Whitewater Book The Same Old Story

The Clintons are right, after all., Four years of frenzied digging into Whitewater - all the investigative reporting, all the congressional hearings, all the work by the independent counsel, all the midnight oil of pundits, and now a new book, “Blood Sport,” by a journalistic gumshoe, James B. Stewart - lead to the same conclusion.

Whitewater does boil down to one failed land deal, just as the Clintons have always claimed.

It is the very cheesiness of the deal that makes the story so sad and depressing. The scandal is embarrassingly un-presidential in scale.

In Arkansas, the Ivy-League, Hilton-Head crusaders did what other politicians have done - sweetheart deals amounting to chump change. In Washington, they resisted (and resented) accountability, sending off aides, ignorant of the facts, to defend them. (Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Margaret Williams, now owes a quarter-million dollars in legal bills - more than the whole of the Whitewater investment.)

As though Pat and Bay Buchanan were not enough, “Blood Sport” reaffirms the portrait of the Clintons as Tom and Daisy Buchanan - careless about using people, reckless about the rules.

When The New York Times’ Jeff Gerth first started looking into the Clintons’ finances in 1992, Hillary Rodham Clinton did not feel she had done anything wrong - despite her cavalier behavior toward legal and financial obligations. Instead, she blamed politics or gender prejudice or cynicism or jealousy or just plain journalism.

“She didn’t understand how, after all she’d given up for a life of public service, the media could question her ethics,” Stewart writes.

This is the White House that spin built. And, fittingly, Stewart’s book was born in spin. In one of the most spectacularly wrong-headed decisions in the history of spinning, Hillary Clinton’s enforcer-friend, Susan Thomases, recruited Stewart to tell the story in March 1994.

The Clintons had decided the best way to clear their name was to open themselves to a reputable journalist. Stewart - the former front-page editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting on the insider-trading scandal, author of the best-selling “Den of Thieves” - drips reputability.

But the spin backfired when it turned out the Clintons wanted exoneration without examination. They denied their hand-picked author access once they realized he wanted the truth. The account he produced, persevering on his own, backs up the reporting on Whitewater that the White House had vilified.

“I started the book with the premise that there was nothing to hide,” Stewart told me. “But I ended up writing about a consistent theme of dishonesty and embarrassing bad judgment.”

He reports that Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel, suggested in January 1994 that the president and first lady should avoid an independent counsel by making Whitewater documents public, demanding congressional hearings and offering to testify.

“That is crazy,” the president shouted on a speakerphone from Russia. “Do you know what the publicity would be?” The alleged passivity of the first feminist was always a little odd, and “Blood Sport” proves her centrality.

It is possible to feel sorry for the book’s anti-heroine because everything comes back to The Deal: what Bill owed Hillary for coming to Arkansas and for putting up with his wandering eye.

Stewart recounts an anecdote from Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ embittered partner in the Whitewater deal, about Hillary Clinton trying to help her husband win back the State House in 1982. A woman came up and gave Hillary Clinton earrings shaped like Razorback hogs. After the woman left, Susan McDougal said, Hillary Clinton told her that this was the kind of (expletivedeleted) that she had “to put up with.”

Susan McDougal said Bill Clinton had told her he loved being governor because “women are throwing themselves at me. All the while I was growing up, I was the fat boy in the Big Boy jeans.” And Stewart suggests Hillary Clinton wanted to make money because she was insecure about her marriage.

The White House has reacted with, naturally, spin. Michael McCurry said that Stewart “has found precious little news.”

There is new information in the book, but McCurry is right about one thing. It’s the same old story.

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