Author Takes Look At Whitewater, Ethics
Washington’s political scandals of the ‘90s have many of the same elements as the Wall Street scandals of the ‘80s, said an author of books on both topics.
“There’s always a justification, that everyone is doing it,” magazine editor and columnist James B. Stewart said Thursday in Spokane. “There’s the uncritical view that the ends justify the means.”
People begin to believe that the laws don’t apply to them, or that they can break them “in the interest of some higher goal,” said Stewart at the Aram Lecture on Business Ethics, an annual event for the Gonzaga University Business School.
“Ethics don’t exist in a vacuum,” he said. They evolve over generations to protect society.
Stewart covered the stock market crash of 1987 and the insider trading scandals of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, writing about it in “Den of Thieves.” He recently published a new book on the Clinton administration, “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries.”
The later book started out with an invitation from the Clintons to investigate Whitewater to clear their names. He met with Hillary Rodham Clinton at the White House, who insisted they had nothing to hide and would do everything in their power to make any documents available to him, Stewart said.
“This was the high point of my relationship with the Clintons,” he said. “The cooperation never materialized.”
Although the investigation of Whitewater isn’t complete, Stewart said he did draw some conclusions. One is that the Arkansas land deal is not complicated or difficult to understand.
Clinton probably is telling the truth when he tries to dismiss Whitewater by saying he has never been interested in making money, Stewart said.
“Because he was not interested in money, he let others take up the slack,” the author said.
“The Clintons owned 50 percent (of the development) without having to pay 50 percent. They were accepting favors from people with powerful interests in government decisions.”
White House legal adviser Vincent Foster is the most tragic example of the consequences of ignoring fundamental principles, Stewart said. Foster once said no one should ever do anything that puts a blemish on one’s integrity.
When the FBI and Congress began investigating the firings in the White House travel office, Foster lied under oath to protect Hillary Clinton, Stewart said. Shortly afterward, he was found dead in a Washington, D.C., park, an apparent suicide victim.
“He didn’t want to continue to compromise his integrity by continuing to lie,” Stewart contends.
The future is not bleak, either from the Wall Street scandals or the nation’s political problems, he said. Cleaning up insider trading helped restore the average investors’ confidence in the stock market, which now is booming.
The public will curb the excesses of politicians of both parties by demanding more accountability and replacing them with more ethical officials, he predicted.
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