Respond

Jan/Feb 1999 - Volume 31 Issues 1&2

Roman Genn

Richard Mellon Scaife may well have been the leading backer of the get-Clinton movement, having sunk roughly $2 million into the American Spectator's Arkansas Project which produced "Troopergate", and its star, "Paula." Recently he told George's John F. Kennedy, Jr. an anecdote that suggested Clinton had arranged for the crash of Ron Brown's plane: "Listen, he can order people done away with at his will. He's got the entire federal government behind him."

Remember our December item about how generously Ken Starr paid Ronald Rotunda for his service to the Independent Counsel after Rotunda had filed a Supreme Court brief on behalf of Paula Jones? Rotunda, an Illinois law professor, was supposed to be advising Starr on "ethics and constitutional issues." But according to Joe Conason of the New York Observer, he billed for several trips to Little Rock and Washington, D.C., to consult with deputy prosecutor Hickman Ewing and Jackie Bennett on what is described only as a "special project." When Conason asked Rotunda just what was his mysterious "special project," Rotunda refused to answer, citing grand jury secrecy. You have to love the way the Starr gang invokes grand jury secrecy whenever it protects possible misdeeds of their own, but constantly leaked grand jury testimony to reporters like ABC's Jackie Judd and The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt when the leaks could hurt Bill Clinton.

In his new book Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, Bryan Burrough compares Johnson Space Center Director George Abbey to Rasputin and J. Edgar Hoover, alleging that astronauts are so afraid of incurring his displeasure and losing their chance to fly that they hesitate to mention possible safety problems. But if Burrough has a villain or two he also has his heroes. One, astronaut Michael Foale, is depicted as a hero for, among other things, showing the Russian crew - whose morale was crashing because of the many Mir mishaps - the movie "Apollo 13" with its story of frightening problems overcome.

The jurors who acquitted Susan McDougal in the Zubin Mehta case "expressed outrage that the case came to court," reports the Associated Press, "calling it a waste of taxpayer money." As for the 18 months she has spent in jail courtesy of Ken Starr and his new charges against her for obstructing justice, McDougal says, "He says he's cleared the president of Whitewater charges. So what was I obstructing?"

When Rep. Dan Burton goes to the House barbershop he takes along, according to The Hill, "his private duffel bag of tools - scissors, comb, and electric razor." The congressman is said to be concerned about AIDS.

As you may have noticed, this magazine has been pretty consistent in its opposition to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. But there is one point the Republicans make that does gnaw at us. Sometimes military personnel are punished for offenses similar to the president's. Now there's an example involving the Foreign Service. Jerry Seper of The Washington Times has come up with the case of an ambassador who was fired because of allegations that he had made sexual overtures to two of his female subordinates. "The firing," writes Seper, "followed complaints that he repeatedly groped, kissed, fondled, touched, and called them at their homes despite numerous requests that he leave them alone." One of our office's more resolute defenders of the president points out that there is no evidence that the president ever persisted after one request that he desist. But the similarity still bothers the rest of us.

Veteran Washington observers will tell you the White House National Security Adviser and the Secretary of State are natural bureaucratic enemies, and illustrate with stories of classic struggles between Henry Kissinger and William Rogers in the first Nixon administration and between Cy Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski during Jimmy Carter's tenure. Now Madeline Albright is said to be upset that Sandy Berger is getting the last word with Bill Clinton, too often putting a dovish twist to what The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland calls her "muscular policies." The latest example is the last-minute cancellation of the bombing of Iraq that was scheduled for Nov. 14. Albright is suspected, according to the National Journal, of leaking the news that Clinton "rejected the recommendation of his vice president and all but one of his national security advisers."

What member was behind that last-minute attempt to expand the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry into the area of alleged Clinton campaign finance abuses? None other than Henry Hyde. Egged on by his personally-selected chief counsel, David Schippers, Hyde, in the words of The Washington Post, "proceeded on his own," without consulting other members, to seek evidence of naughty Clinton fund-raising practices. When it turned out to be a dry hole, the chairman didn't even blush. We've got a score to settle with the sources who told us this guy was fair-minded. He has been consistently partisan.

Another prejudice we have to confess is one in favor of Hillary Clinton. We think she's almost totally nifty. In fact our only complaint, other than that her health care plan was too complicated, is her proclivity for stonewalling without which there probably would never have been a revival of the Independent Counsel law and the emergence of Ken Starr as the Clintons' tormentor. Our best guess is that she feared that she would be exposed as having either underestimated the hours she worked for Madison Guaranty or overestimated the billable hours. The latter is more probable (as any lawyer can tell you) and was probably done by her firm (again, as any lawyer can tell you). So she was trying to hide a very small sin. Why? Friends say she feels any concession will be greedily seized by the Republicans as an admission of serious guilt.

We did not sympathize with Hillary's fear until the morning of December 10 when we picked up the conservative Washington Times and saw how it chose to treat the concession made by a White House attorney that "reasonable people" could have concluded that Clinton gave false testimony. That's what we thought the Republicans had said he had to do in order to be forgiven. But how did the Times play it? "In what was supposed to be a strong finish to the president's defense, the White House instead found itself ceding significant ground to Republicans who had long been stymied in their attempts to wrest concessions from Mr. Clinton's defenders." The headline over the story read: "Clinton's defense team stumbles en route to panel's vote with concessions on veracity."

~Susan Threadgill