New Book Traces Whitewater Affair
James and Susan McDougal tried more than once to cut Bill Clinton free of his ties to an embarrassing Arkansas land deal gone sour, but Hillary Rodham Clinton refused each time, according to a new book on Whitewater.
After an Arkansas newspaper mentioned the Whitewater Development Co. in a list of delinquent taxpayers in 1985, Hillary Clinton hotly refused to sign a blank stock transfer certificate Whitewater partner Susan McDougal set before her, according to excerpts of author James B. Stewart’s “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries.”
“No! Jim told me this was going to pay for college for Chelsea,” the Clintons’ daughter, Stewart quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in excerpts appearing in Time magazine’s March 18 issue. “I still expect to do that.”
Blood Sport exposes no “smoking gun” in the Whitewater affair, but attempts to make sense of a series of arcane and confusing issues that have been reported in the press.
In an introduction to the excerpts, Stewart writes that Hillary Clinton’s friend Susan Thomases, a Manhattan lawyer, approached him about doing a book in order to clear the president’s and the first lady’s names.
He met with Hillary Clinton, who initially agreed to cooperate, for about an hour and a half in April 1994.
“As time passed and vague promises of meetings never led to anything, I realized that the Clintons were most likely not going to cooperate,” he said, although he doesn’t know why.
Mark Fabiani, the White House’s spokesman on Whitewater matters, said he had not read the book.
“But based on all the reports that we have heard it appears that the book, while adding some new detail, doesn’t add many basic facts to what is already known about Whitewater,” Fabiani said Saturday.
No investigation so far has turned up any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons, he said.
The book also reveals personal information about the Clintons, including Hillary Clinton’s early doubts about her marriage.
“According to friends of the couple, … Hillary expressed doubts about the future of her marriage, and as a result, whether she could count on Bill to support her and a child,” Stewart writes in the book. “Their marriage, now in its third year, was by the Clintons’ subsequent admission, at a low point. If Gennifer Flowers can be believed, she and Bill were in the passionate, early stages of their affair during the summer of 1978.”
People close to the Clintons were aware of other women in Clinton’s life, Stewart said in the book. “They believed that Bill had been unfaithful to Hillary even during their engagement.”
Hillary Clinton continued to worry after she and Clinton moved to the governor’s mansion in January 1979, he said.
Clinton told Susan McDougal that he loved being governor because of all the female attention it brought.
xxxx UNCOVERED In the book, “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries,” scheduled for release March 15, the author lays out the Clintons’ tangled Arkansas business dealings, their money-eating investment in Whitewater and their dogged attempts to keep details away from the public eye.