
...As a lawyer, Clifford had to know the trustees' fiduciary responsibility to the miners was to ensure their pension fund was invested to their maximum benefit, not for the benefit of the bank that was paying Clifford to serve as its respectable front-man...
...Because I said so," Clifford retorted—billing the company for another $5,000...
...Baker: Nice try, Sam...
...the minutiae of Whitewater will probably join Spiro Ag-new trivia in the political junkyard...
...a former senator (John Culver, Democrat of Iowa...
...Nevertheless, it was a sexy story: the ethics czar with an ethical problem of his own...
...Many coincidences of blood, marriage, and career are just that—coincidences...
...Clinton has been cast in the Whitewater drama as Lady Macbeth obsessing over the family checkbook, it is old hat in Washington for the wives of prominent men to worry about money...
...According to a 1988 story by Pincus and Woodward, Bush and Baker each put up $50,000 (a much lower average investment than others in the enterprise) and, by 1992, Hollywood had netted Bush $240,000, making it one of his most profitable personal ventures...
...cronyism (the appointments of Clarke and Seidman...
...The other was by Sam Donaldson, who asked Baker a who's-up-who's-down question about Gray, who had also criticized Baker's agreement to clear Central American policy with Congress: Donaldson: C. Boyden Gray, a few weeks ago, embarrassed you publicly by calling attention to your bank stock...
...Congressman John Dingell of Michigan watches out for the interests of the Detroit automakers, most recently derailing legislation that would have required more energy-efficient vehicles, and is married to a General Motors executive...
...In fact, BCCI's help in Washington makes Little Rock look like a kindergarten pageant: It included Clifford...
...He found a cash cushion in a $20,000-a-year consulting fee from Louis Wolfson, a Florida businessman who was under investigation by the SEC for alleged stock improprieties...
...Had these deals been made on the golf course in Little Rock, instead of Burning Tree or Kenneb-unkport, you can bet the cultural tone would have been different...
...in fact, Baker spent several hours a week with reporters, an investment that paid off when the worm turned...
...But the larger question is why the press is content to caricature the South so broadly...
...instincts, away it went...
...The rap against Little Rock is that everybody seems so cozy—politicians, lawyers, and businessmen grow up together, go to school together, marry each other, and then move in the same circles...
...Yet during the Reagan administration, no reporter ever pointed out Baker's ownership of the bank stock, and he never mentioned it in his confirmation hearings for the job at either State or Treasury, although the subject of Third World debt came up at both...
...Foir one, it's easy for reporters whose experience of the South is limited to dim recollections of All the King's Men, Blaze, or "The Andy Griffith Show" to fall back on those stereotypes to juice up their copy or talk-show comments...
...These are all based on newspaper stories and magazine stories...
...Hollywood Marine manufactures "single hull" barges...
...You sold it at that point...
...But how can journalists who make at least $5,000 a pop to yap before trade groups be expected to challenge the capital culture that has treated them so well...
...Even Republican Senator Trent Lott tossed softballs, telling Brown, "I have to say that there's no doubt in my mind you're qualified by experience and background to do this job...
...Clifford: Correct...
...Kondracke attacked Bentsen's idea in a column...
...Hillary was exceedingly ambitious for herself and her husband, and was the main family breadwinner for years," argued a Newsweek cover story in mid-March...
...The larger question is why the press caricatures the South so broadly...
...But while Mrs...
...That he was an "icon" here tells us much about what Washington values...
...And Pat Buchanan made nearly $1 million speaking and writing the year before he ran for president...
...William Kennedy—an I-told-you-so sense has emerged among the Washington media...
...To understand how accepted Cutler's way of doing business is here, you have to understand the history of Washington since the New Deal, when lawyers were among those who answered FDR's call to public service in the thirties...
...Little Rock culture was rooted in an informal way of doing business, in which behind-the-scenes relationships played, at least as large a role as the evident formal structure of power...
...lender to those countries, with $4.5 billion in outstanding loans...
...What's scariest about the 10 years the bank eluded U.S...
...In the fifties and sixties, for example, the former New Dealer and Washington lawyer Abe Fortas' wife, Carolyn Agger, herself a lawyer, urged her husband, at the time the guiding force of his firm and an informal advisor to LBJ, to stay out of government in order to represent lucrative clients such as Western Union and Sun Oil...
...So there is a ready store of conventional wisdom about the South to juice up copy or talk-show comments...
...The question now is whether any of those pressures led her to cross ethical lines in various legal and business deals—and whether she used her husband's role as governor of Arkansas to help her to do so...
...On ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley," there were only two mentions during Baker's season of scandal...
...We should also say, on that banking thing we were discussing, these are only allegations we are dealing with here...
...the appearance of using public office for private gain (the meetings attended while Baker knew he still had a stake in ChemBank...
...Now, he is complaining that you have made a [foreign policy] deal that is wrong...
...They all go to the Little Rock Country Club and the bar at the Capital Hilton...
...A corporate general counsel in the Midwest called Clifford to ask what his company should do about a piece of tax legislation...
...The major reason for this was that Baker had mastered the art of stroking the Washington press corps in his days in the Reagan administration...
...After an early flirtation with criticizing Mrs...
...The appointment of Lloyd Cutler is a very good one...
...All in a day's work, in other words...
...According to Fortas biographer Bruce Allen Murphy, they spent it fast: They had a house in Geoige-town, a vacation house in Westport, Connecticut, a Rolls Royce, and Agger spent vast sums on jewelry, art, and 150 pairs of shoes...
...Hubbell, an Arkansan hired gun, was scorned for being connected...
...A few weeks later, Clifford answered, "Nothing," and sent along a bill for $20,000...
...Under this kind of extreme domestic pressure, it is easy to understand why Fortas cast around for a few extra dollars after he went on the Court...
...Tommy's sister is Cokie Roberts, of National Public Radio and ABC News, so there are two major media outlets right there...
...We can't afford it...
...Washington assumption: In a small Southern state, everybody knows everybody else—politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, journalists—and that intimacy leads to a go-along, get-along atmosphere...
...In 1990, The Wall Street Journal described how lobbyist Clifford Gibbons, son of the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, brokered campaign contributions and access between his clients and his father...
...And Tommy's mother, Lindy, served in the House herself from 1973 to 1991, meaning she might be reachable, too...
...Mosbacher later said that inviting Bush and Baker into the deal in the late seventies was "not a big favor, but a favor" because the barge deal turned out to be "a very, very good investment...
...Cutler, a Washingtonian hired gun, is lionized...
...Note that all this happened in Washington, not in Little Rock, and that at the beginning of the Bush administration, two intimates of the new president were calling each other out for apparent conflicts that existed while they were both high-ranking officers in the federal government...
...So the overwhelming cultural urge is not to queer a good deal by calling for what mainstream Washington would view as whacked-out, naive reforms, like a single payer health system...
...Firms such as Arnold, Fortas & Porter, Clifford & Warnke, and Pat-ton, Boggs & Blow became the center of respectable Washington life, even more so than politics, since administrations come and go but the firms endure...
...There the matter dropped, and the show bantered on...
...Nor have other presidents passed up chances to accept expensive gifts or to get rich quick...
...Of course, Cutler is a good lawyer, and he represents respectable liberal organizations like Common Cause as well as his mega-clients...
...On "Washington Week in Review," Newsweek's Howard Fineman said, "Arkansas is the kind of big and basically poor state where maybe 200 people run the whole show...
...In his book The Superlawyers, Joseph Goulden relates this tale about the courtly Clifford's practice...
...And it tells us how poorly the press perceives Washington's systemic faults...
...Later that week in February 1989, Pincus wrote the first Baker/ChemBank stock story...
...Not in the least, and the next Clark Clifford is no Southerner but a consummate Washingtonian born and raised in New York: Ron Brown...
...in Washington, much of downtown is full of just that kind of arrangement...
...That is Washington's creed...
...Fine—but look at the eighties, when BCCI got away with murder...
...Kerr, a Capitol Hill baron who, like the Duke of Newcastle, reveled in the corruption of other men and once proclaimed, "I represent myself first, the state of Oklahoma second, and the people of the United States third—and don't you forget it...
...In 1993, the country had two vivid reminders of the kinds of things Brown used to get done for clients...
...They've got the power...
...Baker did sell the stock a few days later...
...Most of them work in downtown Little Rock within about a mile of each other...
...The fawning accorded Clifford for his six years in government (five with Truman and one, 1968, with Johnson), compared to more than 50 in private practice was never more evident than on CNN's "Larry King Live," where Clifford was flacking his memoirs at the height of the scandal...
...There was no "Nightline" investigation, little jawing on the Sunday morning shows, no calls for a special prosecutor...
...The first was in a question from Cokie Roberts to John Sununu ("How ethical is this administration...
...His defense...
...As Arkansan after Arkansan has died, resigned, or been demoted—Vincent Foster, Jr...
...Although Justice eventually cleared Brown of any indictable crime, he did have three meetings with a Vietnamese representative that his spokesman at first denied...
...The point remains, however, that Baker, not Gray, was the real culprit...
...In the Times, describing Webster Hubbell's resignation amid charges of overbilling and possible conflicts of interest, Maureen Dowd wrote: 'This is a blow to the Clintons, particularly Hillary,' said a top administration official who is close to the couple...
...The Clintons may end up lucky...
...His scam...
...the latter, Clinton's first nominee to be attorney general), Cutler navigates Washington as if it were, well, a small state capital...
...Since he is presumably redeeming the Clinton administration from its small town ways, he must be like Clarence the angel coming to save James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life—a visitor from the Heavenly City...
...CBS White House correspondent Rita Braver is married to Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer who has done personal work for the Clintons...
...Headlined "Off on the Wrong Foot," the piece, from top to bottom, criticized Gray for his "naivete" and "lousy political instincts" for taking on Baker...
...When Bush, for example, was planning his first run for president in 1978, his friend (and later secretary of Commerce) Robert Mosbacher cut Bush and a third friend, Baker, into a lucrative deal involving a barge company called Hollywood Marine Inc...
...This is a world, in other words, for people who won't rock the boat too much, and conservatives are world-class non-boat-rockers...
...In addition, Bush collected $387,000 in directors' fees in the late seventies from four corporate boards (one of which was Purolator Inc., whose chairman, Nicholas Brady, became Bush's Treasury secretary...
...Clark Clifford, who is an icon among virtually everyone who lives here, has had his own problems and is now fighting to repatriate his reputation at the age of 84...
...Cut to 1981...
...According to people familiar with the situation, after the '88 election, Baker sent an intermediary to ask Boyden Gray, whom Bush had put in charge of ethics decisions for the transition, whether Baker could continue to hold the bank stock...
...Jenrette, you may recall, was the congressman who seduced his wife, Rita (who later became a Playboy model) on the Capitol steps...
...and the line between public money and private business is very fuzzy...
...In a revealing note about Washington life, Evan Thomas, Williams' biographer, reports that Clifford once wrote Williams, '"I appreciate your kindness in supplying the football tickets to the Solicitor of the Interior Department...
...BCCI, you see, was not Clifford's first ethical slip-up...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 5
