Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Wed Jun 29, 2016 5:41 am

Part 3 of 3

In Little Rock his political influence seemed stronger than ever. By the mid-1980s Lasater and Company had its own ties to Madison Guaranty, what one account called "significant dealings." A decade later the Whitewater special prosecutor would reportedly be moved by the record of these dealings to investigate whether Lasater used the thrift to funnel money to the Clinton campaigns in 1984 and 1986.Whatever happened with the swirling accounts at Madison, Lasater continued to be a fund-raiser for the governor as well as a major public contributor. Like the employees of Madison Guaranty, brokers at Lasater and Company were urged to contribute to Clinton, with the boss offering higher commission to compensate for the donations -- thus "bundling" the Lasater donations to exceed the individual or family limits. But the relationship between Lasater and Clinton now also went beyond the discreet but constant contacts at the brokerage and the mansion, the social occasions, or the funneling of state business. The two men came to share patronage of an intimate adviser -- a link that would last all the way to the White House.

Lasater had given jobs to the children of a Clinton campaign official, and in 1984 he hired as his chief assistant a longtime Clinton associate, Patsy Thomasson, who had begun as an aide to Congressman Wilbur Mills in the 1970s and later became a close friend of state legislator and Lasater partner George "Butch" Locke. She had been named to the Arkansas Highway Commission by Governor Pryor and kept on by Clinton, and she reportedly continued to serve on that notoriously powerful body even as she worked for Dan Lasater. A self-described "yellow dog Democrat," Thomasson was a discreet, almost cryptic figure and was never to be charged in any of the crimes surrounding her employer. Thomasson was a frequent companion on Lasater's business and social flights, including a 1984 flight to Belize that came under investigation by the FBI, which was probing Lasater's attempted purchase of a suspected marijuana farm in that country. She ultimately became president or board member of various Lasater properties and subsidiaries, including Angel Fire, and in 1987 Lasater would give her an extraordinary seven-page durable power of attorney, granting her sweeping authority over his financial affairs after his conviction for drug distribution.

Again, even as she held positions with a convicted Lasater, Thomasson would go on to succeed Betsey Wright as executive director of the Arkansas Democratic Party. In 1993 Clinton quickly named her special assistant to the president and director of the Office of Administration in the White House, where she was one of the more obscure yet most powerful members of the Arkansas circle. It would be Patsy Thomasson who was among the first to enter the office of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster following his controversial death in July 1993 -- "in the middle of a 'cats and dogs' scramble," reported the Wall Street Journal, "to find the combination of Vince Foster's safe the night of his death."
At the time her presence in the Foster affair seemed odd to many, but "only if you didn't know where she came from, and how," said an Arkansas politician.

In the meanwhile, the luck of her former employer, Dan Lasater, was to run out, in a sense, with his criminal indictment on federal drug charges in 1986. Up until then, though, the company's intriguing transactions seem to have been going full swing. In the summer of 1985 a county official named Dennis Patrick from a small town in Kentucky was contacted by a Lasater broker, an old school friend, who proposed to open an account for Patrick that would require no money from him yet would yield $20,000 a week at no risk. Seeming to make money at first, as Patrick told his story later, he duly followed instructions and arranged to deposit his profits automatically at a Little Rock bank. Meanwhile he enjoyed cordial, even warm relations with the brokerage. The trading volume in his account appeared to reach as high as $23.5 million in one transaction, though he never received the profits personally. After several weeks he grew suspicious when he was asked to sign several documents, and he asked his friend to stop trading. There followed a hiatus of months, and then Lasater and Company brought a lawsuit against him, claiming that he and the salesman, who had since been fired, had conspired to defraud the brokerage of some $86,000. But the suit was soon dropped -- according to the company because Patrick had no money to justify the litigation, according to Patrick because he threatened a public airing.

In the welter of accusations, including ones about Patrick's own troubled business dealings in Kentucky, the episode remained murky, though some elements were telling. Before his falling-out with the brokerage, Patrick told a writer, he had been flown at Lasater's expense from London, Kentucky, to Angel Fire and had even gone dove hunting on the same Arkansas farm alleged to have been used for cash drops by Barry Seal. Examined by another bond broker, Patrick's trading records with Lasater and Company showed a total of some $50 million run through the account in less than six months, vast amounts of cash of unaccountable origin, the very definition of money laundering. Not least, the flush trades stopped early in 1986, just after Barry Seal was murdered.

Nobody was more astonished by the vaulting ascent of Patsy Thomasson than Dennis Patrick, a truck driver in Florida. He was listening to the Rush Limbaugh radio show just before Christmas 1993 when suddenly her name cropped up in the midday commentary. "Rush made some comments about Patsy Thomasson removing some documents from Vince Foster's office," he said. "Then he started talking about Dan Lasater, and I thought 'My God."' [41]

The names brought back a flood of confused memories. Dennis went rummaging through boxes of documents at home and unearthed a wad of trading receipts from a brokerage account in his name at Lasater & Company. He had looked at them years before but the documents were hard to interpret, and anyway his life had been in such a shambles that he had somehow missed their full significance. This time he looked closer.

The trading tickets showed that "his" account had been buying bonds worth tens of millions of dollars in late 1985 and early 1986. In a single trade on July 31, 1985, Patrick & Associates bought a block of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation bonds for $6,763,373. On September 18 it bought a block for $9,492,216. It was constantly buying and selling Treasury Bills in blocks of$1 million or $2 million at a time, and GNMA pools for $5 million. [42]

Dennis took the slips to a friend from church, a stockbroker, who told him that these trades were not options trades -- where a small sum of money can control large amounts of stock. These were actual buys and sells, face-value transactions by a man who could write a check for $ 10 million. Lasater & Company had been running huge sums of money through a "straw" account in his name.

Dennis was living in hiding with his wife and two young children in Coral Gables, Florida, when I first went to see him in early 1994. A gentle man with a tense, quivering voice and tired eyes, he seemed older than 42, but then he had a good excuse for premature aging. If a Hollywood screenwriter concocted his story, it would fail the test of plausibility.

He had once been a rising star in the Appalachian coal town of Williamsburg, Kentucky. He came from a respected local family. His father had been Sheriff of Whitley County. His mother had been Circuit Court Clerk, and he stepped in to succeed her after her death. The youngest Circuit Court Clerk in the country, aged 24, he did a good job. "He had integrity," said Marlyn Arnold, chief deputy clerk. "He saw that everything was run right. It seemed like everybody loved him."

"I was asked to run for state office by the Kentucky State Republican Committee," recalled Dennis, shaking his head with melancholy regret. "My goal was to be governor. I thought that one day I might really lead the state of Kentucky."

But if Dennis had a failing, it was a willingness to go along to get along. In the summer of 1985 he was contacted by an old college friend, Steve Love, who was making a fortune trading bonds at Lasater & Company in Little Rock. Love drove up in his Lamborghini, flush and exuberant, and began to lure Dennis into Lasater's flashy, vulgar world. In July 1985 he invited Dennis to stay at one of Lasater's luxurious beachfront condominiums in Destin, on the Gulf of Mexico. Out fishing, Dennis caught a Wahu, which Lasater & Company mounted at exorbitant expense and shipped back to Kentucky.

"When I look back now I realize that I was just a clay pigeon. I was being set up from the beginning," said Dennis. "We were out on a fishing boat and Steve turned and said 'I've got the inside on this. I can make you a great deal of money, Dennis, and it won't cost you anything.''' It wasn't something that Dennis wanted to get mixed up in. His income as Circuit Court Clerk was less than $25,000. His total assets were only $60,000, including the value of his house. He was in no position to play with the big boys on the bond market. "I should have just said no, but they were being so generous I felt obligated. I told Steve to send me something so I could read up and see what I was getting into. He changed the subject."

A few days later Steve Love called up and said: "I've just earned you $20,000, but I need you to come down to Little Rock and open an account." Dennis was ecstatic. He jumped into his pickup truck and raced to Arkansas. "My God, I would have ridden rollerblades to Little Rock for $20,000 dollars." At the Capitol Hotel he was treated like royalty and given the best suite. He was escorted to the First American Bank and $21,932 was deposited in his newly opened account. [43] The money went through Dennis's fingers like water. "I spent the lot," he said, sheepishly. "My fear was that they were going to ask for it back."

Years later Dennis was interrogated about this by FBI agents working for the Whitewater investigation. Why did he take the money? "Hell," he replied. "Hillary Clinton took a hundred thousand dollars without asking any questions, didn't she? And she's supposed to be one of the best lawyers in America." This caused considerable mirth at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Indeed, the FBI agents interviewing him had to leave the room until they could control their laughter.

After a grueling cross-examination, FBI Agent Mike Smith told Dennis that he was "a vital witness in the overall investigation of Whitewater." But Dennis was never contacted again. Dennis's trip to Little Rock was a whirl of high-life extravagance, ending at a nightclub where Roger Clinton was playing in the band. "Good to have you aboard," said Lasater, patting Dennis on the back and promising him that the firm would make him a rich man. Lasater's senior vice president, Billy McCord, told Dennis that $20,000 was nothing. Dennis was going to make that much every week.

"I was already thinking of buying farms up in Kentucky," confessed Dennis. He was hooked. When the firm offered to send a Lear jet to London, Kentucky, to fly him to Angel Fire for an elk hunt, he accepted eagerly. He asked whether he could invite his girlfriend Karen (later his wife), who was in the little town of Paducah. The aircraft was put completely at his disposal. So he called Karen from the air phone, and the Lear jet collected her off the tarmac.

During the flight Steve Love repeatedly tried to get Dennis to sign a set of papers that would formalize his relationship as a client of Lasater & Company, and Dennis kept trying to put it off. "I began to get a queasy feeling in my stomach, even then. I don't know why," said Dennis.

Then the music stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. After the trip to Angel Fire, Dennis never heard another word from Lasater & Company.

His life began to fall apart a few weeks later. In October 1985 the ATF contacted Dennis and told him that an armed criminal by the name of Patrick Henry Talley, who had recently been granted early parole from a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma, had been apprehended in Alabama. "They told me that Talley had been 'dispatched to murder' me." Apparently Tally had been arrested after a fight in a bar. Among Talley's possessions police discovered a picture of Dennis, a hand-drawn map of his house, a picture of his Blazer jeep and its license tags, as well as $30,000 in cash and an Uzi submachine gun with a silencer. Talley was driving a motorbike with no serial numbers on it -- a classic "drop bike." Though Talley confessed to the ATF that his intent was to murder Dennis Patrick, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Alabama declined to investigate the apparent contract hit and allowed Talley to plead guilty to a minor firearms violation. [44]

When Dennis met with an ATF officer, he found himself accused of high level involvement in narcotics smuggling. "You'd better start talking because those bastards are going to kill you, and we're going to hang you out to dry," warned the officer. [45]

If that was shocking, what happened next was bizarre. Sex ads with his name and address were published in magazines. "White, Bi, male seeks satisfaction, Anytime, Anywhere, with Anyone. Nothing too kinky for me to enjoy," was one that appeared in Modern Publications. Rolls of film with pornographic pictures were dropped off at the photo shop. Dennis's name and address were on the cover envelopes. "I wouldn't pick up the pictures, but it didn't make any difference, it started spreading like wildfire," he said. The mystery of who placed the sex ads and pictures was eventually solved -- as we shall see -- but not before even more harmful rumors spread.

A woman he had chosen to work in his office as a deputy clerk came to him, highly distraught, to say that she could not take the job. The minister of the First Baptist Church, Dennis's own church, had told her to stay away from him, because he was "heavily into drugs."

"That just busted my chops," said Dennis. "For a while people stick with you, but when it keeps coming they pull away, and you're all alone .... It reached a point where people would walk out of the barber shop when I came in .... And I still didn't know why it was happening."

"It was all out war. I was getting sued left, right, and center, fictitious lawsuits, draining me of every penny I had." Then his house was firebombed. On October 15, 1985, a gas grenade canister was hurled through the window, setting the curtains and walls on fire. Dennis was not there. After the ATF warned him about the attempted contract hit on his life he had been sleeping in barns, or in his jeep, always watching his back.

Terrified, he now began to take exceptional precautions. He bought a bullet-proof vest, and turned his house into an electrified fortress with live wires activated at night. Inside he had seven guns carefully placed in different spots. One was a shotgun mounted in the kitchen with a triggering mechanism attached by string to the kitchen door. He even linked a copper wire from his Chevy Blazer to an electric cable under the ground so that anybody trying to plant a detonating device in his car would be blown up in the process.

"There are a lot of animal instincts in a human being that you don't know about until something like this happens," he said. Perhaps it was animal instinct that led him back to his house on Friday, December 13, 1985. He was standing by the kitchen window getting a drink of water when an old Bonneville with Tennessee tags drove up. "I knew at once that this was it .... A man got out with a package and started walking up toward the door. The next thing I know he'd hurled a bomb at the window, but it hit the corner and exploded outside. It was a military CS gas grenade that he'd covered with candle wax and shotgun pellets."

What happened next was something straight out of a Charles Bronson movie -- with this difference, it is attested to in sworn depositions before the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Tennessee.

The would-be assassin sprinted back to his car with Dennis, barefoot, running after him in the snow. His assailant raced off the wrong way up a blind alley, giving Dennis enough time to jump into his Blazer and go careening down 1-75 in hot pursuit. As they wove through the mountains at 100 mph, dodging in and out of heavy trucks, the assailant fired a .38 Smith & Wesson out his window. Dennis rammed the assailant's truck, but the impact sent Dennis's own Blazer spinning out of control, finally bouncing back on the tarmac.

When the assassin pulled off the freeway, Dennis fired a Belgian Browning 270 deer rifle with an eight power scope at the assassin's car. "I shot his tire out, and then just started to dismantle the car shot by shot .... I blew out the windscreen, the gas tank .... I was going to make sure that this one never got away."

The Jellicoe Police arrived, followed in quick succession by the Tennessee State Police and the ATF. The assassin was arrested. He was a Texan named Danny Starr Burson. In a deposition given a year later he admitted that he had been contracted for "$20,000 plus expenses" to kill Dennis Patrick and his wife with a KG-9 machine gun. [46] He described how he bought a "drop car" under a false name, how he found a spot in some foliage where he sat at night, wearing camouflage, his face painted, and watched Dennis's house with a set of night binoculars.

"Was it your instructions at the time to kill Mr. Patrick and his wife, or to only put him under surveillance?"

"No, it was to kill 'em."

"Why didn't you do it?"

"Couldn't find him."

He admitted that he had put Dennis on a pornographic mailing list. It was one of the tricks in a harassment manual he had picked up at a gunshow. He referred in opaque terms to the organization that contracted him as a multi-million dollar outfit with military ties. As a case of conspiracy to murder that crossed state lines, the federal authorities had jurisdiction, but the ATF left it to the local authorities. Burson pleaded guilty to "wanton endangerment" and "criminal mischief." He was sentenced to five years, but was immediately released on probation. Omitted from the deposition was a crucial piece of testimony. In an examination under oath shortly after the attack he had said:

"This guy called me named Steve and I met him in Little Rock, at a McDonald's near downtown and he told me he wanted to harass this guy Patrick."

"Steve who? Do you know?"

"No, sir." [47]

There was one last plot to murder Dennis Patrick. A group in Texas -- penetrated by an ATF informant wearing a body microphone -- planned to blow up his Chevy Blazer, and if that failed to kill him, to attack his house with an "M-72 anti-tank weapon" (sic). Thanks to the informant, the group was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and sent to prison. But the ATF investigator in charge of the case, John Simms, could not fathom why anybody would go to such lengths to eliminate a Circuit Court Clerk of modest means in Williamsburg, Kentucky. "Somebody, somewhere, was really determined to kill this guy," he said. "But I never was able to get to the bottom of it." [48]

"I think John Simms felt sorry for me," said Dennis. "He came to my house one day and sat down in the kitchen. My wife was there, six months pregnant, and he looked up and said 'Dennis, I don't know what I can do for you .... This thing is too big.'"

The local newspapers attributed the attacks to a dispute between Dennis and his business partners in a wildcat drilling venture in Kentucky. One of the conspirators from Texas, James Josey, was involved with civil litigation against Dennis over some marginal oil and gas leases.

"If you added up the whole company I was involved in it wasn't worth $25,000," said Dennis. James Josey later phoned Dennis from prison to confess that the conspiracy was much bigger than he imagined. "There are a whole lot of people who want you dead," he said, in a taped exchange. "There are a lot of things I can't disclose right now .... We're in very thin shoes." Josey intimated that he had been exploited by a powerful organization and used as a patsy. The murder attempts, he said, had nothing to do with the oil leases. [49]

Dennis had been warned long before by a disenchanted broker at Lasater & Company called Linda Nesheim that people with ties to the firm were trying to kill him. "Linda kept talking about Patsy Thomasson," recalled Dennis. "She told me that Patsy was the one in charge, that she was the one who could put an end to my whole nightmare." [50]

But at the time it didn't make much sense to him. "I couldn't figure out why Lasater would do this to me. I didn't know back then that he'd run $100 million, or $150 million, or whatever it was, through my account."

Eight years later, Dennis managed to speak to Nesheim again, if only for a few minutes. This time she was more circumspect. "They're bigger than we are, they're larger than you can imagine. I know you have a son, and I know you love him. I have a daughter, and I love her too," said Nesheim. "Just leave this alone, Dennis." [51]

Dennis limped through to the end of his term as Circuit Court Clerk, then left town with his pregnant wife, Karen, and his infant child, Robert.

"We drove, and drove, and drove, always going South, to get as far as possible from Kentucky," he said. "We ended up here In Florida, living in a motel with roaches. Here I was with a college degree, working a dump truck ... but that's all I was fit for. I couldn't think, I couldn't focus, I was a burned out husk of a man .... I still am."

His friends did not know whether he was dead or alive. "How could I face them when I'd been stripped of my whole life, my name, my integrity, everything I had?" Too proud to return to Williamsburg in disgrace, he preferred to build a new identity as a working man in Coral Gables, Florida. And that is how he was living when two British reporters, Chris Wood from The Economist and I from The Sunday Telegraph, invaded his refuge in the spring of 1994.

It was only after we started writing about Dennis that the worst details came to light. The Economist was leaked a confidential document dated March 15, 1989, entitled "REPORT FLINTLOCK SCORPIO 000289." It profiled Dennis Patrick as "an associate of the Lamida Family of Long Island, New York .... Subject allegedly has been under suspicion of trafficking in cocaine with the Lamida Family. He has hidden all assets ... under the drug cartel in Florida." [52]

The report called for an urgent investigation. "Need two operatives to proceed immediately for additional information to Cape Coral and Williamsburg, Kentucky." In a supplementary page it stated that "subject is known to carry a 9 mm UZI in his vehicle while traveling. He must be considered armed and dangerous at all times."

The documents included a printout of telephone calls from Dennis's house made between August and September 1988. According to the printout six calls were made to a place called Lehigh Acres, "a swamp with small landing and drop zones." There was a trading receipt from Lasater & Company for a Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation bond sale worth $9,492,216 and an asset statement, dated December 13, 1985, that was drawn up by a Memphis accountant named Ron Moore. It listed the net worth of Patrick & Associates (the associate had been Dennis's first wife) as $12,339,850.

The FLINTLOCK SCORPIO document portrays Dennis as a wealthy drug smuggler capable of trading $9,492,216 in bonds in a single block. The question is, who was behind FLINTLOCK SCORPIO? Who had a motive to give a dump truck driver the false identity of a man with this kind of money? The report carries no government identification or letterhead. Its style and lettering look like an amateurish rendition of an FBI document. But similar charges were appearing elsewhere. Dennis was informed that his name appeared on Florida police computers as an associate of Colombian cartels. [53] Moreover, in 1989 an FBI agent in Louisville went to Williamsburg, Kentucky, to inform the Police Department that Dennis Patrick was involved in a Florida drug cartel. [54] Whoever was behind this effort had deep reach into U.S. law enforcement.

For Dennis's erstwhile "broker," Steve Love, life has had its up and downs, too. When I tracked him down in a small town in Pennsylvania, he was a different man. The Lamborghinis were gone. He, too, had been living half-underground for years, frightened that the past would catch up with him. "I find it extremely painful to think of what happened at that time," he said. "I was just a scapegoat. I was used by Lasater, and flushed away, my whole life destroyed .... I finished up sleeping on park benches." [55]

He professed remorse. "Dennis never did anything wrong, and I'm deeply sorry that I got him mixed up in it. The fellow was like a brother to me."

Love swore that he was not responsible for the monster trades of $9 million at a time in the account of Patrick & Associates. His "broker number" was on the transaction slips, he admitted, but the orders had been given by the higher-ups who ran Lasater & Company. "There was an awful lot of money going through that business, that's all I can say, and most of us didn't really know what was going on," he said.

Did Lasater & Company order his murder? I asked outright.

"They certainly didn't want anybody to blow the whistle," he replied.

***

In 1989 the Arkansas Committee, a group of left-wing students at the University of Arkansas, started investigating the alleged nexus of drug-running, money-laundering, and covert activities linked to Mena Airport. The Arkansas Committee's lead advocate, Mark Swaney, came to suspect that Lasater and others were laundering funds through the Arkansas Development and Finance Administration (ADFA), a state-controlled investment bank created by Governor Clinton in 1985 to provide "low interest finance for economic development." [56]

There was no need for Clinton to create ADFA. The state already had the Arkansas Housing Development Agency and the Arkansas Industrial Development Corporation (later made famous by a clerk named Paula Corbin Jones). But these two bodies had semi-independent boards. ADFA gave Clinton a patronage machine that answered to the Governor alone. It was a versatile instrument. As James Ring Adams reported in The American Spectator, it was designed with the help of a Boston consultant named Belden Daniels and allowed Clinton to tap into the huge reserves of the Arkansas Teachers Retirement System. At the same time, Clinton steered bond business to Lasater, and low interest industrial loans to the others in the Arkansas group -- Seth Ward, for instance, the father-in- law of Webster Hubbell -- frequently without due diligence and over the objections of the agency staff. [57] "They were giving money away like candy to the insiders," said Mark Swaney. [58]

Believing that ADFA's records would reveal the story of a national security operation run amok in his home state, Swaney tried to pry open the books. His FOIA requests were stonewalled. He fought a protracted lawsuit that eventually compelled ADFA to let him review some of the archive. It was not exactly full disclosure, but what he found was enough to confirm his suspicion that the agency was engaged in practices that were far outside the scope of a state development agency.

Funds had been flowing offshore. ADFA had done at least $250 million worth of business with the Fuji Bank ofjapan. In December 1988, for instance, ADFA raised $50 million for the purpose of building and buying houses for the needy of Arkansas, but instead, ADFA wired the $50 million to the Fuji Bank, Grand Cayman Branch, account number 63119808. [59] It was a nice piece of arbitrage profiteering. ADFA raised the money at 7 percent interest with tax exempt status, and loaned the money to Fuji at an interest rate of 9.37 percent, generating a profit of about $1 million on a ten-month investment. Whether the money -- all of it, plus interest -- came back from Grand Cayman is anybody's guess. ADFA has not provided the wiring documents. When the bonds were remarketed in October 1989 the principal had fallen to $47,915,000. [60]

In 1987 ADFA borrowed $5.04 million from Japan's Sanwa Bank to buy stock in a Barbados company called Coral Reinsurance. [61] With 84 of the 1,000 shares issued, ADFA was in fact the biggest single shareholder. The activities of Coral Reinsurance triggered an investigation by the Delaware Insurance Department in 1992, which cause panic at ADFA. [62] Among the documents obtained by Mark Swaney were a series of memos by Bob Nash, who had taken over as director of ADFA (he is now White House chief of personnel). "Why are they asking about this??!!" scribbled Nash. "Why no other states, only private people? Who was the mover and shaker on this? ... CALL ME."

Swaney believes that ADFA was created by Clinton as an instrument for Dan Lasater. What we know is that Lasater wrote at least eight letters to Bill Clinton recommending people for the board of ADFA. Most of them were appointed. The letter and telephone traffic between Lasater and the Governor's Mansion suggest that ADFA was essentially answering to his instructions. [63]

In 1984 and 1985 there was an explosion of housing bond issues. They spiked to $300 million a year, way above their usual level of between $50 and $100 million. It is exceedingly hard to find an actual bricks-and-mortar house built with all this money. As an experiment, I tried auditing ADFA's $175 million housing issue from July 1985, but the money is impossible to trace. [64] "It just disappears on you, it goes into night and fog," said Mark Swaney.

The finance director, Bill Wilson, admitted to me that ADFA "had trouble getting enough house buyers." [65] If that was the case, why raise the money in the first place? It was a confession that the purpose of the bond issue was to generate commissions -- or soak up money. Wilson was soft-spoken and charming when I paid a visit, but one of his aides destroyed the effect by switching on a tape-recorder as soon as we started chatting about the exploits of Dan Lasater. [66]

Lasater & Company was deeply involved in the demise of thrifts in Illinois. One of them, First American Savings and Loan of Oak Brook, Illinois, fired back with a lawsuit against the firm in October 1985, alleging that Lasater had transferred "unprofitable investments from his personal account to the account of the Plaintiff" after trading was closed. [67] The suit was taken over by the government's Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation in April 1986, after First American was seized by regulators. It hired the Rose Law Firm to handle the case. The attorneys were Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster. They settled for a modest $200,000 in a sealed agreement that drew a veil over the reasons for the collapse of the S&L. The Chicago Tribune ran a blistering series on Hillary Clinton's role. It accused her of a "glaring conflict of interest" for negotiating "a secret, out-of-court settlement" that ended a suit "against a family friend and an influential benefactor of her husband."

Patsy Thomasson handled the case for Lasater, who was by then in prison. She was more than just an executive vice-president. She was also a "financial and operations principal" of the brokerage firm, with direct liability for criminal misuse of client accounts. According to the Arkansas Securities Commission, she held the key 24,27, and 53 series brokerage licenses (as well as a Masters in Economics from the University of Missouri), making her one of the most highly qualified broking principals in the country. "She's as smart as a whip with these licenses, a very rare find," said a spokesman for the National Association of Securities Dealers. "But she was sitting in front of a howitzer. If any of the brokers had got in trouble, she would have been responsible."

She must have been fully cognizant of the transactions in the account of Patrick & Associates, if not involved herself. Her role was certainly something that seemed to interest the Republicans in the early summer of 1994. After Dennis Patrick went public with his amazing story, he was summoned to Washington and ushered from one office to another on Capitol Hill. Senator D'Amato (R-N.Y.), for one, was in high dudgeon. "This man should be sworn in, he should be deposed. We should have a right and the people should have a right to hear his testimony, and to judge," he thundered on the floor of the Senate. "There are substantial documents to show tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars being funneled through this fellow's account, a person who has absolutely no wealth, and the question is how? And the question is why?"

But it was all bluster. "D'Amato's office never called me. When he got into the majority he didn't do anything about it," said Dennis. A year and a half later Dan Lasater was called to testify before the Whitewater Committee. He was not asked a single question about the trading in the Patrick account. (D'Amato told The Wall Street Journal that it was outside the scope of his investigation.) "I think all these investigations of Clinton are red herrings, just trying to divert attention from what really went on," said Dennis in disgust.

"One day I want to go back to the mountains and woods of Kentucky and go squirrel hunting again like I once did. I want my kids to come back with me to a town where nobody questions my integrity," he said one evening, sitting in the garden of my house in Washington.

"When I think what these people have done to me, the living nightmare they've put me through, I don't think death could have been worse. I would never have believed that what happened to me could happen to anybody in the United States of America. I've never been a militant, but you look at the Red, White, and Blue, and you think of the renegades running everything, and it makes you wonder whether we'll have to fight to get our country back."

-- The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


That autumn Lasater was indicted on federal drug charges. A federal-state narcotics task force had been formed in Arkansas in 1985 after reports of blatant cocaine trafficking and use, especially in the Little Rock bond business, became what one officer called "overwhelming." Lasater was soon implicated by a torrent of informants' reports and formal statements. But almost from the beginning, the investigation followed what agents remembered as "unusual procedures." By his own account the lead state police investigator, J.N. DeLaughter, was ordered to give "only verbal reports on his investigative findings" and only to the state police commandant, Tommy Goodwin, who at least twice took DeLaughter's briefings on the nearly yearlong probe while in Governor Clinton's private office. At the same time, Lasater was receiving reports on the inquiry from a source in the state police to whom he had made loans and given other favors.

Clinton would later claim that he learned of the Lasater probe only at the last moment in the fall of 1986. But not only had Goodwin received earlier briefings in the governor's office, the inquiry itself had been what investigators called "a spinoff of the Roger Clinton investigation," the files and testimony of which the governor and Roger's lawyers had followed closely. In any event, even with the Lasater inquiry at its height, Clinton lobbied heavily and successfully for a bond issue for a new state police communications system, an issue for which Lasater and Company would receive $750,000 in underwriting fees while its owner was under active investigation for multiple federal and state felonies. "Because they backed the right individual in Clinton," Butch Locke would tell the FBI, "Lasater and Company received the contract. "

In mid-October 1986, with two of his lawyers present, Danny Ray Lasater himself was finally interviewed by local US attorney George Proctor, an FBI agent, and a Little Rock police detective, but none of the agents most familiar with the evidence. Recorded in the bureaucratic prose of the FBI, the result was a relatively perfunctory interrogation with no sustained questioning and a seeming lack of curiosity about the broker's dealings beyond his confessed recreational use of cocaine. "It was either a high dive or incredibly unprofessional, take your pick," said one law enforcement officer. With the interview and his indictment only days later, the investigation came to a premature halt. Though it was standard practice in drug cases, agents were enjoined from seizing any monies or property clearly associated with the cocaine, including Lasater's Lear jet. Most important, they never pursued the complex web of financial affairs that trailed off from Little Rock. When members of the powerful bond community in Little Rock grew worried that the Lasater indictments might go beyond the obvious charges of cocaine use to include money laundering, officials were said to have reassured them discreetly. "Somebody went out and told them not to sweat it, that there was no money laundering involved," said an IRS agent familiar with the investigation, "though we had tons of evidence for cases of just that." Inquiries into Lasater elsewhere fared no better. In 1989 a federal investigation into Angel Fire fell apart in an interagency jurisdictional dispute between Customs, the FBI, and the DEA.

Having testified to the Lasater grand jury, Roger Clinton would be named as an unindicted coconspirator in the charges against Danny Ray. Despite pleas by state and federal agents to pursue the leads suggested by the evidence already gathered, the prosecutors were ultimately no more curious about the millionaire's powerful friends than about his far-flung finances.

When a local journalist asked US Attorney George Proctor in October 1986 about any possible connections between Lasater and organized crime, Proctor responded quickly: "None there," he said tersely.

Questioned further by another reporter as to Clinton's "involvement" in the case, Proctor answered almost dismissively about the man who was among Lasater's most intimate associates. "No way," he told the reporter. A Carter appointee kept on by Reagan and Bush, George Proctor would become a ranking official in the Clinton administration, head of the justice Department's Office of International Affairs, responsible for, among other things, narcotics matters.


Law enforcement officers were dismayed and angry at the stunted probe of Lasater. Whatever the limits or extent of Lasater's cocaine trafficking or the nature of his other dealings, most believed that beyond him the larger corruption in Little Rock and elsewhere pointed unmistakably to organized crime, not to mention the vast crimes of Mena -- none of which would be pursued.

For his part, Bill Clinton had by now publicly distanced himself from the man to whom he had once been so close. "I feel very sick about it," he said at the time of Lasater's indictment, "and I'm sad about it because a person who supported me, who supported a lot of good causes in Arkansas and made a very great success in three careers has been devastated by getting involved in cocaine." Had he ever used cocaine? a reporter asked the governor at the time. "No," he said casually, ''I'm not sure what it looked like if I saw it." Had he ever asked Dan Lasater about the rumored cocaine parties? "No," Clinton told the Gazette, "I never asked him about it. But I never would have had the occasion to ask him about it in a social setting."

Just before his indictment, Lasater sold his share in Lasater and Company to an associate of John Y. Brown and a partner in the brokerage, William D. McCord, who was later indicted on money laundering and gambling charges. Given "use immunity" in return for cooperation in other cases, Lasater was sentenced to only thirty months in prison, though he apparently never offered testimony in another major case. He served just six months in prison and four in a halfway house and would be pardoned by Clinton immediately after the 1990 gubernatorial election. The pardon allowed him to reacquire state-regulated business licenses and thus, as a prominent Arkansas attorney told the Los Angeles Times, was "worth big bucks to Lasater." By the 1992 race, however, the singular relationship between the two men had been virtually expunged. Bill Clinton and Danny Ray Lasater, the Clinton presidential campaign would claim, "didn't socialize."

***

Clinton would continue to hear reports about Mena after 1986, though he apparently never again spoke openly about "Lasater's deal." L.D. Brown was not alone among the bodyguards in witnessing Clinton's reactions to stories of Mena. Joining the security unit in 1987, trooper Larry Patterson would testify later about frequent conversations among state policemen "that there was [sic] large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns, that there was an ongoing operation training foreign people in that area. That it was a CIA operation." At one point the mansion detail and state police headquarters buzzed with a story of how local and federal law enforcement officials had obtained a warrant and were about to conduct an important search at Intermountain Regional when they were called off by the state police commandant, Tommy Goodwin. "Do not under any circumstances execute that search warrant," Goodwin was said to have ordered.

A number of the discussions took place "in the presence of Governor Clinton," Patterson recalled. Yet, whether the subject was drugs, guns, guerrilla training, or an apparent cover-up, the state's chief executive would seem somehow detached and uncharacteristically reticent and uninquisitive. "He was just interested in what was, you know, what was going on. He had very little comment to make," the trooper would say. "He was just listening to what was being said." Patterson would also remember "verbatim," he testified, an intriguing conversation between Clinton and Goodwin as the two men rode in the governor's limousine. It was in 1991, when Attorney General Bryant and Congressman Alexander were speaking out on Mena and Clinton, on the verge of his presidential candidacy, was about to hold his lone press conference on the crimes. "Tommy, I want to know -- what the hell is going on at Mena?" Clinton asked his police chief, using the present tense, as Patterson insisted he heard the dialogue. "Governor," he heard Goodwin answer, "I have been told by Senator Pryor and Senator Bumpers to stay out of Mena, Arkansas." But with that, according to Patterson, neither Clinton nor Goodwin had said another word on the subject -- as if the federal usurpation of state police, the seeming involvement of two United States senators in suppressing investigation of widely discussed drug and arms smuggling, needed no further explanation.


Years later a retired investigator familiar with both the Lasater and the Mena files would reflect on what happened. "You know, I guess I never really knew what we were looking at until I read that part in Clinton's letter to the ROTC fellow. You know, the part about being corrupt and all of us being lost." The passage in Bill Clinton's letter to Colonel Holmes had been, he thought, all too prophetic. "I do not think our system of government is by definition corrupt, however dangerous and inadequate it has been in recent years," Clinton had written as a young man, adding in parenthesis, "The society may be corrupt, but that is not the same thing, and if that is true we are all finished anyway."

In a sequel sadly characteristic of the story, L.D. Brown's testimony under oath about flights with Seal and Clinton's telling response would be known to some in the media in the spring of 1996. In addition, new witnesses close to Seal confirmed that the smuggler spoke of flights with "this Arkansas state trooper." Yet, as for Welch, Duncan, and others, the revelation drew attacks on the unwanted messenger rather than sparking intensified scrutiny of the crimes of Mena. Though Brown had been the last and most reluctant of the bodyguards to tell what he knew, it would be the young police officer and his own scarred record in state police politics, including a Clinton smear, not Mena, that became the issue.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Wed Jun 29, 2016 5:42 am

Part 1 of 2

20. Little Rock to Washington: "We Saw in Them What We Wanted to Believe"

The Clintons' campaign for the presidency began in 1986.

His third reelection as governor that year was in some ways a rehearsal for the charges and responses of the 1992 campaign. Orval Faubus, the six-term, twice-defeated seventy-six-year-old former governor, was the opponent in the primary, running out of "spite," as Arkansas Democrat editor John Robert Starr saw it, because Clinton had fired him from the state office of veterans affairs at the urging of the Gazette. But Faubus, the old hill-country populist and segregationist, was upset also by Clinton's increasingly comfortable accommodation with the state's oppressive corporate powers, especially the secretly negotiated Grand Gulf settlement that left Arkansas ratepayers charged for 80 percent of AP&L's share in a nuclear plant that did not supply power to the state (all of it went to Louisiana). Clinton, the onetime putative utility critic and consumer advocate, was now discreetly supported by AP&L and refused to release his own files on Grand Gulf despite the clamor of consumer groups.

To many, the utility deal -- more than any other episode -- seemed to symbolize the forty-year-old governor's compromised career. For almost a year Clinton had been using corporate contributions and other campaign funds from a rich war chest in an advertising blitz to blame the federal government for utility hikes, to "soften the impact" of Grand Gulf, as Starr reported it. The preemptive effort stifled both the criticism and Faubus's primary challenge. The governor also attacked his relic opponent for abuses of power. In a twist few were likely to perceive, the same Clinton who used his troopers to hide his own excesses now denounced Faubus for exploiting the Arkansas State Police for his "personal and political purposes."

A florid Frank White was once again the opponent in the general election, sounding hypocritical in a blunted attack on Grand Gulf because of his own earlier support of the utility and captivity by monied interests. The campaign skirted genuine issues. When White learned relatively late that Dan Lasater was under investigation by a grand jury he began to attack Clinton for steering state bond business to the contributor and suspected "coke trafficker." Republican commercials played against a backdrop of what one account called Lasater and Company's "tony Louisiana Street headquarters." But there was no inkling of how close or intense the Clinton-Lasater relationship had actually been. White's characteristically refracted charges were easily swatted away. When the GOP candidate claimed that as governor he was briefed in 1982 about police suspicions of Lasater and that Clinton had to have known about them when he allowed state bond business to pour into the renegade brokerage, state police commandant Goodwin once again supported Clinton's denials, claiming he had seen no police files on Lasater prior to 1983. And when White pointed to the Rose Law Firm's handsome share of legal fees in connection with state bond work (Hillary's "conflict of interest"), Clinton and his regime would say accurately enough, as they did of Lasater's state largesse, that the generous fees had been spread over several firms. That, after all, was the way the system worked in Little Rock. White was only slinging mud at one of the finest, most respected women in the world, a model of rectitude, Clinton would say of his wife. "Remember, Frank," he taunted, "you're running for governor, not for First Lady."

Nonetheless, the relatively lame attacks touched raw nerves. When the media at a mid-September news conference questioned Clinton about his brother's appearance as a government witness before a grand jury and about the Clintons' Lasater ties in general, Hillary stood behind the reporters, listening in visible agitation. "There have been no charges filed. The grand jury's still convened," she interrupted peremptorily when Clinton was asked about Lasater's chauffeur Chuck Berry (though Berry had already been indicted). Afterward she angrily asked a journalist if Senator Pryor and Senator Bumpers, "who also received campaign funds from Lasater, were going to be questioned on their relationship with Lasater as her husband had been," the Gazette reported. "Mrs. Clinton continued for several minutes questioning the nature of inquiries that had been made to her husband and lectured a reporter on the propriety of covering grand jury investigations." Though the First Lady's outburst was the talk of newsrooms and political offices, it had the effect of chilling further questions, and neither the local press nor White would come close to exposing the reality. Even Lasater, who made an iron rule of never talking to the media, suddenly appeared -- after his indictment and only days before the election -- to announce that he had also contributed to Frank White in 1980 and to flourish a "Dear Supporter" form letter from the GOP camp asking the broker for another donation in 1986.

In the richest campaign in state history, Clinton would raise more than $800,000 for the languid primary against Faubus and more than a million in the general. The money had come in part from the single-largest fund-raising event ever held in Arkansas, a $500-a-head gathering of the state's elite in the fall of 1985 that netted more than a half million dollars. He overwhelmed White four to one in recorded contributions, to say nothing of the inevitable "walking around" cash. As witnesses later told the Whitewater special prosecutor, it was in 1986 that corporate pilots and other discreet messengers began carrying to Clinton intermediaries unmarked envelopes stuffed with cash. "Lots and lots off the books that year in particular," said a prominent Democrat in White Heights.

In any case, the "books" themselves, their official list of contributors, again read like a who's who of Arkansas power old and new -- the trucking giants; the timber conglomerates Georgia Pacific and Weyerhauser; the financial houses Drexel Burnham, Merrill Lynch, American Express, Smith Barney, and E.F. Hutton; Worthen Bank; TCBY Yogurt; various Stephens enterprises; and on through the roll, including the usual crowd of rich supporters like the Blairs. As it had before and would again, the cash obliterated the opposition and any serious questioning of records or ties. Clinton was "as surprised as anyone," Starr noted, when the public did not seem to take his opponents or their charges seriously. He would crush White with 63.9 percent of the vote, winning two and three to one in Little Rock's wealthiest precincts and, as usual, sweeping the African American precincts and running impressively throughout the poor white regions -- what one observer termed a "red-neck, black-neck" coalition. "A clear, unambiguous, and almost stunning mandate," the elated governor would call it.

That September Clinton had solemnly assured concerned Arkansas voters that he would serve a full term as governor, that he had "removed himself from contention as a candidate for president" in 1988, as one account described the pledge made repeatedly during the race. Despite a late party on election night, however, he was up before dawn the next morning for a Today Show interview; and in a few days, with discreet touting and leaks from Little Rock and elsewhere, Newsweek was listing Bill Clinton as a likely contender for the White House. Secretly, the Clintons' race began even before the 1986 vote, with national scheduling already planned for the following winter and spring, leading to an announcement of candidacy in the early summer of 1987. "We knew if we got by good in 1986, we were off," said a statehouse aide.

Yet other secrets, other plans turned out to be far more decisive. The shadowy destruction of Democratic front-runner Gary Hart in the Donna Rice affair was to influence not only the Clintons' fate and the presidential election in 1988 but also the campaign of 1992 and the presidency that followed.

***

Absorbed by the bid they had contemplated so long, Clinton dealt with the legislative session at the beginning of 1987 in what one observer called a "chaotic" manner, agreeing to seal from public scrutiny previously open tax records, flouting his own promises of open government, betraying black supporters on a Highway Commission appointment, signing a bill fastening the hold of the giant AP&L on Arkansas cities and towns -- altogether moving from commitment to surrender with a carelessness that dismayed even the more cynical Clinton watchers among local press and politicians. "He's running out of friends," one legislator told the Democrat, characterizing him as "so consumed by running for president that he's just used and abused people to the point that he's lost his ability to influence."

As would be the case four years later, however, many in Arkansas could see an underlying caprice and shallowness in their outwardly impressive young governor yet proudly, heedlessly thrust him forward to lead the nation and to carry the same flaws of inconstancy and disarray into the White House. On March 13, 1987, a vacillating Dale Bumpers ruled himself out of the presidential race, removing Clinton's last apparent obstacle, though some believed the governor's ambition now so burning that he would run in defiance of convention even if the state's senior senator ran as well. With Bumpers gone, however, Clinton was endorsed for the White House by AP&L president Jerry Maulden, and the Democratic State Committee -- including the many members who privately deplored the leader he had become and who had leaked bitter criticism of him -- unanimously adopted a resolution urging him to seek the presidential nomination.

"Oh yes, I'd very much like to do it," the governor said in response, and his wife agreed. "I don't have any ambition for him other than what he has for himself," Hillary said in her own interviews. His purpose was simple, he told reporters. He wanted to bring to Washington what he had done in Little Rock. After all, he added, Arkansas was "a pretty good microcosm of the nation."

Beginning in February and March his pace was "frantic," as one observer described it, including a major speech in New Hampshire and visits to eighteen states, what the Gazette called "a convincing impression of a barnstorming candidate." There were constant meetings and phone calls around the nation to raise money, which quickly yielded nearly $3 million in pledges, much of it from the wealthy individuals and large corporations he had long cultivated outside the state, including Wall Street financial houses, as well as the Arkansas interests. Asked about campaign funds in a local television interview later that spring, the governor refused to reveal how much had been committed but smilingly said money would be "no barrier" to his running. As Clinton admitted, however, he would enter the race far from the obvious choice. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination was clearly Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a former McGovern campaign manager and a nationally known, well-financed veteran of the 1984 race. He was receiving increasingly favorable publicity, had run well ahead of George Bush, the likely GOP nominee, in the polls, and already seemed to many an odds-on favorite to be the next president.

On March 27 Clinton went to Los Angeles for an exclusive dinner with television producer Norman Lear and other figures from the entertainment industry -- " Hollyticking," as the process of currying and money seeking came to be known. By striking coincidence, however, among those dining with Clinton that evening was Don Henley, a former member of the Eagles rock band. The same night, across the continent in Miami, one of Henley's close friends, a young woman named Donna Rice, was boarding a yacht called the Monkey Business for a voyage that would change the course of American politics.

Within the next few weeks, the public would witness the swift destruction of Gary Hart's candidacy and potential presidency. Only days after his April 13 formal announcement for the White House, the senator was the object of media speculation about his alleged womanizing. Acting on what it claimed was an anonymous tip, the Miami Herald followed a woman to Washington, staked out a townhouse where she was visiting Hart, and on May 4, in a story that swept through the media nationwide, accused the front-runner of an illicit "relationship" with twenty-nine-year-old party girl Donna Rice of Miami. The next day it was confirmed that Hart had spent the weekend of March 27-29 aboard the Monkey Business, which his aide Billy Broadhurst had chartered for the candidate's relaxation after Hart attended a scheduled fund-raiser in South Miami. On Saturday the two men had taken an overnight trip to Bimini with Rice and her girlfriend.

In the wake of the later Herald story, compromising photos of the Bimini trip, including one showing Rice on the senator's lap, were sold to the tabloid press for six figures. And though Hart adamantly denied charges of adultery and seemed to be riding out the Herald story, which some reporters had begun to question, there was more. The Washington Post put the Hart campaign on notice that it had been given a private detective's report purporting to show the candidate's involvement with yet another woman in Washington. It was what many later saw as the paper's power play to force the candidate out of the race. Meanwhile, amid the blaring headlines and rumors, crucial sources of Hart campaign money and support were deserting him. On May 8, less than a month after he had declared as the clear favorite and only three days after the Monkey Business expose, Hart withdrew.


As elements of the Hart drama began to emerge afterward, it was clear that his personality and habits had driven his fate to some extent. Yet there had been more to the politician's destruction than vulnerable psychology. Whatever his other strengths or weaknesses, Hart was no ordinary candidate to those in the inner recesses of power. As a freshman senator he had been a key member of the celebrated Church committee investigating CIA abuses and specifically the agency's incessant links to organized crime. He had gone on to serve on the new Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, where he continued to be known for advocating further investigation and exposure of the alliance between the mob and the US intelligence community. Hart would be a vocal critic of CIA covert operations in general. A leading opponent of the Nicaraguan Contra war, the senator had barely escaped what he and others believed to be an assassination plot in 1983 when he flew into Managua at the time of an extraordinary CIA-sponsored Contra air strike against the capital.

From 1984 to 1987 Hart was repeatedly on record voicing his skepticism about the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and promising that if elected president in 1988 he would order the opening of all CIA and other government files in question, looking in particular at the possible role of organized crime figures Santo Trafficante, John Roselli, and Sam Giancana in the Kennedy murder -- the last two of whom had been killed during the Church committee inquiry. By the mid-1980s Hart was increasingly bold in exposing the "sleaze factor" in the Reagan administration, including the wider influence of the mob in Washington. According to someone familiar with a written record of the remark, Trafficante had said of Gary Hart, "We need to get rid of the son of a bitch."


Though it came too late to affect his fate, there would be still more evidence that Hart's fall was not what it seemed at the time. According to US Customs sources, one part of the setting of the episode had long been suspected of a role in drug running. Some of those involved in Hart's Miami-Bimini weekend turned out to have links to organized crime and cocaine trafficking and, in spiraling circles beyond, to crime bosses of the Jewish and Italian syndicates, who in turn possessed ties to the US intelligence community dating back to the Bay of Pigs and earlier.

Discrepancies were plain in the Miami Herald's role in the affair as well. In the supposedly spontaneous call of the paper's public-spirited tipster there had been highly implausible detail about Hart's movements and phone records over the preceding period, intimate knowledge that should have prompted journalistic suspicion but that the paper apparently never questioned. In fact, as a subsequent independent investigation would show, Hart had been under surveillance by unknown parties for days and perhaps weeks before the weekend of March 27-29.

There were also reports of sensational videotapes of the Monkey Business, part of a professional surveillance of the vessel. Despite unexplained money, incriminating phone calls, and even evidence of a contract murder, most of the media had simply repeated the first trumpeted charges and reprinted the supplied photos, joined the clamor that forced the candidate from the race, and then moved on to the next story.
There was no doubt that Hart inhabited the edge, but there was compelling evidence, too, that he had been pushed over it. And both self-inflicted and arranged, the ruin of Gary Hart would have historic impact on the Clintons.

Though Clinton continued to travel to a few dates in Washington and elsewhere after the headlines of May 4-8, for most of the next month the Hart scandal and withdrawal threw him and his campaign into a fearful paralysis. "What happened to Gary Hart scared the hell out of him," said one statehouse aide. "He just pulled back and shivered like it had been him," said another, "and of course with the women problem it could have been." Whereas only days before there had been a coy smugness about the cash he was raising and funds were "no barrier," reporters suddenly detected in Clinton a cautious ambivalence about both money and support and, in place of the almost boyish gleefulness of April, a studied indecision by the second week in May.

Returning from a trip in mid-June, he gave the waiting press in Little Rock a bleak assessment. "I can tell you there has been erosion," he said of his position, though never hinting at the real fear and vulnerability. The front-runner's withdrawal ought to have strengthened his chances considerably, but now he was the victim of circumstance and logistics. He had waited for Bumpers to pull out, he said, and perhaps the senator's indecision had made him too late. Since he had not yet formally declared, the former Hart aides and contributors Clinton had hoped to inherit were going instead to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. "Clinton was thinking of all the reasons he normally would have waved aside," an aide remembered. "Inside he was still acting like he was going to run," said a friend, "but he was getting ready in June to bailout, making excuses because he was afraid he'd be the next candidate everybody would see sitting there grinning stupidly with a woman on his lap."

At midnight on June 30 Clinton called former Hart aide Raymond Strother in Washington to tell him, "Let's go." In early July the Clintons were reported to have bought a condominium for the Rodhams in Little Rock so the grandparents could care for seven-year-old Chelsea during the coming campaign. The national media and aides and backers from around the country were invited to what many believed would be an announcement of candidacy at a luncheon on July 15.

Most in the crowd of three hundred would be shocked. His eyes watery, Hillary at his side in obvious distress, Clinton said he had decided against a run because he wanted to spend more time with his daughter. He had promised himself "a long, long time ago if I was ever lucky enough to have a kid, my child would never grow up wondering who her father was." The decision had been a real "tug-of-war," he told the hushed, sniffling audience, but "I knew it wasn't my time." Fear of scrutiny of his personal life had not been a factor in his decision, he told them earnestly. "But I thought about it a lot and we debated it a lot." He had decided how he would handle questions about his personal life, but he would not discuss it further at this point "because I am not a candidate."

To loud applause he added, "For whatever it's worth, I'd still like to be president. And if I get another chance, I'll be 110 percent."

Behind closed doors at the mansion there had been another reality, genuine vacillation but a rather different "tug-of-war." According to three separate accounts, Clinton had been strangely undeterred by Hart's early, almost prohibitive lead. Much as he would four years later, he seemed to some uncharacteristically ready to settle for less than the top prize, perhaps the vice presidency or merely name recognition for another run in 1992. "He'd been itching to go for so long," said an associate. "I think he just wanted to jump in and see what happened." Hart's sudden removal in May might now have opened Clinton's way as he had never imagined -- except for the fact that his personal excesses made him far more vulnerable than Hart.

If Clinton himself thought Hart had been set up by outside forces, aides who were with him much of the time never heard him say so in the restless days of talking and arguing leading up to his July 15 announcement. Whether or not Hart's removal surprised Bill Clinton, the manner in which it was done clearly sent a chill through the mansion in Little Rock. Suddenly a candidate's private life and philandering seemed susceptible to scrutiny as never before. While Clinton had long been immune in Arkansas -- almost cavalier in the openness of some of his extramarital affairs -- the rules seemed to be changing just as he was reaching for his ultimate ambition.

In an embarrassed, vain attempt to confront the issue, two of his closest backers met with him privately at the mansion in late June, while Hillary was gone. They carried a list of some of the women most widely known to have been involved with the governor since the late 1970s. It was a precursor of what would be called inside the 1992 campaign the "doomsday list," a later and longer enumeration of Clinton's affairs or other sexual episodes, with each woman assessed and action recommended according to her potential for exposure or betrayal. In the early summer of 1987, however, Clinton had been dismayed, and angry, at this first crude effort at the "damage control" for which his campaign later became famous.

"He didn't even recognize some of the names of women we knew he'd done," said one adviser. "He just got red in the face and waved his arms and said, 'Get this goddamned paper out of here. Hillary doesn't know any of this. What good is this goddamned paper?'" As if to make the advisers' point, there were soon stories gusting around Little Rock that the Democrat had what was called "a Hart-like expose" of Clinton's womanizing ready for its front page on the Wednesday the governor announced. Though the paper had no such story then or later, "either in the works or in the can," as Oakley noted in a column, the rumor further sealed his decision.

About what happened next, accounts differed. In one version Clinton had finally raised the issue more explicitly than ever with his wife, who was obviously aware of the problem, if not its magnitude, and whose reaction was bitter. It was the "nadir of their marriage," Gail Sheehy reported. There was a "raging argument," according to an aide. "She was furious that he was so worried it would come out, that it couldn't be handled," said an adviser who saw them together at the time.

In yet another recollection, Clinton had simply told his wife that they could not run, that he was too "vulnerable," but they had not talked much more until after his withdrawal. "They had the real hashing-out after everybody went home," said a former aide.

In either case, Clinton had told friends and advisers that ''I'm not ready for this," as one recalled, "and neither is Hillary." A handful in the July 15 audience knew that his teary remarks to the press were the usual political cover. He "could not face the prospect of the national media spreading rumors of his infidelities," one foreign journalist reported the governor's telling his closest supporters just before his announcement. Yet at the time both the local and the national media remained largely silent on Clinton's deeper motives, in effect crucially postponing any wider publicity on the issue of womanizing. The usually acerbic Oakley seemed relieved that he was not running for the White House and ready to take him at his word that he had done what was "best for himself and for his family," though she gently reminded readers of his personal frailty. "They were so caught up in the excitement about having a viable presidential contender from Arkansas," she wrote in words of lasting relevance, "that they forgot about the man in question."

Furious then or later, Hillary Rodham Clinton was outwardly stoic as usual when his indiscretions now cost them the chance for which she had worked so hard and sacrificed so much. She gave the media her own excuses. "As far as she was concerned," the Gazette noted in contradiction to most of what it had been reporting for weeks, "she had not wanted to launch another campaign at this time." There was a strange foreshadow of 1992 and the Clintons' famous 60 Minutes appearance. "BY HER MAN" the Democrat captioned a photo of the First Lady wiping away a tear as her husband announced he would not run for president.

***

Clinton would give an early endorsement to the relatively conservative Michael Dukakis for the 1988 campaign against Jesse Jackson and more reform-minded elements in the Democratic Party, many of them the remnant or spiritual legacy of the old McGovern forces. By several accounts, he even "coached" Dukakis in a more homey and earnest style and -- as Republicans mounted one of the worst smear campaigns of the century, including the infamous Willie Horton ads playing on racism and fear of crime -- in a more aggressive counterattack. But the tame, technocratic, privately acid and publicly diffident Massachusetts governor was a frustrating, eventually enraging pupil. "Dukakis drove him crazy, positively nuts," said one aide who watched the two men interact, the nominee largely ignoring Clinton's advice while the Southerner seethed in the conviction that he himself would have been a far better candidate. The disdain extended to their wives as well, Hillary Clinton privately deploring Kitty Dukakis's relative informality and self-effacement. "She thought Kitty had no fight in her," said a woman who heard the remarks, "and not the dignity or sense of real privacy to be a president's wife."

When Dukakis chose Clinton to give his nominating speech at the Atlanta convention, what should have been an impressive nationwide exposure turned into a cosmetic disaster for the Arkansas Governor. In a draft polished by Hillary, like all other important speeches, but then tampered with by the fratricidal Dukakis camp, Clinton droned on for what seemed endless minutes on prime-time television as the Omni house lights remained undimmed and undisciplined Dukakis delegates milled and murmured in utter distraction. It was an unprecedented humiliation for a Clinton who prided himself on his oratory and who was invariably deferred to both in Arkansas and around the country. All too aware of the debacle, he was apparently powerless to improvise to escape it; his voice grew "tinny" and "desperate," as one Arkansas reporter remembered, and his face typically "redder by the minute." When it was finally over, the crowd cheering his departure from the stage, the pride of Hope and Hot Springs had become the butt of jokes. "What a windbag," Johnny Carson remarked to his audience of millions. The surgeon general, he said, had approved Clinton as an over-the-counter sleep aid.

The Clintons were more furious than staff or friends had ever seen them. Dukakis was the "son of a bitch of the week," recalled one reporter, while for months afterward Clinton bitterly referred to the nominee in front of the troopers and other aides as "that little Greek motherfucker." Meantime, Hillary moved with customary resolve to retrieve the situation, summoning Betsey Wright to Atlanta to manage the aftermath and shrewdly telephoning Hollywood friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Arkansans made good as sit-com producers. In hours Clinton had an invitation to be on Carson's show, where his self-deprecating performance and saxophone solo seemed to redeem him. The Thomasons threw a gala party afterward with a sign showing the White House and captioned "On the Road Again. Clinton '96." Some were not so sure. The Atlanta speech showed "the real Bill Clinton," thought Gazette reporter John Brummett, and had been damaging with "the big-money people in the Democratic Party."

As it was, Dukakis's forfeit of a seventeen-point poll lead and his decisive defeat by George Bush would mean more than any Clinton blunder; he would have a chance again in 1992, though the specter that drove him from the race still loomed. Hardly noticed amid the campaign, the Gridiron Club of Little Rock journalists and politicians put on a skit at a 1988 gathering that brought down the house. Members impersonating Gary Hart and Bill Clinton came on stage and sang a parody of a popular song, "To All the Girls We've Loved."

***

As Clinton had hinted in his 1987 withdrawal, he and Hillary had already begun to formulate the tactics they would adopt to deal with the all too real potential for a sex scandal's erupting during a presidential campaign. He had thought it a "weakness" in Hart, aides remembered, that the senator seemed to equivocate over issues like a definition of adultery and appeared unprepared to lash back to discredit the attacks. Hart, who had formally and openly separated from his wife in 1979 and again in 1981, would admit to having seen women during the separations but otherwise refused to answer questions about infidelity. At the same time, no woman had come forward to accuse him, including Donna Rice.

With Hart's precedent and four years to prepare, Clinton's response would be more concerted and sophisticated, at least as staff and advisers saw it evolve between 1987 and the 1992 race. He might acknowledge having had "difficulties" in his marriage -- "nodding humbly at the weakness of the flesh," as a Hot Springs friend put it caustically, "like a good Southern Baptist is supposed to do" -- but dismiss them as all in the past. Unlike what they saw as a passive Lee Hart, Hillary would stand behind him with characteristic firmness. "She was never to play the poor little wife," said one adviser. They would also be prepared to strike back at any women accusers -- "taking on the bitches," as one former staff member put it -- including with private campaigns of "spin" to discredit them with the media and even pressures to silence them. Above all, however, Clinton would simply deny everything. Barring the most direct evidence -- which advisers and others say he always assumed would never be available -- he was sure the story could go no further. The governor, they remembered, had an almost mystical faith in the absence of photographs. "He felt it was probably those pictures that killed Hart, that and being sort of mealy-mouthed about the whole thing," one friend remembered. "If you could deny it over and over, the reporters would get tired sooner or later and go away to something else." As Clinton himself would tell one of the women, Gennifer Flowers, late in 1991, "If they ever hit you with it, just say no and go on. There's nothing they can do .... If everybody kinda hangs tough, they're just not going to do anything. They can't ... if they don't have pictures."

Even given all the familiar reasons for discretion and concealment by the women themselves, there was no small potential for revelation. There had been far too many cases. As they eventually told their stories after he was elected president, the Arkansas trooper bodyguards and others would testify to Bill Clinton's extramarital relations with literally hundreds of women, "There would hardly be an opportunity he would let slip to have sex," a state police security guard told the London Sunday Times in 1994. Insistent denials by both Clinton and the woman in question would not always be a guarantee of erasing suspicion, even without photos. While one woman employee of an Arkansas utility continued to deny any relationship with the governor, for example, the Los Angeles Times unearthed partial phone records between 1989 and 1991 that showed Clinton telephoning her fifty-nine times at her home and office, placing eleven cellular calls to her residence on July 16, 1989, and, two months later, while on an official trip, making a ninety-four-minute call at 1:23 a.m. and another for eighteen minutes the next morning at 7:45. Clinton had been wrong when he talked about telephone evidence in a tape-recorded conversation with Gennifer Flowers in December 1991. Did she have phone records? he had asked her after she told him someone had broken into her apartment. "Unh unh. I mean why would I? You ... you usually call me, for that matter. And besides, who would know?" Flowers had answered. And Clinton, speaking from the mansion, had seemed to reassure himself: "Isn't that amazing? Well . . . I wouldn't care if they ... you know, I, I ... They may have my phone records on this computer here, but I don't think it.... That doesn't prove anything."

Though most of the eyewitness accounts would appear only after the 1992 election, the list of the future president's illicit affairs would be remarkably detailed, including more than twenty women who stepped forward or were otherwise publicly identified by the spring of 1994. Troopers would describe the wife of a prominent local judge, a Little Rock reporter, a former state employee, a cosmetics clerk at a Little Rock department store, and several others, including Flowers, whom Clinton had seen at intervals of two to three times a week in the course of relationships lasting anywhere from weeks to months to years. According to the British press, there had been a black woman who claimed, after more than a dozen visits by the future president, that Clinton was the father of her child. In the testimony, too, were the settings and circumstances -- the flaunting of girlfriends in public, Clinton's slipping troopers cash to pay for gifts at Victoria's Secret in Little Rock's University Mall, the constant and often vain efforts to conceal movements from Hillary and the periodic scenes between Clinton and her, the numberless one-night stands with strangers in the state and beyond, oral sex in the dark parking lot of Chelsea's elementary school. "Later he told me that he had researched the subject in the Bible," trooper Larry Patterson told the American Spectator, "and oral sex isn't considered adultery." Some thought it all undeniably pathological. "What has emerged," Geordie Greig of the London Sunday Times wrote, "is a man with what would appear to be an almost psychotic inability to control his zipper."

From the first alarm and strategizing after the Hart episode in 1987, the response of the Clinton entourage had been to view the womanizing in an almost prudish way, fearing outright public rejection. "We were thinking how it was going to play in Jonesboro or Paragould," said one aide, "and of course we were thinking of Gary Hart." But the national public response in 1992 would prove apparently more lenient and worldly. When audiences in New Hampshire, New York, or California seemed ready to accept that a presidential candidate's private life -- whatever his extramarital sexual habits and whether they credited his denials or not -- had no bearing on his integrity as a leader, Clinton's aides regarded their strategy of simply stonewalling as vindicated. Neither then nor later did many of those around Clinton reflect on the deeper meaning of the womanizing and what it said about other aspects of the man and leader.

At almost every turn in the history was an abuse of power and trust: the routine employment of the troopers to facilitate, stand guard, and cover up; the use of state cars and time and the sheer good name and prestige of the governor's office.

It was not that Clinton had governed and then made his sexual forays as part of some scrupulously separate private life. In part because of the furtive shadow play with Hillary, in part the product of his own insouciance and sense of entitlement, much of the philandering took place during the workday, on official trips, or around ceremonial or political functions. He had indulged a good deal of his relentless promiscuity as the government. Propositioning young women at county fairs or enticing state employees at conferences, he enjoyed much of his predatory privilege because he was the government.

There was also the issue of how much the illicit practices opened the governor and future president to blackmail or how much the gifts and other expenses, which could not be taken from any legitimate income that Hillary might notice, made him all the more dependent on his own "walking around" cash from backers. Equally telling was what it all revealed about his genuine attitude toward women. The repeated testimony of the troopers would show the undisguised Clinton rating women as objects, "ripe peaches," as he called them, "purely to be graded, purely to be chased, dominated, conquered," according to L.D. Brown. The governor had been predatory even toward one of the trooper's wives and toward another's mother-in-law.

There was a sharp demarcation between his two worlds, the public champion of equal rights naming women to high office and the seducer who preferred his partners without too much rival seriousness, rewarding substance only as part of the seduction. A young staff analyst for the National Governors' Association would remember Clinton's courting her not only by personal charm and flirtation but also by ardent support of her policy proposals. When she firmly rebuffed his advances one night at an NGA dance, however, he instantly lost interest in her ideas -- "cut me and the policies dead the next day," she remembered. When a former Miss Arkansas, Sally Perdue, told of a four-month affair with Clinton that began not long after he returned to power in 1983, reports fixed on her colorful details of the governor parading around her apartment in one of her black nightgowns playing his saxophone, using cocaine. More significant were the circumstances of their breakup. When she told him she was thinking of running for mayor of Pine Bluff, Clinton bristled. "You'd -- you'd better not run for mayor," he warned her, and the relationship ended in an angry argument. He was clearly upset that she had crossed a line, Perdue remembered. A "good ole boy," as she recalled him, he had wanted a "good little girl" as an intimate. "I don't think he really wanted me to be an independent thinker at that point," Perdue would say.


Fear of exposure notwithstanding, the behavior would continue through the election and transition. Among the troopers' stories would be a scene at the Little Rock airport as the president-elect and his wife left for Virginia and their inaugural procession into Washington. Hillary noticed a security guard escorting one of the women to the farewell ceremony and turned on him angrily. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she asked Larry Patterson, according to his account in the American Spectator. "I know who that whore is. I know what she's doing here. Get her out of here." In a reaction familiar to many aides, Clinton simply shrugged and the trooper took the woman back to the city. At the same juncture, having witnessed during the later days of the campaign and during the transition what some in Arkansas had seen for years, even the legendarily discreet Secret Service was shocked by the new occupants of the White House. According to reliable sources, some of the agents who had been in Little Rock filed an extraordinary warning with headquarters referring in old-fashioned terms to issues of "moral turpitude" involving the president-elect.

Even after the troopers' initial revelations in the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator late in 1993, however, the issue would be all but marginalized by the mainstream media. ''I'm not interested in Bill Clinton's sex life as governor of Arkansas," New York Times Washington bureau chief R.W. Apple told a British reporter. At the same time, longtime Washington Post journalist Mike Isikoff would find himself in a shouting match with editors who were refusing to publish even a portion of his meticulously researched investigative report on Paula Jones, who would later bring a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president. Jones's much-substantiated story of being propositioned by Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock on May 8, 1991, when she was a twenty-four-year-old Arkansas state employee, was typical of the situation in which many young women of her time and class found themselves during the Clinton era. Yet few episodes so starkly expressed the inherent sexism, class discrimination, and willful myopia of the Washington establishment as the Jones case. The media, national women's organizations, leaders throughout the Congress, and organized labor and other ostensibly progressive institutions alternately ignored, dismissed, or even belittled Jones and witnesses like her. The studied hypocrisy and insensitivity to the underlying issues of abuse of power and exploitation of women would be one more vivid example of the capital's culture of complicity.

***

In the years leading to the 1992 election the Clintons would enjoy a similar tacit indifference and acceptance regarding the life and career that Hillary Clinton pursued.

There would be several sources -- including a former US attorney, sometime aides, a number of lawyers, social friends, and many of the same troopers who testified about the governor's illicit acts -- who described the First Lady's affair, dating to the mid-1980s, with Rose partner Vince Foster. A relationship evident in the semiprivate kisses and furtive squeezes at parties and dinners described by the security guards, it was also an intimate professional bond between two attorneys who worked together on some of their firm's most sensitive cases. Along with Webster Hubbell, they staged a veritable coup d'etat to wrest control of the Rose firm in 1988. Many thought that the governor was well aware of the affair and ultimately accepted it as one more implicit bargain in their marriage. Clinton continued to treat Vince Foster as the close friend he had been since childhood in Hope, even entrusting him with some of the most crucial secrets of the 1992 campaign. "Bill knew, of course he knew," said a lawyer close to Foster who was familiar with them all. "But what the hell was he supposed to say to anybody about being faithful?"

To some, Hillary's relationship with Vince Foster, a tall, handsome, courtly figure who was widely respected in the Little Rock legal and business community, was an understandable and natural response to her husband's behavior. Foster was known to treat her with the dignity, respect, and abiding love she was missing in her marriage. "He adored her," said a fellow lawyer. Under other circumstances, it might have been one of those relationships that remained private and without any political relevance to the Clinton presidency. What set it apart was that, once in the White House, the Clintons would install the First Lady's confidant in one of the nation's most sensitive positions as deputy counsel to the president, where he would handle controversial matters stemming from their Arkansas past as well as highly classified presidential affairs.

"I cannot make this point to you too strongly," Foster told University of Arkansas Law School graduates in the spring of 1993 in his last public statement. "There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity .... Dents to the reputation in the legal profession are irreparable." But the man whom the Washington Post would call the "integrity cop" in the Clinton White House was destined to die an unquiet death. According to the official inquiry, on a sultry July day Foster ate a hearty lunch from the White House mess at his desk, left the office at midday without explanation, and was found only hours later in a park overlooking the Potomac, a fatal gunshot wound through his mouth. Nothing else about the event would be without controversy: Foster's state of mind, the unaccountable debt he left at the White House credit union despite personal affluence, the Clinton papers on Whitewater and other matters that were in his office, which was entered soon after his death by Patsy Thomasson and other White House aides, and even whether he lost or actually gained weight in the weeks leading up to his death. Initially ruled a suicide, Foster's shooting would come under investigation by the Whitewater special prosecutor in 1995, an office that had not even been contemplated at the time of his death.

Whatever the circumstances of Foster's fate would eventually prove to be, he had been a man who knew many of the money secrets of both the campaign of 1992 and the Clinton presidency, just as he knew the secrets of the Rose firm and of Hillary Rodham Clinton's business and financial dealings over the previous decade, dealings that would become the subject of numerous investigations and would cast an even greater shadow over the White House than his death would.

***

In the summer of 1990, in the midst of a bitter reelection campaign, the Clintons would publish a financial statement purporting to show their financial condition while in the governorship, though the figures went back only to 1980 -- discreetly short of Hillary's 1979 windfall in the commodity trades. Even at that, the numbers were surprising to many in Arkansas. Clinton had made only $35,000 a year as governor, and Hillary's income had risen from $46,000 to $98,000 yearly over the decade as a Rose partner. The couple's net worth at the end of 1989 was listed at more than a half million dollars, their total assets first claimed to be $418,692, then revised upward the next day to $614,094 because investment accounts had been left out of the initial statement. Their adjusted gross income had been well over $100,000 annually for most of the ten years, and in addition to their salaries, Hillary's director's fees from corporate boards, miscellaneous income, and capital gains had reached as high as $70,000 yearly by the late 1980s.

In one of the poorest states in the nation -- its average annual income barely $19,000 and one in every five, or half a million people, living below the poverty line -- the Clintons were relatively affluent. Dorothy Rodham need not have worried at their wedding fifteen years before that they were sacrificing "luxury and money," as she had put it, by "realizing their ideals" in running for office. As the record would show, Bill and Hillary Clinton were as committed to making money as to holding political power, and in many ways the two drives and results were so entwined as to be inseparable. It was an old and simple reciprocal in Arkansas and American politics. They had gained and held power in large measure because of their appreciation of money, and they had received much of their money because they were in power.

Their official financial statement in 1990 revealed little of the Clintons' real circumstances, the perquisites and favors that surrounded and mortgaged their political rise, and none of Hillary Clinton's steady, often tenacious acquisitiveness. By the end of the decade they were benefiting from a tax-paid household budget of over $800,000 a year, including a thousand dollars a week for food alone. By special legislative dispensation, Clinton was also receiving for purposes of retirement benefits three years' credit for every one served as governor and two for every one as attorney general, which would give him some thirty-eight years' worth of retirement benefits when he left office in 1993, as if he had been working at the top of state government in Arkansas since the age of eight.

But that was only the beginning of their wider advantages. From 1983 to 1988 Clinton obtained twelve bank loans from one bank totaling some $400,000, according to an exclusive Associated Press report -- all of which were personally guaranteed by Clinton and arranged without security or collateral. By May 1995 the Washington Post would report that the Whitewater independent counsel was looking beyond the $400,000 into more than $800,000 in "campaign-related loans that a handful of Arkansas banks made to Clinton while he was governor." Though the Clintons would later claim that $300,000 of this borrowed money was used for elections, his official campaign contribution records would not reflect such donations or loans from the candidate and there would be no explanation for as much as $500,000 of the borrowed money. Apparently, much of this personal debt was eventually paid back by contributors, including $25,000 from TCBY, $15,000 from Tyson Foods, and $11,500 from the same Union Bank that had loaned them the $20,000 Whitewater down payment. (Spokesmen for Tyson and others later claimed they believed they were contributing to a fund for promoting education or other Clinton policies, as distinct from paying back personal debts or giving to a political campaign.) In the end, some suspected that what may have been nearly a million dollars constituted, as one called it, a Clinton "slush fund." How they spent the money would not be completely accounted for by 1996. Tax records showed that they never claimed it as income, though many in Arkansas believed that they obviously benefited personally from much of it. "It's still sitting out there in fiscal limbo," wrote author Martin Gross.

As Clinton was taking in $400,000 to $800,000 in unaccounted loans repaid by someone else over the late 1980s, Hillary was avidly pursuing her own opportunities in circumstances that would prove questionable as well. In 1983 she had put $2,014 into an investment group under David Watkins -- a Hope native and Clinton loyalist whose Little Rock advertising firm produced many of the governor's political spots -- to compete for a lucrative cellular-phone franchise in Little Rock. When their bid failed initially, Watkins took a loan -- with Hillary Rodham Clinton personally guaranteeing $60,000 of it -- to buy out the winner of the franchise. In 1988 the group sold the franchise to a large telecommunications firm for a profit of more than $2 million, and the First Lady received $45,998 on her original $2,014 investment. On the surface it seemed another fortunate venture, but Hillary Clinton had been no ordinary investor in the scheme and David Watkins no ordinary promoter.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

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Part 2 of 2

As Larry Wallace, owner of the NBC affiliate in Little Rock and another partner in the group, later told a reporter, influence with the Federal Communications Commission had been assumed crucial to winning the franchise, and "Hillary's connection to the governor was thought to be a way of attracting the FCC." As for Watkins, according to a 1994 investigative report by Business Week, interviews with more than a dozen former associates and investors, as well as court documents and financial statements, showed what the magazine called "a man with a past," including "a trail of disappointed investors" and "a string of failed penny-stock companies from New York to Texas, hawking items from cruises to credit cards." Watkins's Amerinet was started in 1986 to market Visa cards, went public through a reverse merger with a Nevada shell company, and sank amid investor complaints of securities fraud and management plunder; a 1987 franchise cash-checking operation soon collapsed with more embittered investors; and elder-care franchises and ocean cruises floundered as well. "Many of Watkins's ventures," Business Week concluded, "flew below SEC radar."

Yet, as with Jim McDougal and others, the dealmaker's record was no deterrent to his relationship with the Clintons. Not long after Hillary's boon in the cellular-phone franchise, the governor named Watkins's father to the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, whose sweeping powers over Arkansas's air and water quality standards and land use policies made it one of the most prized preserves of the interests. By the early 1990s David Watkins was a millionaire despite his business history and the fate of the investors he recruited, and he in turn would help the Clinton presidential campaign arrange at the beginning of 1992 a candidacy-saving but highly controversial bridge loan of $3.5 million from the Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank. Equally important, as deputy manager and chief financial officer of the campaign, he also helped arrange around the same time a contract worth more than a million dollars designating his friends in Little Rock's World Wide Travel the campaign's travel agents. It proved a critical relationship, at least behind the scenes. At a crucial moment early in the 1992 race, when Bill Clinton was still reeling financially and politically from charges of infidelity and a second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, World Wide would defer billing on enormous travel costs, allowing Clinton to pour scarce money into the pivotal Michigan and Illinois primaries. "Were it not for World Wide Travel here," Watkins would boast to Travel Weekly magazine, "the Arkansas governor may never have been in contention for the highest office in the land."

Named assistant to the president for management and administration in 1993, Watkins would go on to be a central figure in the Travelgate scandal, a furtive maneuver by Hillary and others in the first weeks of the Clinton presidency to replace the White House Travel Office with World Wide. In the resulting controversy, inquiry, and findings of shady practice, Watkins would be officially reprimanded by White House chief of staff and old friend Mack McLarty and taken to task by Congress for backdating personnel appointments and pay raises. Eventually he resigned when he was discovered using a presidential helicopter for a golf outing to Maryland's Eastern Shore.


Cellular-phone franchises were a common windfall for the politically connected during the 1980s. "The scandal isn't what's illegal, the scandal is what's legal," observed the New Republic's "TRB." But the franchise episode was only one of many ways Hillary Clinton realized a financial advantage from her position. Seemingly oblivious or indifferent to the companies' practices, she would take and keep lucrative seats on the boards of numerous corporations. She was a $30,000-a-year director of Lafarge Corporation, the nation's second-largest cement producer, whose kilns were under official and private condemnation from Michigan to California for burning hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste. She was the first and sole woman on the board of Arkansas's giant Wal-Mart under a reactionary, authoritarian Sam Walton, known for his low wages, anti-union venom, sexism, and a company patriarchy that forbade employees to date one another without approval. She was a trustee of Little Rock's booming TCBY Yogurt, which paid Rose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and whose executives gave themselves pay raises and golden parachutes while shareholders filed a class-action lawsuit citing the corporation's "disdain for the truth." In the boardrooms of each, as among the Rose partners, as in other settings, she would not only fail to challenge the abuses petty and major but, by her very presence and prestige, lend support.

It was much the same in her more visible, noncorporate public roles during the late 1980s: chairing an ad hoc group of the American Bar Association on sexism in the legal profession, sitting on the board of the Children's Defense Fund, or, somewhat more behind the scenes, devising a desegregation scheme for the Little Rock federal court or a state government ethics reform proposal. She would be outwardly impressive in each yet, on closer examination, substantively vacant in the end. In the ABA review of what amounted to massive gender discrimination, "Clinton's tangible accomplishments," as one study of the review put it, "amounted to little more than a few reports and manuals and a lot of speeches." While she claimed the Children's Defense Fund as the very symbol of her commitment, policies on child welfare and foster care under the Clinton administration in Little Rock had produced a scandalous system of neglect, leading some of the groups Hillary Rodham had once supported to bring a scathing lawsuit against Bill Clinton. So, too, her recommendations on Pulaski County desegregation -- still to be achieved nearly four decades after the US Supreme Court's Brown decision -- would prove a convoluted political expedient, and her plan for governmental ethics reform in Arkansas, passed as well through her quietly felonious partner Webb Hubbell, managed to exempt the governor's office from critical accountability.
"She was far less adept at making a difference in public policy than at making money," said one man who worked closely with her in Little Rock and elsewhere. The verdict of those who looked beyond the mere resume went back to the bargain she had made long before. "No matter how accomplished and brilliant she is, or what she wants, or what she has done, or what she stands for," wrote Nina Martin after a 1993 investigation of the record, "in the end it is her husband's agenda -- and career -- that always comes first."

Meanwhile she continued to expand her financial portfolio. She would join Vince Foster and Hubbell in a private investment scheme in 1983 that made them rather than their spouses the beneficiaries; bought into oil-drilling partnerships for tax deductions; invested substantially in Value Partners, a prestigious White Heights investment pool; and in 1990-91 reportedly accepted $101,630 as a consultant to a New York State-funded commission on education and the economy. At home, at least, she could be persistent, even intimidating, in her reach. When she joined the board of the Southern Development Corporation, a consortium of local charities put together with state funds to make loans to the most needy, she soon lobbied for Rose to get the group's legal work, yielding some $150,000 in fees. "She just pitched a fit to get that retainer," said another member of the board.

Together the future president and First Lady seemed no less concerned about realizing the benefits of their own charity, taking nearly $200,000 off their taxes in charitable deductions over the 1980s, usually attaching a handwritten list itemizing their noncash contributions -- $30 for three shower curtains, $5 for an electric razor, $40 for an old pair of Bill's running shoes, various amounts for discarded undershorts and shirts. By many accounts the grasping at opportunity was part of her fierce sense of sacrifice -- and thus of self-justification. Hillary was said to be furious when their handler, Dickie Morris, told her at one point that many in hard-up Arkansas were likely to resent her putting in a swimming pool at the governor's mansion. "Her friends in the Heights had one, so why couldn't she?" said another adviser. "Why can't we lead the lives of normal people?" Hillary Rodham Clinton had demanded in an angry argument with the consultant.

***

If the Clintons did well enough in the mansion, if they felt entitled to all their income, perquisites, and more, their portion was still only a relative scrap compared to the great fortunes their governance allowed a handful of the ultrawealthy to amass during the 1980s. "You have to remember that for political purposes there are really just two classes in this state -- rich and dirt," a prominent Little Rock attorney would say. "The Clintons got their votes from the dirt and their money from the rich and saw themselves always as part of the money." By the early 1990s, as Clinton ended his dozen years as governor and readied himself to enter the White House, wealth and power were consolidated in Arkansas as never before.

Forbes called them the "undeniably formidable business juggernauts" -- the "mind-boggling" concentrations of wealth and influence like Stephens, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt, Dillards, TCBY, and others, whose success "had everything to do with a no-holds-barred unfettered approach to free enterprise," as the magazine put it. "Be assured that when these entrepreneurial Arkansas capitalists want to talk, Bill Clinton is ready to listen."

Their arrogance and reach were legends in Little Rock and beyond. Confronted with a state supreme court decision that might have cramped his control, Witt Stephens, "Mr. Witt," as his kept governors and legislators respectfully knew him, was only momentarily annoyed. "Well, hell, we'll just change the law," he said and proceeded to do just that. Under his brother Jackson Stephens, the multibillion-dollar Stephens, Inc. continued to wield the same, almost perfunctory dominance during the Clinton years despite a facade of mutual distaste the financier and the politician found it expedient to present to the public. "Privately they had a very warm relationship," a Rose senior partner would say of Clinton and the Stephens clan and executives, whose interests Hillary and Vince Foster represented legally and who openly joined the Clinton contributor lists in 1990 and 1992, as well as moving to save his presidential candidacy with the Worthen Bank credit line.

If less subtle, it was much the same with poultry tycoon Don Tyson. From his Springdale headquarters, adorned with an executive suite that was a replica of the Oval Office (but with doorknobs in the shape of hen's eggs), and with Clinton confidante Jim Blair installed as house lawyer, Tyson disposed a multibillion-dollar empire of international scope. Like Wal-Mart, it was a gigantically profitable corporation of primitive paternalism. Norman Solomon wrote that the poultry industry in Arkansas "keeps its farmers in near indentured servitude ... works its underpaid, frequently injured workers at an extraordinary pace ... discharges half a million tons of chicken shit into Arkansas' rivers every year." The grizzled, hard-partying Tyson poured money into Clinton throughout the politician's career to preserve and extend the company's interest, including $12 million in state tax breaks and what Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity called "laggard and unaggressive" enforcement of environmental regulations. Under Clinton, as before him, the chicken industry effectively made its own rules in Arkansas. Even the state inspection laboratory was controlled by poultry producers. "A series of unsentimental transactions," Michael Kelly described Don Tyson's view of American politics, "between those who need votes and those who have money."

Beneath the most enormous fortunes were dozens less vast or flamboyant, though many of the holders had similar views of social responsibility. The Dillard's department store chain was charged by its own employees with racial discrimination and was said to treat shareholders with what Arkansas Business magazine called "a big case of the Marie Antoinette syndrome ('Let them eat cake!')." Comparison to Bourbons was not idle. When the Arkansas Times early in 1992 began to profile "fat cats" in a state with a per capita yearly income of $14,629, those with less than $100 million net worth were well down the list. It was the fat cats' Arkansas in which Clinton came to power. It was theirs more than ever when he went on to Washington.

What Tyson and others saw as "unsentimental transactions" were far more than the permits or rate increases or random favors that defined special-interest influence in other states and even more than the over $400 million yearly in corporate tax exemptions, a fifth of the state's budget. Bought and sold was a political culture, a way of life for the two and a half million people of the state. It was not only that Clinton's government exercised no regulatory power worth the name. Utterly uncontested by the early 1980s, no longer even denounced in Arkansas's ritual verbal populism, the immense monied power shrouded every part of the state -- finance, the job market, incomes, prices, institutions of all kinds, including educational institutions from grade schools, whose funding was hostage to the interest-controlled tax system, to colleges, where the new rich dictated as they donated.

If either of the Clintons had been troubled by that crude oligarchy, there was no sign in their continued silence and collusion. Over the decade after 1983, they enjoyed an unprecedented political dominance not only in the governor's enduring hold on the electorate but through some two thousand appointees to more than two hundred commissions and boards dispensing hundreds of millions and overseeing much of the economy. The Clinton "machine" was now unlike any other in Arkansas history, and many believed it the only administration strong enough to have taken on private power in the state. That was the paradox and the tragedy.

Afterward, among both supporters and critics there were differing explanations of the relative emptiness of Bill Clinton's record in Arkansas: that he was capricious and inconstant as a matter of personality and leadership style, that he often intended to do the right thing yet wanted to be liked even more and was unable or unwilling to confront the opposition or inertia of a backward legislature, that he was distracted by national ambition, that he spent too much time traveling or vacantly politicking or philandering, even that he was emotionally or intellectually unable to sustain the necessary concentration. Whatever the pattern of the moment, however, the common outcome in policy was submission to the interests. Of a dozen years of examples, none was more illustrative than the Arkansas Development Finance Authority's involvement in the Beverly nursing home scandal.

While giants like Tyson and Wal-Mart made their way as usual, Clinton's ADFA provided what U.S. News would call "pinstripe patronage" and "insider lending" for a number of smaller, less-known Arkansas companies whose chief distinction was often a tie to partners in the Rose firm, the owners' contributions to Clinton, or both. In the seven years after Rose-drafted legislation created it in 1985, ADFA issued bonds of more than $700 million and claimed to have created twenty-seven hundred jobs in Arkansas. But on closer examination, most of the new wages were well below the national standard, and the overall number of jobs was shockingly low compared to the ninety thousand produced by Orval Faubus's Arkansas Industrial Development Commission over nine years with no bonding power -- all in a state where the unemployment rate remained nearly 8 percent and twenty-three counties had rates in the double digits, with some as high as nearly 19 percent. Instead, ADFA had been a bonanza for Lasater and Company as well as for Stephens, Goldman, Sachs, and other larger financial houses, who continued to underwrite millions in issues despite the competition of newer Clinton patrons. At least ADFA provided job security for the governor himself, his 1990 campaign receiving over $400,000 in contributions from those benefiting directly from the publicly guaranteed bonds.

Ostensibly for economic development, ADFA had the power literally to "create money," as one writer described it, though the creation went largely to the profit of solvent, credit-worthy companies who received loans well below market rates. There was virtually no legislative oversight or other public accountability, save for that provided by Governor Clinton himself, who appointed the ADFA board and personally approved every bond issue and major transaction from 1985 through 1992. Though there were later suspicions and even published accounts of ADFA's being used to launder millions in drug money, including some of Barry Seal's from Mena, the agency's official records did little to dispel the charges. When reporters began to look at ADFA seriously for the first time after Clinton's election to the presidency, it was plain that the agency had not exercised what many in the financial world regarded as "due diligence" in its bond issues, and even relevant documentation seemed to be missing or hidden. There were differing versions of exactly how many bond issues the authority had released and no clear accounting of precisely where the more than $700 million had come from or, for that matter, how it had all been spent. "ADFA had its own 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy," said a Little Rock broker.

What was visible was a burlesque of the incestuous world of Arkansas government and business. In the $2.75 million loan to POM, the thriving parking meter manufacturer and Pentagon contractor, Rose got its fee as ADFA's certifying attorney while Hubbell was counsel to POM. In two bond issues totaling $1.77 million for the Pine Bluff Warehouse Company, the trustee bank's vice president sat on the ADFA board; the bank's chief executive officer, the father of Rose partner William Kennedy III, sat on the board of the warehouse company; Stephens underwrote the bonds; and Rose handled the legal work. A $4.67 million loan went to Arkansas Freightways, whose largest outside stockholder was Stephens, who in turn underwrote the bonds, with Rose co-counsel on the issue and the trustee bank's executive vice president a Clinton appointee to the ADFA board. Cavalier practices extended well beyond Arkansas as well. In 1987 ADFA would suddenly borrow $5 million from a Japanese bank's Chicago branch to purchase stock in a Barbados reinsurance firm called Coral, all in a relatively risky and vague venture that was unquestioned by the Clinton regime in Little Rock but later prompted investigation by securities authorities in New York and Delaware as well as by the SEC.

Yet the most vivid portrait of ADFA would be in what Arkansas lawyers and others came to call the "Beverly operation." In the late 1980s one of the Stephens investments, a nursing home chain called Beverly Enterprises, was troubled by debt and the financial house, abetted by a Texas banker and the Rose firm, formed a nonprofit corporation to buy the nursing homes. The banker and underwriters would take millions in profits, Beverly would make millions in needed cash, and Rose and Stephens would realize their share -- all because the deal was to be financed by tax-exempt state bonds. Early in 1989 they had executed the scheme to buy forty-one nursing homes in Iowa with $86 million in state bonds, a transaction an Iowa court would denounce four years later as using "a 'shell' nonprofit corporation ... to make millions of dollars of excessive profits."

In September 1989 they were about to carry off a similar deal in Arkansas for the purchase of thirty-two nursing homes with $83 million in ADFA bonds, and as much as a half million dollars in fees to Rose. "The Beverly operation was one of the biggest contracts the firm had handled and was the subject of regular discussion among the partners," the London Sunday Times noted later. "It is inconceivable that Hillary Clinton did not know about the deal." Then, at the last moment, the deal collapsed when Attorney General Steve Clark claimed he had been offered $100,000 in campaign money as a thinly disguised bribe to drop his opposition to the Beverly bonds. Suddenly, if fleetingly, like Mena two years later, the affair and the usually obscure ADFA practices were front-page news in Little Rock, the Texas banker was challenging a state official to a fight, and Clinton "reluctantly stepped in and killed the transaction," as a team of British journalists described it afterward. "They tried to milk us like an old, full cow. It was wrong," the governor told reporters. "The more I study and the more I learn about it, the worse I feel." In his indignation he said nothing of ADFA's earlier agreement to the deal with his approval or of Rose's role. The partner who devised both the Iowa and the Arkansas schemes, William Kennedy III, would be named a counsel to the president in the Clinton White House.

As in Washington in the 1980s, the toll of such governance was not only in favor and enrichment but in negligence and suffering. Behind the claims of the Clinton presidential campaign in 1992, the sum of his actual policy record was stunning. An Arkansas that spent less than half as much on environmental protection as Mississippi and often allowed powerful interests to pollute at will would be rated last in the nation for the effectiveness of its environmental policies. In what the Los Angeles Times called "one of the nation's most regressive tax systems," Arkansas families earning less than $9,000 a year paid nearly four times more state tax proportionately than families making in excess of $600,000. The state's economy remained mired in what one observer called a "low-wage, low-skill trap," near the bottom of the nation, as it always had been, in average annual pay, income distribution, joblessness, and poverty. When the fanfare of education "reform" had died away, the state remained almost last in the United States in per capita expenditure for education, in the percentage of its students completing high school, in the proportion of its citizens with college degrees. While as governor and later as president Clinton spoke earnestly of welfare reform, Arkansas's own system was "flawed from start to finish" with inadequate child care, transportation, supervision, or jobs.

In those areas of government that required more detailed and sustained attention, among the more entrenched bureaucracies and stolid, corrupt institutions, the cost of the Clinton style and substance was still more evident. The scandalous system of child welfare and foster care that left dead and maimed children in its wake and provoked a class-action lawsuit in 1991, constituted what one witness called "a silence ... and a stench one can't forget." The state systems of juvenile justice and adult corrections were nightmarish by several accounts. In health care, Arkansas remained among the worst in the nation -- second in the country in teen pregnancy, plagued by scandal in its nursing homes, state hospitals, and mental-health programs in general, its infant mortality approaching Third World rates. At a 1989 conference Hillary Clinton, seated next to President Bush, made a point of complaining, justifiably, that US infant mortality overall left the nation far behind other wealthy societies, a fact Bush at first denied and later acknowledged. Campaign aides would tell the story as one more example of her strength and caring, yet at the same moment infant mortality among African Americans in Arkansas was twice the national average she had deplored with Bush.

Nowhere was the toll sharper than in the black community that gave its votes so fully and decisively to Bill Clinton. In the Delta's Lee County, one of the ten poorest counties in the nation and emblematic of the region, two-thirds of all children never graduated from high school. While black appointees came and went at the statehouse and powerful black bosses emerged in the Clinton machine, the African American community at large was at the juncture of what the Economist cataloged as the state's "dismal failures" in economic development and welfare. Discreet redlining by banks kept the state residentially segregated, while nearly three decades after Orval Faubus's historic confrontation at Little Rock Central, many Arkansas schools remained quietly separate and unequal. One of the worst districts, and last even to acknowledge what a 1988 class-action lawsuit called "widespread discrimination," was a place called Hope.


***

With Dukakis's defeat in 1988, Clinton would spend more and more time traveling as the prelude to his presidential candidacy, much of the time at National Governors' Association meetings or in Washington with the Democratic Leadership Council he had helped found in 1985 to move the party more overtly to the right. Sessions of a few days deliberately designed to showcase the participating politicians, the settings put a premium on performances issue to issue and furthered his reputation as what the press would term a "policy wonk," a politician with an unusually avid grasp of governing problems and solutions.

Those inside the process knew how shallow and scattered the presentable young Arkansas governor could be, how marginal visiting politicians were to Washington despite their pretense, and how little they saw or understood of the genuine capital. "He and others would go up to the Hill and have these polite sessions with the leadership, who indulged them for appearances, and then think, 'This is big-league politics,'" said a senior staff member of the National Governors' Association who watched Clinton come to Washington over the 1980s. "I don't think he understood a damn thing about how Washington really worked." Another staff analyst thought Clinton's Washington trips "one long retreat where a lot of people who thought he'd run or might even be president told him what he wanted to hear and where he was too busy impressing them anyway to do a serious inventory of what was happening to Washington."

The result of it all would be plain in his presidency. A Clinton thought to be a successful governor of innovative policies would have few successes or truly new policies in the White House. A Clinton assumed to be a masterful politician would be thwarted and often baffled by the tribal politics of the national capital. Not least, a Clinton who spoke so much about the future and a changing world came from an Arkansas deliberately locked in the past, his major patrons not the corporations or figures of change but relics of paternalism and social-economic reaction. He would miss the cutting edge of business and corporate evolution in the America of the 1990s much as he missed the inner reality of the Washington he wanted so long to lead.

He returned to Arkansas for one more run for the governorship, promising yet again to serve out his term even as he honed themes and husbanded money for the 1992 presidential bid. It was in many ways a classic Arkansas race. For the first time since 1982 he had serious opposition in the primary. Briefly Jim Guy Tucker was again a rival, trying in vain to coax some of the state troopers to tell him their stories of Clinton's womanizing. Tucker eventually faded, then appeared later as lieutenant governor before succeeding Clinton. The more serious rival was young Attorney General Steve Clark, who enjoyed a brief wave of popularity in exposing the Beverly nursing home scheme and even led Clinton in the polls for a time.

But Clark was soon victim of his own scandal when the Gazette published an expose of his expense accounts with a state credit card, including interviews with prominent figures whom Clark claimed to have entertained but who denied being with him. While Clark was clearly guilty of account padding and tens of thousands of dollars in excesses and while the Gazette's reporter on the story, Ann Ferris, later claimed that "Mr. Clinton was merely the timely beneficiary of aggressive independent journalism," Steve Clark, like Gary Hart, was pushed. As onetime Clinton adviser and confidante Bert Dickey and others told the story later, the governor had been anxious about Clark's poll numbers. Clinton pressed for "somebody to take him down," as Dickey remembered him saying. "What can we get that's real good?" Clinton had asked. Records had been checked, calls made, the first tips given in a trail Clark obligingly provided by his own abuses, and a last local obstacle was eliminated.


In the primary he would face a patrician Tom McRae, a former Bumpers aide who had presided over the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation with mounting dismay at Clinton policies. The idealistic, almost professorial McRae posed little threat and took only 40 percent of the primary vote -- though not before Hillary, taking nothing for granted, staged one of her more dramatic interventions on behalf of her husband and their common future. A week before the primary election, McRae was holding a news conference at the capitol when he was visibly astonished to hear the First Lady shout out an interruption from the back of the hall. She had just been passing by, she would say later, when she heard McRae misrepresenting the facts and she could not resist stopping. Then a Hillary Clinton who was only passing by pulled from her purse a four-page statement refuting McRae with quoted passages from some of his own Rockefeller Foundation reports.

Meanwhile, as McRae tried to engage issues of economic policy or education, the old gothic Arkansas hovered on the edge of the campaign. That June Clinton denied parole to Wayne Dumond, a man wrongly accused in the 1984 rape of a Clinton relative in the Delta and imprisoned after being sodomized and castrated by local vigilantes. Behind the gruesome crimes was the story of a corrupt local sheriff who kept Dumond's testicles in a jar in his office and of a courthouse machine closely linked to the governor. There was also the unsolved mystery of two teenage boys, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, who were placed on railroad tracks to be run over by the northbound train on the Pulaski-Saline county line. Despite blatant bungling and cover-up by authorities, the crime would be linked to drugs, the murders of six figures implicated in the first killings, and allegedly to Mena. But those deeper politics of Arkansas would not intrude on the campaign.

“I didn’t give a shit. Some of these people, like Wayne Dumond, needed to be dealt with. So I went to the jail, cut his nuts off, put them in a jar, put formaldehyde in it and left it there.”

-- Interview with Larry Nichols by Pete Santilli


Against former Stephens protege and onetime Democrat Sheffield Nelson in the general election, Clinton was richly financed and clearly confident. Some thought it his best run. "He has an informed, thoughtful answer to virtually every question he is posed," wrote Spectrum's Philip Martin on a swing with the candidate that he called "Riding with the Sun King." "He remembers names and faces. He tosses off facts, numbers, anecdotes, and rude rustic stories. He can be ruthless when aroused. . . . They reach out to him as though he were a faith healer, their confidence absolute, their eyes dancing .... He takes the microphone, and all the Walker Evans faces go rapt."

Still, he was vulnerable. In the last days Nelson ran a series of effective ads attacking Clinton taxes and spending, and when a last-minute Dickie Morris poll showed serious erosion in their sizable lead, Clinton panicked once more, calling wealthy friends, obtaining a $50,000 emergency loan from yet another friendly bank controlled by one of his highway commissioners, answering Nelson with his own flood of spots in the final days and hours. Using "palm cards" and voting booth strings in black precincts, busing voters in some areas from precinct to precinct with changes of shirts, handing out $30,000 in $100 bills just days before the balloting and free fried chicken at some polling places, he would win with 59 percent. A week after the election he pardoned Dan Lasater and began to take soundings for the presidential race. In Little Rock and in the countryside people seemed to take it all in stride, many not knowing, or not wanting to know. Former Gazette editor Max Brantley, a backer and friend, would look back at 1990 and all the races before and voice a kind of requiem for Arkansas that would soon apply to a nation. "We saw in them," he said of the Clintons, "what we wanted to believe."

***

The surface chronology of his election began in May 1991, when Bill Clinton emerged at a carefully staged DLC convention in Cleveland as the best of six possible Democratic presidential contenders in a field stunted by calculations of George Bush's prohibitive lead in the race. Publicly and privately Clinton had used the event to mark out what would be called the "Bubba tactic" in his campaign, pointedly excluding Jesse Jackson from giving a policy address at the gathering of the corporate-funded group that Jackson called the "Southern White Boys Club."

By the autumn of 1991, suddenly Bush and the Republicans did not seem invulnerable. That November Clinton would begin to pull ahead of the field in New Hampshire and be "anointed" by the party hierarchy, as the Economist reported it, at a meeting of his fellow governors in Chicago. By the winter and spring of 1992 Clinton would finish second-place in New Hampshire and declare victory as "The Comeback Kid," and billionaire Ross Perot would declare his candidacy on a television talk show. Clinton would go on to sweep the March 10 Super Tuesday southern primaries and a week later the crucial Illinois and Michigan races, clinching the nomination in final primary victories over former California governor Jerry Brown.

Southerner and contemporary Senator Al Gore of Tennessee would be selected as his running mate by early July. Then, at the close of the Democratic Convention in New York, with Clinton and Gore surging ahead of Bush on a wave of celebrity, there would be the unpredictable Perot's sudden withdrawal from the race. The much-publicized Clinton-Gore bus tour through the Rust Belt, producing signs of genuine popular enthusiasm for the Democrats, would be followed in August by a chilling Republican Convention dominated by the religious and rightist minorities that had captured the party.

Into the fall Clinton would maintain a lead over Bush. With Perot back as an independent third candidate, however, the race would narrow in the last days. But on November 3, 1992, eighteen years after his first run as a losing yet launched young politician in the Ozarks, Bill Clinton would be elected president of the United States, though with only 43 percent of the popular vote.

Standing outside the old statehouse in Little Rock on election night, Clinton made a special appeal to Perot voters as well as his own, promising the "fundamental change" for which a clear majority voted, in what the president-elect called the "great mystery of American democracy." Yet what had happened behind the public facade of the race was less a "great mystery" than it was the banal result of the Clintons' machinations and the system.

The troopers would have no trouble recalling Labor Day, 1991, as the Clintons nervously prepared for his October announcement of formal candidacy. Early that morning, as Larry Patterson related the scene, Hillary had pulled out from the mansion in her blue Oldsmobile, only to return moments later, tires squealing. The guards ran out to her thinking "something was terribly wrong," as Patterson recalled. "Where's the goddamn fucking flag? I want the goddamn fucking flag up every fucking morning at fucking sunrise," she had screamed at them. "Such displays," the American Spectator noted dryly in publishing the account, "made Hillary by far the most unpopular member of the First Family."

It was obviously a very different impression than the apparently bright and articulate couple was now leaving around the country. Scarcely two weeks later the Clintons were in Washington for a specially arranged session of the "power breakfast" put on by Christian Science Monitor journalist Godfrey Sperling to bring politicians together with prominent Washington reporters for a supposedly more intimate conversation. The mutually understood subject of the meeting was what the Gazette called nimbly "The Question" -- old and new rumors about the governor's womanizing. There was perfunctory talk of foreign policy, taxes, abortion, liberalism and conservatism, and eventually The Question. Would he take the advice of some Democrats "to settle conclusively the issue of your personal past"? After a pregnant pause Clinton broke the tension with what was supposed to be a small joke. "This is the sort of thing they were interested in in Rome when they were in decline too." Yes, his marriage had experienced "difficulties," he said with Hillary at his side. Then the carefully crafted and rehearsed statement that would be used often in the months ahead: "What you need to know about me is that we have been together for almost twenty years and have been married almost sixteen, and we are committed to our marriage and its obligations, to our child and to each other. We love each other very much. Like anybody that's been together twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free of difficulties. But we feel good about where we are. . . . And we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now regardless of whether I run for president or not. And I think that ought to be enough."

Two months later, in the wake of Harris Wofford's Senate victory in Pennsylvania, where Wofford had made an issue of health-care reform, Clinton met privately in Washington with outside advisers to discuss the issue. For two hours the governor and his campaign staff listened as Yale professor Ted Marmor advocated the Canadian single-payer system and Ron Pollack, a Washington lobbyist, pushed the managed care, or "play-or-pay," scheme of employer-paid coverage favored by much of the insurance and medical industry. "Ted, you win the argument," Clinton had said to Marmor, and then gestured toward Pollack. "But we're going to do what he says." Whatever its virtues, Clinton and his staff argued then and later, the Canadian system would only arouse Republican and industry charges of "socialized medicine" and jeopardize major industry contributions to the campaign. "The price of this preemptive concession was large," the Washington Monthly noted with understatement in recounting Marmor's story three years later.

The campaign would feature well-planned responses and predetermined "debates" like the health-care issue, but there would be a largely new Clinton staff. They included James Carville, a Baton Rouge native who was credited with engineering the Wofford upset and who cultivated his acid irreverence and lack of pretension. "I was really hired because Clinton didn't want to be the biggest redneck in the campaign," he would tell the press. With him was George Stephanopoulos, a former Dukakis aide who had joined the staff of House majority leader Richard Gephardt after the 1988 defeat; Paul Begala, who had worked with Carville in the Pennsylvania race; David Wilhelm, a former campaign aide to Senator Joe Biden and manager of Richard M. Daley's last two mayoral races in Chicago; Rahm Emanuel, another former Daley assistant; press secretary Dee Dee Myers, who had handled the media in a 1991 mayoral race in San Francisco; and others like them. Clinton's "extensive policy network" included figures from the DLC and the National Governors' Association, the "Rhodes gang" from his student days, influential lobbyists and Washington consultants, Wall Street backers (some who had been prominent in the Muskie, McGovern, or Mondale campaigns or the Carter administration), and not least Hillary Clinton's own circle, including Mickey Kantor, the formal chairman of the campaign. They would come from different precincts of the political or business establishment and Washington culture. But they would all have that governing orthodoxy and mentality in common, along with the obligatory, sometimes fierce loyalty to their candidate. "A pack of lies" and "a new low for American journalism," DLC adviser David Osborne would say of the Gennifer Flowers revelations on CNN. "I trust his integrity completely," Ira Magaziner, a business consultant who would direct health-care reform in the Clinton White House, assured the National Journal.

What they also had in common, however, was an oblivious ignorance of -- or indifference to -- the Clintons' Arkansas history. "I've had blind dates with women I've known more about than I know about Clinton," Carville would finally explode in the spring of 1992, when the slow, fitful uncovering of Hillary Clinton's work at the Rose firm began. Some advisers, like Wall Street broker Roger Altman, who became deputy secretary of the Treasury and was soon embroiled in the Whitewater-Madison Guaranty scandal, would pay for what they did not know about Little Rock. Yet the members of the campaign staff, most of whom would join the White House staff, would largely be typical of the political retainers of the era, frequently serving politicians and the forces behind them without much independent awareness or judgment, accepting and perpetuating the culture by surrendering to it the integrity of their careers.

It was only after the convention that the famous "war room" took shape, and only then, too, that Carville was given firm day-to-day charge of the campaign. At one point the candidate had seemed to be flailing so ineptly that in desperation his handlers booked him on MTV and Arsenio Hall in an effort to fashion a new public image. For months there had been no clear lines of authority and confused, almost chaotic decision making. As in Arkansas, however, no frailty of candidate or organization would outweigh the sheer force of the money. Behind the scenes, it was utterly decisive at crucial moments -- and the decision, as it were, was made in Arkansas. By January 1, 1992, thirty-one cents of every dollar raised in the pivotal early months of the presidential race -- more than a million dollars -- would come from Arkansas, most of it from the big interests the Clintons had furthered. The most lucrative fund-raiser in the Democratic primaries for any 1992 candidate would be "Winter Wonderland" at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel, providing $900,000 in a single evening to make Bill Clinton president of the United States.

However scattered the rest of his campaign, the Clintons had planned the money strategically and with historic effect. The Worthen Bank line of credit from the Stephens empire would be established in early January, before any of the crises of the campaign were apparent. Altogether it would provide over $3.9 million in eleven installments, supposedly collateralized by federal matching funds -- though there was a typical fast-and-loose quality to the borrowing, the first draw of a million made on March 4, only two days after campaign submissions to the FEC sufficient to cover the draft. In any event, the Worthen money would be there when the draft controversy and the Flowers story broke with their predictable numbing impact on fund-raising. Unlike Gary Hart in 1987, the Clintons would not be driven from the race by financial blackmail. And the early contributions that made possible the federal matching funds, and thus the razor's edge collateralizing of the Worthen loan, came largely from Arkansas and a relative handful of wealthy Clinton backers around the country. Altogether, less than twenty-three thousand donors would make a president. A study that summer by the Los Angeles Times established that the Stephens family and employees alone had given over $83,000 to the Clintons and that by the spring of 1992 the largest share of his financial support -- some $2.6 million -- would come from lawyers and lobbyists, with nearly another million from financial interests.

With World Wide Travel in Little Rock carrying the campaign's huge travel costs, Clinton would emerge from his second-place finish in New Hampshire not a questionable candidate with unresolved issues and flagging support but a front-runner with monied momentum. It would allow them to invest early and effectively in the determining Illinois and Michigan primaries. After Illinois and Michigan, the money began to come in again to the media-declared front-runner and likely nominee, though the Worthen money continued to finance the April 7 New York primary victory over Jerry Brown, a race fought in typical New York fashion with what participants on both sides would describe as "dirty politics" and what one Brown operative called "a good deal of money changing hands that never showed up on anybody's report." But dirty or not, New York was anticlimactic. Clinton's rivals had had no Worthen reserve, no comparable, long-cultivated bank of big contributors. In a sense, the race for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination had been over before it started.

From the beginning he had renounced PAC money and used the corruption of campaign finance as one more issue in his "outsider's" run against Washington, even promising Common Cause and others early in the primaries that he would make reform of campaign spending an urgent priority in his administration. But the disavowal had been no disability with the Worthen money and other contributors, and after his nomination the so-called soft money had flooded into the campaign, close to $30 million of it from a list of nearly every major interest in the country. By summer the process was unabashed. For the New York convention the campaign would organize a special train on which lawyers and lobbyists could mingle with Democratic Party leaders and likely members of the new administration, the passengers paying $10,000 just to be on board, $25,000 to roam the train. "The journey promises to be memorable," said the campaign's promotional flyer. Traveling north through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Trenton, the train retraced the route taken by J.P. Morgan in the age of the spoilsmen for similar purposes.

Only momentarily did Arkansas ghosts appear. Jerry Brown raised the issue of Hillary's conflict of interest at Rose and even Madison Guaranty, but there would be little media interest in an obscure past. "If somebody jumps on my wife, I'm going to jump them back," Clinton responded to Brown as he had earlier to Frank White and others, and there was scant coverage of Hillary's own initial response: "For goodness sake, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks." For a moment both Tom Harkin and Brown had looked at the Mena suspicions, but that issue, too, remained out of public view. "I'll raise it if the major media break it first," Brown told aides. "The media will do it, Governor," one replied wearily, "if only you'll raise it."

As it was, Arkansas issues emerged in 1992 only by the Clintons' own choosing; otherwise they were concealed, sometimes by smear or coercion. At one of the most critical moments of his campaign, after the Flowers expose and on the eve of the 60 Minutes broadcast, Clinton had suddenly flown back to Little Rock to attend to the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a severely brain-damaged black man convicted of the murder of a white police officer. So completely disoriented was Rector by the time of his scheduled execution that he regularly howled like an animal. "I'm gonna vote for him, gonna vote for Clinton," Rector would say in a thick mumble as he watched the television coverage of the Flowers affair, and he made a point of saving the dessert of his last meal to have the next day. "Never -- or at least not in the recent history of presidential campaigns -- has a contender for the nation's highest elective office stepped off the campaign trail to ensure the killing of a prisoner," wrote the Houston Chronicle. But Rector, the black killer of a white policeman, was not just any prisoner and a reeling Clinton was not just any contender. The governor would reject all pleas for clemency with what author Marshall Frady thought "the brutal clumsiness of an essential decency obsessed with larger purposes." But others were less sympathetic. "He had it in his power, and for all intents and purposes he killed a man for political purposes," said a lawyer and old friend from Hot Springs.


Much of the rest of the campaign would be directed not at making a point of his power and willingness to use it but at hiding its embarrassments. The Clintons summoned Betsey Wright to brief reporters on local Arkansas critics and seemingly trivial local issues and incidents. "I'll swear to God there were dossiers kept on anybody who said anything crossways of Clinton, and I don't know who did it, but a lot of folks got smeared real good with the reporters," said one Little Rock activist. "You'd talk to a reporter and they'd be ready to jump on a story and look into everything," remembered another, "and then they'd go down to [Clinton campaign] headquarters and come out thinking you ought to be in a straitjacket or jail or you were just dumb or vengeful. When they got through attacking people personally down there, it wasn't just the people who suffered, but real issues like Whitewater or funny money didn't have any credibility either." "Where's the info on Gennifer?" Hillary Clinton had asked Little Rock from a pay phone on the campaign trail when the story broke. The tactics of suppression were not limited to Arkansas, however, and were not always so genteel as providing discrediting information or spin for visiting reporters. The campaign soon hired a private detective to work on the "bimbo problem." Then, too, Sally Perdue would later tell of being approached by a Democratic functionary in Illinois and none too subtly warned that she might have her knees broken or worse if she continued to speak publicly about her relationship with Clinton. For their part, the professionals of the campaign would deny any knowledge of such practices, though Betsey Wright, gone to a lobbying job in Washington, would be enlisted again in 1994 and afterward to "explain" the instability or seamy motives of those, like the state troopers, who told their stories. It would be a mark of the Clinton White House to attack in open and secret the people who exposed its inhabitants and thus to evade, often successfully, the substance and truth of the charges, the issues themselves.

Protected for the time being from their past, however, the Clintons would enjoy their moment of triumph outside the old statehouse on election night. In the crowd were many who had been with them from the beginning, followers who believed in them or at least still saw, as Max Brantley would say, what they "wanted to believe." They had touched millions around the nation in the same way -- a brilliant young couple appearing to represent the best of their generation, a seemingly enlightened and equal partnership in marriage, and, not least, the promise of a new beginning in a political system gone so painfully wrong. Bill Clinton had said it to a Philadelphia audience earlier that spring, and he spoke it there so earnestly, as he did in Arkansas over the past two decades, that his audience clung to the words: "We all have to change," he told them, promising sweeping reform and new leadership in Washington. "We all have to change."
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Jun 30, 2016 2:50 am

Afterword

As the expectant Inauguration crowds soon discover, the Clinton presidency issues in disappointment for millions who welcomed it with such hope: The story of the new administration is neither its present nor future, but its past.

Both the Clinton regime and the Washington surrounding it are virtual parodies of the system so many voted to change. Pledging to install a government that "looks like America," his appointees represent nothing so much as the old Washington and an Arkansas that was its provincial replica. Though the new president begins with a few token gestures of promised reform, every major decision is captive to the oppression of the interests. His budgets remain hostage to the old myths and claimants. Almost immediately after taking office, Clinton goes behind closed doors to abandon his commitment to campaign finance reform, the essential precondition to all else in any struggle against Washington's misrule. The only major accomplishment he can claim after a year in office -- passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- is for a controversial treaty negotiated by his Republican predecessors, considered a betrayal by many who elected him.

Leaving the governing power of the K Street lobbyists unchallenged, the Clintons pay a historic price in the killing of their health insurance reform -- in which they suffer a devastating defeat -- comprised of their own original compromises, the hubris and convolution of their proposal, and, most of all, the massive power of industry interests they have made little effort to check or honestly expose.

Meanwhile, in 1993-1994, the majority of Democrats and minority of Republicans in the Congress continue to stifle authentic congressional reform, and the rest of Washington remains unchanged. When the Republicans seize control of both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections -- a low voter turnout ceding power to the zealous right-wing minority -- their own so-called revolution only continues the tide of reaction from the 1980s, slashing at social programs and public purposes while maintaining and extending the customary fix and favor for the monied interests.

Halfway through the administration, the Clinton White House effectively abandons even the pretense of reform, and spends its time and energy combating the irrepressible ghosts of their Arkansas past. Once more Hillary Rodham Clinton responds to rejection and crisis by undergoing a series of cosmetic changes, adapting to whatever more modest role is prescribed by image handlers. Once again, Bill Clinton responds to his own failures and defeats by returning to what he has always been -- the consummate salesman, practicing not the politics of substance but of self, like Arthur Miller's traveling man, like his own father, Bill Blythe, "out there . . . riding on a smile. "

By the spring of 1996, scarcely three years in office, the Clintons are besieged on all sides by criminal and civil investigations. Not since Richard Nixon has a White House been so under suspicion for acts of wrongdoing both before and during the presidency. Some of the attacks, as always, are vacantly partisan. Others involve the most serious allegations ever leveled against a sitting president and First Lady. On the eve of their reelection campaign, the Clintons are under scrutiny by special prosecutors and federal grand juries, in civil and even criminal cases, from Little Rock and Mount Ida, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. The subjects under investigation range from sexual exploitation and petty abuses of power, to bribery, obstruction of justice, financial corruption, and election fraud. Perhaps most historic, and most ominous, by the spring and summer of 1996 investigators from one congressional committee have begun to gather sworn testimony linking the president of the United States to drug money and organized crime.

For all that, however, the President and First Lady are clear favorites to be reelected. They are the lesser of evils in a contest with Republican rivals who are the worn epitome of the Washington system, and they remain unchallenged by their own Democratic Party equally bereft, corrupt, unable or unwilling to face itself. Neither their opponents nor supporters recognize the reality of these partners in power -- that the Clintons are not merely symptomatic, but emblematic of the larger bipartisan system at its end-of-century dead end.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Jun 30, 2016 2:51 am

Acknowledgments

Two colleagues were incomparable inspiration and example. In intellect and spirit, the book's guardian angel has been my partner and co-author in a number of projects, the distinguished investigative journalist Sally Denton. Out of pure friendship and in a moment of personal trial herself, she gave without the asking one writer's inimitable gift to another -- her own shining talent and commitment -- informing, encouraging, editing from start to finish, standing by the book even when she stood alone. With the same devotion, a close friend and colleague in the national media who wishes to remain anonymous shared his singular insights, cheered me on, and made me believe anew in the integrity of political journalism. "Since we cannot expect much truth from our institutions," as Edward Abbey wrote, "we must expect it from our writers." This friend and Sally fulfill his promise.

Beyond, there are many others whose help was significant, though they in no way bear responsibility for what I did with it. They are listed alphabetically only but with much gratitude: Craig Barnes, Tom Blanton, Peter Bloch, Rodney Bowers, Max Brantley, Tristan Clum, Nancy Cook, John Crudell, Ken Cummins, Michael Dowd, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Bob Fink, John Floresku, Mike Gallagher, Jeff Gerth, Peggy Giltrow, Josh Goldstein, Felice Gonzales, Marcy Goodwin, Jim Grady, Laura Hagen, Ned Hall, John Hammer, Sy Hersh, Erika Holzer, Jim Hougan, Jennifer Howard, John Kear, Peter Klempat,Peter Kornbluh, Albert LaFarge, Mara Leveritt, Dennis Marker, Conrad Martin, Ian Masters, David McMichael and fellow members of the Association of National Security Alumni, Robert S. Meloni, Dan Moldea, Jason Nelson, George D. Oleson, Mark Oswald, Greg Pleshaw, Zach Polett, Dr. Marge Prefontaine, Nick Pulaski, Janice and Terry Reed, Hilda Rush, Steve Schmidt, Jeff and Nancy Smith, Mark Swaney, and Stuart and Lee Udall.

I owe the usual inadequate thanks to librarians, of the Arkansas State Library, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the University of New Mexico, as well as the public libraries of Little Rock, Hot Springs, and Chicago. Public interest groups were also vital: mainly Common Cause, the Center for Responsive Politics, Charles Lewis and his invaluable Center for Public Integrity, and the brave, vindicated Arkansas Committee at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Once again, my family gave me generous gifts: Kathy Morris helped interview in Washington and Little Rock and did an essential first analysis of many depressing files. David Hammer lent months of fine research in Washington. Zoe Hammer-Tomizuka and Ethan Morris ran down crucial documents and dispatches. My parents, Cathrine and Paul Morris, lovingly stood with me as always, even when my findings clashed with their enduring hope that the Democratic Party might be true to its name.

Finally, I have an incalculable debt to so many unnamed sources who shared not only experience and insight but also the example of their courage. The dark side of American politics was often discouraging, but there could be no abandoning this book once they gave me that trust. Their integrity is the redemption of this story.

Roger Morris
March 19, 1996
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Jun 30, 2016 2:55 am

Sources and Notes

A principal resource for this book has been over a hundred interviews with sources whose knowledge and experience spanned the entire range of the lives and careers of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and who would answer my questions and tell their stories only on the condition of complete confidentiality. Several compelling reasons existed for their discretion. By the time I began interviewing for this book in the summer of 1993, many of those in Arkansas and elsewhere who had spoken on the record about the Clintons during the previous months had suffered what they described to me as severe reprisals in both personal and professional terms. Even those who might have been quoted in the New York Times or Washington Post only weeks or months before now refused to talk further without a guarantee of anonymity. Moreover, even those who had not yet experienced any consequences for their cooperation with a writer or reporter were clearly apprehensive about the potential power of a sitting president and his continuing reach into Arkansas years after his presidency. Not least, many of those who described to me embarrassing or arguably illicit or illegal acts were in some way parties to those acts themselves, and while willing to talk about the events for the sake of public knowledge were not ready to incriminate themselves by name. Finally,there was a large category of sources -- many of them law enforcement officers and other government officials as well as employees of prominent businesses in Arkansas -- who legitimately feared for their jobs and livelihoods if they were quoted on the record telling what they knew about the president of the United States. The result is a regrettable but inevitable phenomenon in the attempt to write candidly about contemporary American politics -- the unnamed source. At no point in the narrative, however, is an unidentified witness the sole or even main source for the point at hand. I have followed the historian's rule of requiring documentary support for every major assertion of fact or state of mind and at least two and usually three verifying sources for any quoted statement. In any case, that so many Americans are afraid to speak out publicly about what they know of American politics says far more about the subject of this book than about its sources.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Jun 30, 2016 2:55 am

Part 1 of 2

Prologue

This narrative of the inauguration is drawn mainly from my own eyewitness notes; interviews with those present, including reporters covering the events; and stories in the Washington Post, Washington Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Weekly, New Yorker, and European press, in particular the Economist and the Independent on Sunday. Follow-up interviews were conducted with Charles Lewis and others quoted in various media accounts.

Page

3 "Cynics don't buy this": The diarist is Philip Hamburger in the New Yorker, January 27, 1993.

4 "chump change": New York Times, January 18, 1993.

5 "desperate for things to start working better": Wall Street Journal, January 20, 1993.

6 East St. Louis mayor: Washington Post, January 21, 1993.

7 "We need health and education": New Yorker, January 27, 1993.

9 "deliberate, and perhaps calculated, charm": Independent, January 24, 1993.

9 "Everybody knows where Arkansas is now": Washington Post, January 21, 1993.

l. Sikeston

The account of the life of Bill Blythe is based on extensive interviews with family members and former wives and their families, including Ola Hall, Vera Ramey, Judith Ritzenthaler, and Sharon Lee Pettijohn; several others of the Blythe, Clinton, and related families who wish to remain anonymous; and Mrs. john Lett and others in Sikeston who described the accident. Published sources include the Washington Post, June 20, 1993; Fort Worth Star Telegram, June 22, 1993; People, November 16, 1992, and September 13, 1993; Sikeston Standard-Democrat, February 20, 1992; Kansas City Star, August 7, 1993, and October 10, 1993; National Enquirer, August 17, 1993; and relevant civil court records for Jackson County, Missouri; Pulaski County, Arkansas; and other locales.

15 local "boot heel" boys: Sikeston Standard-Democrat, January 20, 1992, and interview with Mrs. John Lett.

16 "somebody in a hurry": Interview with Mrs. John Lett.

19 "ladies' man": Interview with Vera Ramey.

19 "standing there by the jukebox": Kansas City Star, October 10, 1993.

21 Virginia Kelley's recollections: People, November 16, 1992, and September 13, 1993; Kelley, 33-69.

23 "you could just never tell": Confidential interview.

2. Hope

The portrait of Hope is cast from a number of interviews as well as published sources, including the WPA Writers' Program Guide to Arkansas in the 1930s, Kelley, the Dumas oral histories, files of Spectrum and Southern Exposure, and articles about the 1993 inauguration in the New York Times, Washington Post, Maclean's, Time, and other publications.

27 Virginia Kelley's recollections are mainly from her Leading.

28 "bright little orphan": Time, July 20, 1992.

29 "a streak in the Arkansas character": Time, July 20, 1992.

30 rigged crap table: Kelley, Leading; Maclean's, July 20, 1992, and November 16, 1992.

31 "stealing from himself' and Roger's business practices: Interviews with Roger Clinton's stepsons, Roy Murphy and George Murphy, and Kelley, 90.

31 "shacking up together": Confidential interview.

31 wild parties: Kelley, 84.

31 "Hempstead County Idiot": Kelley, 84.

31 "if you misbehaved": Dumas, 30.

31 lingerie on a clothesline: Kelley, 85.

32 "blackness inside her": Kelley, 86.

33 toy train: Kelley, 88.

33 "had no problems": Confidential interview.

33 Raymond drives to Hope: Kelley, 92, and confidential interviews.

33 Shooting incident and aftermath: Kelley, 92; Maclean's, July 20, 1992; Time, July 20, 1992; People, November 16, 1992.

33 speak to new father: Kelley, 171-72.

34 "racing up and down": Dumas, 27.

34 Miss Mary's: Dumas, 31-33, and confidential interviews.

34 Foster and Hervey Street homes: Esquire, November 1993; New Yorker, August 9, 1993; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, August 23-29, 1993.

35 recollections of Billy: Dumas and confidential interviews.

3. Hot Springs

This chapter is based principally on extensive and repeated interviews with Hot Springs natives and residents who knew the Clintons well or dealt with them. Most of these sources, including law enforcement officers, asked to remain confidential. Published sources include a singularly insightful report in Maclean's, July 20, 1992; feature articles in People, January 11, 1993, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, July 20-26, 1992, Time, July 20, 1992, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1992, and October 15, 1992; Gail Sheehy's groundbreaking profile in Vanity Fair, May 1992; and the files of Spectrum, Spectrum Reader, Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat. Books include in particular Scully, Dumas, Kelley, Abbott, Gallen, O'Clery, and Dee Brown.

36 images of Hot Springs: WPA Guide; Spectrum Reader, 145; D. Brown; PevpLe, November 16, 1993; Scully.

36 "field for quackery": Maclean's, July 20, 1992.

37 "liquor flowed ... buy it here": Maclean's, July 20, 1992, and confidential interviews.

38 "pleasure tax": O'Clery, 16.

38 Roger Clinton in Hot Springs, Kelley, 95-100, and confidential interviews.

38 "Everybody knew": Confidential interview.

38 "rhinestone of corruption": O'Clery, 16.

39 "roughness and tackiness to it": Confidential interview.

39 "deconstructs and demolishes:" quoted O'Clery, 17.

39 Clinton family politics: Confidential interviews.

39 portrait of Raymond Clinton: Confidential interviews and Kelley, 96-97.

40 "ran some slot machines": Maclean's, July 20, 1992, and confidential interviews.

40 Ku Klux Klan, firebombing, and "A lot of us just knew": Confidential interviews.

40 Raymond the authoritarian: Kelley, 96.

40 "scoop up that boy": Confidential interview.

40 "a father figure": Oakley, 25.

40 "needs an Uncle Raymond": Confidential interview.

41 "If you wanted to get something done": Confidential interview.

41 Park Avenue house: Kelley, 102-105, 135.

42 Ramble, housekeepers, and Billy: Allen and Portis, 6, 19; People, November 16, 1992; Washington Times, January 20, 1993; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1992.

43 Rose Crane's recollections: Author's interview.

43 "such a handful": Confidential interview.

43 "if you use this": People, November 16, 1992.

44 Virginia in Hot Springs: Crane interview; Washington Post, January 26, 1992; Allen and Portis, 16; Vanity Fair, May 1992; People, November 16, 1992; Spectrum, June 10-16, 1992; and confidential interviews.

44 the Clintons' social life: Kelley, 107-10.

44 "woman as the real breadwinner": Confidential interview.

44 "very powerful woman": Crane interview.

45 "father, brother, and son ": Kelley, 137.

45 images of Bill: Confidential interviews and Washington Times, January 20, 1992.

45 "Bill's reactions to Hot Springs's excesses": Kelley, 138; see also Vanity Fair, May 1992.

46 Roger Clinton's violence: Kelley, 94-161; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1992; and confidential interviews.

47 "bedlam": Kelley, 111.

47 Edith Cassidy's addiction: Kelley, 113-14.

47 "Bill's Teal father": Confidential interviews.

48 Roger's birth: Kelley, 123-25, and confidential interviews.

48 "Women who run around": Kelley, 125.

48 "pretty bad stuff': Confidential interview.

49 "she would handle it herself': Confidential interview.

49 police called: Kelley, 133fT.; confidential interviews; Washington Post, January 26, 1992.

49 Bill's confrontation: Washington Post, January 26, 1992; Vanity Fair, May 1992; Allen and Portis, 13ff.

49 "like a dog burying a bone": Confidential interview.

50 "lie automatically": Fick, 65.

50 "We can only guess": Confidential interview.

51 Skully Street house: Kelley, 145ff., and confidential interviews.

51 Bill's deposition: Washington Post, January 26, 1992.

51 "playing the role": Confidential interview.

52 "A real conversation ": Kelley, 165.

52 "Imagine the feeling": Fick, 42.

52 "the real reason ": Time, July 20, 1992.

52 name change: Garland County archives, June 12, 1962.

53 "Bubba! Bubba!": Kelley, 161.

53 "took me to St. Louis": Vanity Fair, May 1992.

54 "never really had a chance": Confidential interview.

54 "One of the biggest problems": Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1992.

54 "He was a perfect kid": Spectrum, October 31-November 6, 1990.

55 "veil over his whole being": Philadelphia inquirer, October 15, 1992.

55 Mackey: Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

55 school politics: Dumas, 36-39; Allen and Portis, 10ff.; Levin, 29-31.

55 "If you beat me": Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

56 "looked down on him": Confidential interview.

56 "risk his political future": Confidential interview.

56 "fat and rejected": Confidential interview.

56 "I was a fat boy": Author's interview with Ernest Dumas.

56 "the strikingly attractive": Kelley, 151.

57 "seemed to do all right": Kelley, 151.

57 "He always knew": Confidential interview.

57 Miller's textbook: Crane interview.

58 "the shrine": Confidential interviews.

58 "Virginia really belittled": Confidential interview.

59 Edith moves in: Kelley, 163.

4. Georgetown

Robert Sabbag's article in Rolling Stone, August 1993, was an especially useful memoir, as was Tom Campbell's reminiscence in Dumas. Like all others, this chapter also draws on confidential interviews. Background articles came from the Washington Post and Washington Times. D. Sams's portrait of Carroll Quigley in Spectrum, October 28-November 3, 1992, was particularly revealing.

60 "State Department bureaucrat's version": Confidential interview.

61 "A three-suit school": Rolling Stone, August 1993.

61 "They'll know what I'm doing": Levin, 39.

62 Georgetown student politics: Rolling Stone, August 1993; Dumas 43ff.; Levin, 38ff.; and confidential interviews.

64 Quigley: Spectrum, October 28-November 3, 1992; Washington Post, January 26, 1992.

67 "a pleasant vegetable": Starr, 50, 81-82.

67 Fulbright job: Washington Times, January 20, 1993; Levin, 55ff.; and confidential interviews.

70 "It wasn't Kennedy": Confidential interview.

70 "He revered Fulbright": Dumas, 47.

70 student council race: Levin, 49-51.

71 "my political enemies": Kelley, 165.

71 "It didn't hit me": Confidential interview.

73 Roger Clinton's illness: Kelley, 162-73.

74 "Of course I know": Kelley, 164-65.

75 "What a girl!": Kelley, 167-68.

75 "deepest, darkest prayer": Kelley, 170.

75 "Never have I been so sorry": Kelley, 175.

76 "If we learn the facts": Oakley, 56.

76 Washington riots: Levin, 56ff.; Dumas, 44ff.; Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

77 "never before paid much attention": Dumas, 50.

77 "an army brat": Dumas, 48.

77 "a kind of grazer": Confidential interview.

5. Oxford

Important published sources include Alessandra Stanley's insightful article on Frank Aller in the New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992; Time, February 24, 1992, and April 6, 1992; Washington Monthly, December 1992; and Oakley, who cites an invaluable collection of interviews in the London press in 1992-93. The chapter also relies heavily on interviews with a number of Clinton contemporaries, most of whom requested anonymity. The account of Clinton's draft crisis is drawn from confidential interviews; published accounts in the Los Angeles Times, especially September 2, 1992, and the Wall Street Journal, especially February 6, 1992; and various reports in the Washington Times. Interviews on the issue of Clinton and the CIA were arranged in part through organizations of retired intelligence officers and other national security officials and included former ranking members of the CIA stations in London, Stockholm, Paris, and Moscow, as well as some who served at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, during the late 1960s and who were familiar with the Operation Chaos files.

79 "just a nuke": Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1992.

80 "grown a little embarrassed": Confidential interview.

80 "kind of cruel": Confidential interview.

81 Henry Britt account and other versions: Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1992, and confidential interviews.

83 voyage to UK: Levin, 65ff.; Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

84 "fluency and glibness" and other comments on Oxford: Washington Monthly, December 1992, and confidential interviews.

84 "as little or as much": Author's interview with Dell Martin.

84 Segal comments: Washington Monthly, December 1992.

85 "better in argument": Sunday Times (London), October 25, 1992.

85 "most comforting figure": New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992.

86 "jolted down the day's names": New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992.

86 "moved on before he had finished": Sunday Times (London), October 25, 1992.

86 Clinton with women: Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

86 "No one is going to believe": Time, July 20, 1992.

86 "You wouldn't understand": Kelley, 189.

86 Evans affair: Oakley, 68-69.

87 "Hush Puppies": Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

87 "overrated orgasm": Author's interview with Sara Maitland.

87 "big noisy parties": New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992.

89 account of draft crisis: Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1992; Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1992; New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992; Time, February 24, 1992, and April 6, 1992; Boston Globe, September 6, 1992; Arkansas Gazette, September 6, 1992; Washington Post, September 8, 1992; Oakley, 72-82; D. Brown, 14-25; Levin, 71ff.

92 Father McSorley: Quoted in Floyd Brown, 23-26.

92 "only observed": Allen and Portis, 28.

93 Clinton caution in antiwar demonstrations: Levin, 75-76, and confidential interviews.

93 "having it both ways": Martin interview.

93 Frank Aller: New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992, and confidential interviews.

96 "If you look closely": Confidential interview.

96 "At the end of the day": New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992.

96 Holmes letter and affidavit: Floyd Brown, 141-48; see also Allen and Portis, 199-202.

101 "loneliness seemed to engulf him ": New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1992.

101 "networking and glad-handing": Washington Post National Weekly Edition, July 20-26, 1992.

102 Clinton and CIA: Confidential interviews.

6. Park Ridge

Background material on the Rodhams and Park Ridge was compiled from confidential interviews in the Chicago area and around the country, as well as from the biographies of Hillary Rodham Clinton by King, Radcliffe, and Warner. Periodical sources include Mara Leveritt's revealing article in the Arkansas Times, October 19B9; files of Hillary Clinton Quarterly, 1993-1994; People, January 25, 1993; New York, January 20, 1992; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, July 12-lB, 1993; Washington Post, January 19-21, 1993; Family Circle, May I8, 1993; Washington Times, January 20, 1993, and March 25, 1993; Newsday, January 10, 1993; Albuquerque Tribune, November 9, 1993; Vanity Fair, May 1992; New York Times Magazine, May 23, 1993; and the Federal Writers' Project Illinois Guide for 1946.

107 Howell and Rodham histories: Washington Post, January 19-21, 1993; biographies cited above; and confidential interviews.

109 "Frank Capra set": Washington Post, January 20, 1993.

109 "where Dick and Jane lived": Confidential interview.

110 descriptions of Park Ridge: Federal Writers' Project Illinois; confidential interviews.

110 "never knew any professionals": Arkansas Times, November 1989.

113 Hillary Rodham's childhood: Vanity Fair, May 1992, and confidential interviews; see also Warner, King, and Radcliffe; Washington Post, January 19, 1993.

114 "good investments": Confidential interviews.

114 "Making money": Confidential interviews.

114 "Mr. Reality Check," Family Circle, May I8, 1993.

114 "flop another potato": People, January 25, 1993.

114 "eat and sleep for free": Warner, 17.

114 "I was a quick learner": Family Circle, May I8, 1993.

115 "should have completed": Albuquerque Tribune, November 9, 1993, and Washington Post, January 19, 1993.

115 "unbreakable": Warner, 16.

115 "the real little Hillary was broken": Confidential interview.

116 "She had to put up with him": Washington Post, January 19, 1993.

116 "I was determined": Family Circle, May I8, 1993.

117 "Why can't she put on a little": Family Circle, May I8, 1993.

118 Sister Frigidaire: Newsday, January 10, 1993.

118 "always voted Republican": Confidential interview.

118 relationship with Donald Jones: Warner, 19ff.; Washington Post, January 19-21, 1993; Newsday, January 10, 1993, and confidential interviews.

122 "He thinks I'm a radical": Warner, 22.

123 "I just crawled": Washington Post, January 19, 1993.

7. Wellesley

This chapter draws on a number of confidential interviews with classmates and faculty at Wellesley and male friends at Harvard and other institutions, as well as on many of the same biographical and other sources indicated above for the Park Ridge chapter, particularly Radcliffe and Warner, and a series of 1992 articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The account of the Chicago convention riots is based on eyewitnesses, press reports, Hodgson, and Gitlin. Excerpts of Hillary's commencement speech were published in Life, June 20, 1969. The Hillary Clinton Quarterly, Fall 1993, provides interesting background on Hillary Rodham's undergraduate thesis and her views of Saul Alinsky.

124 "Women in those places": Confidential interview.

124 "all very rich": Arkansas Times, October 1989.

125 Jeff Shields and other young men: Warner, 29ff., and confidential inter- views.

125 "as decadent as any upright Methodist": Radcliffe, 61.

126 "sentimental liberalism": Radcliffe, 63.

126 "I was testing me": Radcliffe, 69.

126 "just because a person": Radcliffe, 63.

128 black armbands and King's murder: Washington Post, October 20, 1993, and confidential interviews.

128 "Individual consciences are fine": Radcliffe, 70.

128 "implement the change": Quoted in Radcliffe, 71.

128 "I can't believe it": Radcliffe, 72.

130 "Hillary and I just looked at each other": Washington Post, January 20, 1993.

131 difficulties at Wellesley: Warner, 41.

133 Alinsky: Hillary Clinton Quarterly, Fall 1993.

135 commencement speech: Life, June 20, 1969; Washington Post, January 20, 1993; Warner, 39ff.; Washington Times, January 20, 1993.

138 "Blind as a bat": Washington Post, January 20, 1993.

8. Yale I

Beyond confidential sources, principal published sources include the Arkansas Times, October 1989; Allen and Portis, King, Radcliffe, and Warner; the Washington Post, January 26, 1993; Vanity Fair, May 1992; Time, January 4, 1993; and contemporaneous accounts in the New York Ti1l!esand the Washington Post.

139 impressions of Hillary at Yale: Vanity Fair, May 1992; Washington Post, January 20, 1993; Radcliffe, 87ff.

140 "whether we were selling out": Warner, 46.

140 "a radical and feminist only of sorts": Confidential interview.

140 "equal of men": Warner, 41.

140 "Not a lot in between": Confidential interview.

141 Bruck: New Yorker, May 30, 1994.

141 League speech: Radcliffe, 94-95.

143 Mondale hearings: New York Times, July 25, 1970.

143 "Nail your ass": Confidential interviews.

143 Bentsen: New York Times, July 22, 1970.

144 meeting Clinton: Warner, 53-56; Allen and Ponis, 33ff.;Vanity Fair, May 1992.

145 "She certainly wasn't his first": Confidential interview.

145 "at the 'black table' ": Dumas, 54-55.

145 "somewhat casual": Dumas, 57.

146 "define himself as a politician ": Dumas, 59.
146 impressions of Clinton: I.evin, 86; Dumas, 60ff'.;Warner, 57; Vanity Fair, May 1992; and confidential interviews.

146 "it tells volumes": Confidential interview.

116 "Let's face it": Confidential interview.

147 Clinton jobs: Allen and Portis, 32; Dumas, 56.

148 Duffey campaign: Confidential interviews.

149 "saw right past the charm": Warner, 53-55.

150 "had a bad day": Vanity Fair, May 1992.

150 "Come off it, Bill": Levin, 92.

150 "The best story I know": Quoted in Oakley, 68.

150 visit to Park Ridge: Warner, 59.

151 "women who dressed flossy": Confidential interview.

151 "if it isn't Hillary": Warner, 67-68.

151 "scraggly": Kelley, 190.

151 won't marry a beauty queen: New York Times Magazine, January 17, 1993; Time, January 4, 1993; Kelley, 191.

151 "She didn't particularly care for Arkansas": Confidential interview. 152 "cultural tension": Kelley, 191.

9. Yale II

This narrative draws on several confidential interviews with former staff members of the McGovern campaign, including some now working in the Clinton administration. Published sources include Spectrum, June 10, 1992; Allen and Portis; and the King, Radcliffe, and Warner biographies. Sources on Hillary Rodham's views on children's issues include Harper's, October 1992; U.S. News and World Report, August 31, 1992; Time, January 4, 1993; Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1992; Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1993; and Village Voice, January 28, 1993.

153 "It's a little too clear": Confidential interview.

1 54 Texas liberals: Washington Post, January 26, 1992, and January 20, 1993.

155 Wright's impressions of the Clintons: Vanity Fair, May 1992; Allen and Portis, 35; Spectrum, August 14-20, 1991.

158 "In a little while": Author present at the dinner.

159 "The glue holding it together": Confidential interview.

160 "Those who were willing": Confidential interview.

162 "Only trying to help": Harper's, October 1992.

164 recruitment by Doar: Washington Post, January 20, 1993; Radcliffe, 119ff.

165 Altshuler perspective: Radcliffe, 123-24; Warner, 71-74.

165 "She was sensitive": Confidential interview.

166 "We're so damned secretive": Remark heard by the author.

168 "already the Washington type": Washington Post, January 20, 1993.

168 "exciting jobs": Radcliffe, 135.

168 arrival at Clinton headquarters: Radcliffe, 137; King, 58; Levin, 114; Warner, 77-79; Time, January 4, 1993; and confidential interview.

10. Fayetteville

Sources for the 1974 race include confidential interviews with Clinton staff and supporters in the campaign, the files of the Arkansas Gazette, Arthur English's unpublished manuscript, Allen and Portis, the Dumas collection, and Levin. Accounts of the Clinton-Rodham relationship and wedding were compiled largely from confidential interviews with friends close to one or both of them; background material came from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Washington Post; the King, Radcliffe, and Warner biographies; Kelley; the May 1992 Vanity Fair; and other published sources.

170 ''just posted his grades": Allen and Portis, 39.

170 Rudy Moore: Dumas, 85-95.

171 Hammerschmidt background: English manuscript; Dumas 86-87.

173 bank loan and Uncle Raymond: Arkansas Gazette, March 29, 1974, and May 22, 1974; Kelley 202-03; and confidential interviews.

174 Rose fund-raising: Confidential interviews and Newsweek, January 24, 1994.

174 "They did their part": Confidential interview.

175 "Money from the money folks": Confidential interview.

175 Whillock recollections: Dumas, 78-82.

176 "I was astonished": Dumas, 149.

177 "I hadn't displayed": Kelley, 199.

179 "We hope it's a good article": Allen and Portis, 45.

179 "These are the kind of people": Allen and Portis, 45.

180 "the most impressive": Allen and Portis, 50.

181 "He was red-faced scared": Confidential interview.

181 attempted suppression of Holmes letter: Confidential interviews and Washington Post, February 6, 1995.

183 "I know it was": Confidential interview.

185 Hillary and the Marines: New York Times, June 16, 1994.

187 "It was just a little": Warner, 89.

11. Regnal Populus

The Hattaway campaign is described in T. Harry Williams's Huey Long. The portrait of Arkansas politics draws on extensive interviews in Little Rock and around the state and, among published sources, on Blair and the Arthur English manuscript, as well as on Roy Reed's insightful essays in Dumas. The accounts of the 1976 and 1978 campaigns are based on confidential interviews with Clinton staff members and other observers, on the files of the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat, and on useful background material in Starr, Oakley, and Beyle. The story of Hillary Rodham's joining the Rose firm and Rose's general background is drawn from interviews with former partners and associates of the law firm and with other attorneys in Arkansas and Washington, as well as on reports in the American Lawyer, July-August 1992; Sunday Times (London), February 13, 1994; and Business Week, May 24, 1993. As in the following chapters, Connie Bruck's article in the New Yorker, May 30, 1994, and Michael Kelly's piece in the New York Times Magazine, July 31, 1994, provided excellent background.

194 "to arouse into a full fury": Williams, 613.

194 "the worst American state": Quoted in Blair, 16.

194 "About five old men": Blair, 45.

195 "the nearest approach": Leland Duvall, Arkansas: Colony and State (Little Rock: Rose Publishing, 1973), 38.

197 "ARKLA didn't have to worry": Blair, 105.

198 Bumpers and Pryor history: Confidential interviews and author's interview with Ernest Dumas.

202 "It was a populism": English manuscript.

204 "The decision had been made": Confidential interview.

204 Rose firm traditions and history: Confidential interviews; American Lawyer, July-August 1992; and Business Week, May 24, 1993.

208 "separating means from ends": Washington Post, June 23, 1995.

208 "Virtually flawless": Dumas, 12.

210 "It was not a pretty sight": Confidential interview.

210 gas rate controversy: Arkansas Gazette, May 7, 1978, May 27, 1978, May 28, 1978, and especially May 21, 1978.

211 "He was always better": Dumas interview.

212 McDougal's background: USA Today, January 13, 1994, and March 30, 1994, and confidential interviews.

12. Little Rock I

This account of the first Clinton term in the governorship is based very much on confidential interviews with former staff members and supporters and with legislative and other sources in Little Rock. Johnston's Public Policy was especially useful for governance issues. Starr, Oakley, the files of the Gazette, Dumas, Beyle, Allen and Portis, Blair, Bruck's New Yorker piece, and David Maraniss's 1992 reporting in the Washington Post were also consulted. Sources on the commodity trades include especially the Village Voice, April 5, 1994; USA Today, March 30, 1994; American Spectator, August, 1994; and National Review, February 20, 1995.

218 "He was a punk kid": New Yorker, February 22, 1993.
223 "It was pure cannibalism": Confidential interview.

224 "It was like nailing people": Confidential interview.

224 "The truth is": Confidential interview.

226 "I'd never heard anybody": Confidential interview.

226 Hillary's temperament: Confidential interviews; American Spectator, January 1994 and April-May 1994.

227 Jim Blair's clients: Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory for the years 1975-80; Village Voice, April 5, 1994; USA Today, March 30, 1994.

229 "Like the Whitewater thing": Confidential interview.

229 Hillary's commodities trades: Village Voice, April 5, 1994; American Spectator, August 1 994; USA Today, March 30, 1994; Bartley, passim; National Review, February 20, 1995; Albuquerque Journal, March 30, 1994.

233 "all the trappings": David L. Brandon, quoted in Bartley, 338.

233 "If this was such a rogue": Bartley, 374.

234 "There were too many big interests": Confidential interview.

235 "In Arkansas you remember everyone": Confidential interview.

236 "You have to understand": Confidential interview.

236 "It's a bitter pill": Confidential interview.

238 "Hillary was said": New Yorker, May 30, 1994.

238 "I think the truth is": Confidential interview.

240 "always thinking about his own future": Confidential interview.

243 "The man in this building": Dumas, 91.

243 "in search of a magic consensus": Dumas, 92.

244 Frank White: Dumas 99; Arkansas Gazette, November 2, 1980; and confidential interviews.

245 "The road construction companies": Arkansas Gazette, November 6, 1980.

248 "half-laughing, half-crying": Dumas, 67.

248 "He looked me right in the eye": Confidential interview.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

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Part 2 of 2

13. Washington I

The setting of the inauguration and first months of the Reagan administration is drawn substantially from Haynes Johnson's brilliant Sleepwalking through History as well as from press reports. The postwar history of the two parties is largely my own interpretation, with quotations from my own experience, though informed by the books of Greider, Hodgson, Stern, Lapham, Smith, and Solomon. Articles of particular value appeared in Mother Jones, June 1990, July-August 1992, and March- April 1993, and in Common Cause, Winter 1992.

252 homeless on Capitol Hill: Johnson, 19-22.

258 Goldwater and the New Right: New Yorker, July 18, 1994; Greider, 275ff.; Phoenix Gazette, April 11, 1992.

259 "God help us": Confidential interview.

14. Little Rock II

The story of the comeback is based on detailed confidential interviews in Arkansas, including with several people who worked in and around the 1982 campaign. The published sources, however, are rich as well, including Starr, Oakley, the files of the Arkansas Gazette, Blair, Allen and Portis, Beyle, Radcliffe, the Bruck and Kelly pieces previously cited, and the Dumas collection.

269 Lindsey background: Washington Post, July 7, 1994, and confidential interviews.

272 "an extraordinarily appropriate reaction": Reason, November 1994.

272 Clinton's drug use: multiple confidential sources; Sunday Telegraph (London), July 17, 1994; Washington Times, April 14, 1992.

273 Betsey Wright joins staff: Spectrum, August 14-20, 1991; Vanity Fair, May 1992; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1992; Arkansas Gazette, November 7, 1982; Starr, 185; and confidential interviews.

275 Hillary's reaction to defeat; Confidential interviews; Radcliffe, 184-89; Mother Jones, November-December 1993; Vanity Fair, May 1992; New Yorker, May 30, 1994.

275 Clinton and newfound religion: Confidential interviews; Radcliffe, 191; Allen and Portis, 75-77; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1992; Dumas, 113; Beyle, 249.

276 "The Look": Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1992.

277 Hillary's transformation: Confidential interviews and numerous published accounts, including New Yorker, May 30, 1994; Radcliffe, 187ff.; Warner, 113ff.; Newsday, January 10, 1993; New York, January 20, 1992.

279 "all his rich friends": Confidential interview.

284 "out of money"; Starr, 187.

284 "went into overdrive": Starr, 187.

287 "he toyed with it": Author's interview with Ernest Dumas

288 "No matter how hard": Confidential interview.

288 "They were watching it like a prize fight": Confidential interview.

289 "They waved everything": Confidential interview with prominent African American attorney.

289 "He worked like a demon": Arkansas Gazette, November 4, 1992.

289 "More like beat-up": Confidential interview.

290 "It was a marvel of backtracking": Confidential interview; see also Blair, 94.

290 "admiring and fondling the antique guns"; Arkansas Gazette, November 7, 1983.

15. Washington II

This relatively brief summary of the money tyranny derives largely from Stern, Phillips, and Greider and from several articles in Public Citizen, Mother Jones, Common Cause, and Washington Monthly. Interviews with Charles Lewis at the Center for Public Integrity and Josh Goldstein at the Center for Responsive Politics were invaluable. The toll on the nation has been vividly charted in Bartlett and Steele, Phillips, and Greider and in numerous articles in Mother Jones, Public Citizen, U.S. News and World Report, In These Times, Washington Monthly, the Nation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other periodicals.

294 Team 100: Records of Common Cause, Washington; see also Common Cause, August 1992 and Fall 1992.

296 "The politicians dress up: Lapham, 23.

301 decline of Democratic Party: Mother Jones, July-August 1992; Washington Monthly, July 1992; Greider, 90-103; Common Cause, April 1992 and August 1992; Stern, 31ff. and 198ff.; see also Karp and Lewis and New Republic, June 19, 1995.

302 decline of American jobs, decay of economy: see Bartlett and Steele, America: What Went Wrong, 18-20; see also Johnson 242-43 and 478; Greider, 284; Nation, February 1, 1993, and August 9-16, 1993; Z, February 1995; Public Citizen, January-February 1993; New York Times, June 25, 1995; Utne Reader, March-April 1994; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 25- May 1, 1994; In These Times, January I11, 1993, and July 26, 1 993; Phillips, Rich and Poor, 15ff.

304 poverty statistics: Nation, April 21, 1991, March 23, 1992, and February 15, 1995; New Republic, November 23, 1992; Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1994; Washington Post, June 19, 1992; Newsday, February 11, 1995; New York Times, June 25, 1995; Washington Post National Weekly Edi/ion, January 11-18, 1 993, August 23-29, 1993, October 4-10, 1993, November 29-December 5, 1993, and March 21-27, 1994; journal of Population Economics, August 1994; Progressive, June 1993; In These Times, November 30, 1992, and January 11, 1993; Phillips, Rich and Poor, 30-31, 35ff., and 254-55; Greider, 11-23; Public Citizen, January-February1 993; National journal, May 4, 1991; Common Cause, Fall and Winter 1992.

16. Little Rock III

The narrative of Clinton's second term and his education reforms, the 1984 election, and Roger Clinton's drug conviction comes mainly from confidential interviews, against a backdrop based on the files of the Gazette and Democrat, Oakley, Allen and Portis, Dumas, Blair, and Starr. In addition to confidential interviews with law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and others, the Roger Clinton episode is derived from Kelley and Oakley. Fick describes the black-vote money in some detail, as does the American Spectator, December 1994. Special reports on the cocaine parties and visits to the mansion appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph, July 17, 1994, and the Washington Times, April 14, 1992.

308 "scam hot spot": Arkansas Business, September 12, 1988.

309 "the economy of plantations": Reel, 159.

311 IRS interest in Little Rock: Arkansas Gazette, November 4, 1990.

311 Little Rock drug scene: Arkansas State Police documents, August 4, 1982, August 21, 1986, September 11, 1986, September 22, 1986, October 2, 1986, and October 14, 1986; FBI memoranda, October 20-21, 1986; Economist, May 7, 1994; Arkansas Gazette, November 15, 1986; Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994, May 22, 1994, June 26, 1994, September 20, 1994; DEA documents, March 12, 1984, and September 8, 1986; Sunday Telegraph (London), July 17, 1994, and March 26, 1995.

313 used her political status: Confidential interviews and Business Week, May 16, 1994 (for franchise scheme, see chapter 20, below).

315 "It was very humble and watery": Confidential interview.

315 Inauguration: Beyle, 257; see also English manuscript and Starr, 191ff.

315 Maurice Smith: Oakley, 305.

316 "He knew it was popular": Confidential interview.

318 "most turbulent of their marriage": Mother Jones, November-December 1993.

319 politics of education reform: New York Times, April 1, 1992; Arkansas Times, February 1984; Allen and Portis, 83ff.; Blair, 349-50; Oakley, 275-89; Fick, 145-46; Starr, 195; Bartley, 464; and several confidential interviews.

320 stand by in studied silence: Confidential interviews; Oakley 289-91; Starr, 193-94; Warner, 128-30; New Yorker, May 30, 1994; New York Times, March 27, 1992.

321 "I don't think he's got a conscience": Fick, 145-46.

322 education reform and the Bubba factor: Arkansas Times, February 1984; Mother Jones, November-December 1993; Oakley, 290-92; Warner, 131; Washington Post, February 3, 1992, and March 28, 1992; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1 992; Dumas, 114ff.

329 Roger Clinton drug case: Sunday Telegraph (London), July 17, 1994; Washington Times, March 25, 1992, April 4, 1992, April 14, 1992, September 27, 1994; Kelley, 245ff.; Floyd Brown, 57ff.; Allen and Portis, 103-04; Arkansas Gazette, September 18-19, 1986, October 9, 1986, October 30, 1986; Oakley, 296-300; Warner, 137; Newsweek, January 24, 1994; Albuquerque journal, September 20, 1994; FBI memoranda, October 21, 1986; Rocky Mountain News, July 27, 1994; Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 24, 1992; Auerbach, 16ff.; and numerous confidential interviews.

331 1984 campaign finances: Fick, 152-53.

333 "Within his eager earnestness": New Yorker, February 22, 1993.

333 Clinton and Highway Commission: Oakley, 306-08.

17. Washington III

This summary of the Washington institutions is based mainly on Peters, the files of the Washington Monthly, the National journal and its Hill People, Jackley, Penny and Garrett, Greider, Birnbaum, Parry, Hertsgaard, Smith, and Lapham. Major sources also included Public Citizen, Common Cause, and the Congressional Quarterly.

336 Realities of Congress: In addition to Peters, Penny and Garrett, Jackley, and Greider, see Mother Jones, July-August, 1992, January-February 1993, and March-April 1993; American Heritage, April 1994; Stern, 3-22, 107-19, and 243ff.; Common Cause, August 1989, May 1990, and August 1991; "Who Owns Our Government?" Listening to America with Bill Moyers, PBS, April 7, 1992; Nation, December 5, 1994; Washington Monthly, October 1992 and January 1993.

342 Executive branch: Greider; Peters; Public Citizen, January 1993; Washington Monthly, July-August 1991, May 1992, November 1992, and January 1993; Common Cause, March 1990, August 1991, April 1992, and July 1992; Mother Jones, July-August 1992 and January-February 1993; National journal, February 22, 1992, September 19, 1992, and November 21, 1992.

347 Washington lobbies: Birnbaum; Greider; Peters; Lapham; Phillips, Arrogant Capital; Washington Monthly, June 1992, July 1992, January 1993, and April 1993; Common Cause, May 1989, Fall 1992, and Winter 1992; National journal, October 10, 1992, November 24, 1990, and December 15, 1990.

350 The media: Hertsgaard; Parry; Washington Monthly, March 1992; New Yorker, December 12, 1994; Columbia journalism Review, March-April 1995; Extra, January-February, 1993 and January-February 1994; Village Voice, September 14, 1993; Washington Monthly, November 1994; and Utne Readers annual "Top Censored Stories," 1992-95; and numerous confidential interviews.

357 Culture of complicity: Greider, 115; Peters, xiii-xiv; Public Citizen, January 1993; Mother Jones, July-August 1992 and January-February 1993; Washington Monthly, March 1993; Common Cause, May 1989; Parry, 11 and 208-09; Karp, ixff.

18. Little Rock IV

Beyond repeated confidential interviews with federal investigators and others, principal published sources include Bartley, the New Yorker, January 17, 1994; the American Spectator, February and September 1994; USA Today, March 30, 1994; several articles in the Washington Post and New York Times; Reader's Digest, June 1994; Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1994; Gannett News Service, February 4, 1994; People, January 24, 1994; the Times (London), May 12, 1994; files of the House Banking Committee, including RTC and Rose firm documents; and the Congressional Record, March 24, 1994.

360 "The moral of that story": Confidential interview.

360 McDougal background: People, January 24, 1994; Oakley, 521-24.

360 "It was understood": Confidential interview.

361 Early Whitewater dealings: Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 6-12, 1993, and December 27, 1993-January 2, 1994; New York Times, December 15, 1993, and March 25, 1994; American Spectator, February 1994; Reader's Digest, June 1994; USA 1oday, January 13, 1994; New Yorker, January 17, 1994; Gross, 73-89; Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1994; National Review, March 21, 1994.

364 "All that money": Confidential interview.

365 "neither ... was booming": Oakley, 524.

365 "too many risky loans": USA Today, January 13, 1994; Gross, 115; American Spectator, February 1994.

366 "unsafe and unsound" and examination results: American Spectator, February 1994; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 6-12, 1993; and confidential interviews. See also Gross, 115ff., and New Yorker, January 17, 1994.

367 "not particularly unique": Confidential interview.

367 "a local sex celebrity": Confidential interview.

367 Susan was known to live: People, January 24, 1994.

367 "In their heyday": Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 6-12, 1993.

367 "they just kept quiet": Confidential interviews.

368 "Pursuant to your discussions": Gross, 113, and RTC documents; see also New York Times, March 25, 1994, and Congressional Record, March 24, 1994.

368 "Hillary was the point person": Confidential interview.

368 Gold Mine Springs: American Spectator, February 1994.

369 "knew you had no recourse": Confidential interview.

370 Hillary's retainer: Confidential interviews; Washington Post, March 9, 1992, and March 12, 1992; American Spectator, February 1994; New York Times, December 15, 1993; Harper's, October 1994; Business Week, January 31, 1994.

371 "No one thought": Confidential interview.

372 Madison Guaranty fund-raiser: New York Times, December 15, 1993; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 6-12, 1993; Gross, 130-32; American Spectator, December 1994.

372 "phantom contributors": New Yorker, January 17, 1994.

372 "1 guess you could say": Confidential interview.

372 "Whatever else it was": Confidential interview.

373 stock scheme: New Yorker, January 17, 1994; New York Times, March 25, 1994.

375 Frost suit: Washington Post National Weekly Edition, January 10-16, 1994; Bartley, 175; and confidential interviews.

375 "I need to know": RTC documents.

376 "tens of thousands": Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 27, 1993-January 2, 1994.

376 "Any attempt to extract": Notes of conversation between RTC and senior criminal investigator L. jean Lewis and FDIC attorney April Breslaw, February 2, 1994; RTC documents.

376 "Poor man's": Confidential interview.

376 typical Whitewater buyers and contracts: Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 25-May 1, 1994.

378 "A feller could live off the land": Washington Post National Weekly Edition, December 27, 1993-January 2, 1994.

379 David Hale case: Confidential interviews; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, February 21-27, 1994; Gross, 117ff.; Bartley, 93ff. and 355; American Spectator, February 1994; New Yorker, January 17, 1994; Associated Press, July 18, 1994; Albuquerque Tribune, October 20, 1994; Wall Street Journal, September 26, 1994.

379 Castle Grande meeting: Associated Press, July 4, 1995.

383 "Let's close the place down": Gross, 120.

383 "Have you heard": American Spectator; February 1994.

384 International Paper and Great Southern: Gross, 119-21.

385 "off of old Jim": Confidential interview.

385 "but a footnote": Oakley, 527.

386 McDougal transcript: Associated Press, March 11, 1995.

386 "slightly around the bend": USA Today, March 30, 1994.

387 "People knew": Author's interview with Max Brantley.

387 "When the rip-off artists": Quoted in Bartley, 188.

387 "If you know": Lewis-Breslaw conversation cited above; RTC documents.

19. Little Rock and Mena

The documentation of this chapter begins with the 2,000-document personal papers of Barry Seal -- cited below as Seal Papers -- and extensive law enforcement files, including investigative memoranda of the IRS, FBI, US Customs, and Arkansas State Police; the "thesis" and diary of ASP investigator Russell Welch; and the congressional testimony of Welch and IRS agent William Duncan. Additional evidence comes from the sworn depositions in the federal court case of Reed and Reed v. Young and Baker, et al., including the testimony of the following-most of whom are Arkansas State Police officials: Tommy Baker, John Bender, L. D. Brown, William Canino, John Chappelle, David Dillinger, William Duncan, Ricky Edwards, Lawrence Graves, James Jenkins, Melanie McGill, John Morrow, Larry Patterson, Terry and Janice Reed, David Sanders, Barry Spivey, Michelle Tudor, Russell Welch, Doug Williams, and Raymond "Buddy" Young. In addition to the voluminous official and sworn documentation, there are also a number of revealing published sources, including Unclassified, February-March 1992; Nation, February 10, 1992, February 24, 1992, March 23, 1992, April 6, 1992, May 4, 1992, and September 24, 1995; Wall Street Journal, June 29, 1994, and October 18, 1994; Sarah McClendon's Washington Report, March 9, 1991; Boston Phoenix, November 23, 1990; Village Voice, July 1, 1986, and April 14, 1992; Texas Observer, June 17, 1994; American Spectator, August 1995; various Jack Anderson syndicated "Washington Merry-Go- Round" columns; an account of Bill Holmes's story and testimony in Grapevine of Fayetteville, July 2, 1993; and a CBS Evening News Special Report produced by Michael Singer in March 1994.

Several books set the backdrop of the drug trade and official complicity in it, including The Man Who Made It Snow by Max Mermelstein; Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall; The Big White Lie by Michael Levine; Out of Control by Leslie Cockburn; The Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton; and The Chronology (National Security Archives).

The Lasater story is documented by interviews with confidential law enforcement sources, including two former US attorneys in the area; by FBI memoranda of October 20 and 21, 1986; and by Arkansas State Police investigative reports dating from 1984 to 1986 and correspondence from the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, Nashville, Tennessee. Published accounts include a series in the Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994, May 22, 1994, June 26, 1994, and September 20, 1994; Newsweek, January 24, 1994; Economist, May 7, 1994; Washington Times, December 20, 1993; United Press International, April 23, 1987; Sunday Telegraph (London), October 9, 1994; and Louisville Courier Journal, September 21, 1994.

389 Mena history: WPA Writers' Program Guide, 318-20.

390 notable exceptions: Wall Street Journal, June 29, 1994, July 25, 1994, and October 18, 1994; two "Eye on America" segments on The CBS Evening News aired in spring 1994.

391 "Full of fun": Gugliotta and Leen, 146.

391 "He didn't fly an airplane": Gugliotta and Leen, 146.

391 Case quietly dropped: Confidential interviews and Seal Papers.

391 "broker": Gugliotta and Leen, 149.

391 CIA operative both before and during: Seal Papers.

391 Children playing with money: Seal Papers.

392 "One must find": Seal Papers.

392 El Gordo: Gugliotta and Leen, 148, and Seal Papers.

392 invariable routine: Seal Papers, including videotapes of training exercises and actual drops.

392 "only the transport": Seal Papers and Penthouse, July 1995.

392 "between $3 billion and $5 billion": Letter of Louisiana Attorney General William J. Guste, Jr., to US Attorney General Edwin Meese, March 3, 1986.

393 "stacks of cash": Deposition of IRS agent William C. Duncan, June 21, 1991.

393 "bank officer went down the teller lines": Ibid.

393 hundreds of thousands washed through: Arkansas State Police files; IRS memoranda, 1984-85.

393 "magnet": Arkansas Gazette, November 4, 1990, and November 5, 1990.

393 largest cocaine smuggling operation: Interviews with numerous federal and state law enforcement officers; see also US Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations Report, "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," December 1988, 41, 121.

393 one channel: For the other aspects of Iran-Contra, see The Chronology, Cockburn, and Scott and Marshall.

393 Holmes case: Grapevine, (Fayetteville) July 2, 1993; Washington County Observer (Arkansas), June 30, 1994 and September 30, 1994; and author's interview with Holmes. Holmes's testimony was in a federal court trial in Fayetteville that concluded on September 10, 1993.

394 Mena tales: In These Times, February 12, 1992; Arkansas Times, May 12, 1992; Village Voice, April 14, 1992; "Now It Can be Told," April 13, 1992, and July 9, 1992; Sunday Telegraph (London) October 9, 1994, and March 26, 1995; and confidential interviews.

394 Seal aircraft links to CIA: FAA registrations, modification orders, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) reports of title search, aircraft title insurance documents, bills of sale, promissory notes, transport insurance, FAA conveyance recordation notices, and other documents in author's possession (Seal Papers).

394 $750,000 for avionics: Welch thesis.

394 "works for Seal and cannot be touched": Confidential source; Pm/house, July 1995.

394 "told not to touch anything": Welch thesis.

394 Southern Tier: Confidential interviews with law enforcement and intelligence sources.

395 "fixed": Confidential interview.

395 Address book and financial contacts: Seal Papers.

395 "night depository": Reed and Cummings, 138-44.

395 "Seal knew them all": Confidential interview and investigative report in Reed v. Young.

395 "no limit on cooperation": Confidential interview.

395 Seal income and IRS jeopardy assessment: Seal Papers.

395 "CIA-DEA employment": Seal Papers.

396 Royale businesses: Seal Papers.

396 Quaaludes charge: Seal Papers; Shannon, 149-50; Gugliotta and Leen, 149-50.

396 "always smarter": Confidential interview.

396 dicker with the staff: Gugliotta and Leen, 1 49-50; Shannon, 149ff.

396 DEA informant number: Gugliotta and Leen, 151.

396 $800,000-a-year double agent: Seal Papers.

396 Sandinista sting operation: Gugliotta and Leen, 149-69; Shannon, 151-57; The Chronology, 288. See also Barry Seal's testimony to the President's Commission on Organized Crime, October 5, 1985.

396 Leak to Washington Times: Washington Times, July 17, 1984; Shannon 156-59.

396 "a world nearly devoid of rules": Seal Papers.

396 Camp's death: Confidential interviews; Penthouse, July 1995.

396 Fat Lady logs: Confidential interview.

397 Seal goes public: Confidential interviews; Gugliotta and Leen, 340; Shannon, 153-63; and Seal Papers.

397 "Every time Berri": Welch diary, August 27, 1985.

397 "allowed to smuggle what he wants": Welch diary, note on conversation with DEA agent Steve Lowrey, June 4, 1985.

397 Seal's murder: Mermelstein, 195-204,216,224,265-68,284,287; Shannon, 1 60-63; Gugliotta and Leen, 1 68-69; and confidential interviews.

397 Reagan address: The broadcast was on March 15, 1986. The president said in part: "Every American parent will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking. There is no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop. This is an outlaw regime."

397 Fat Lady shot down: Cockburn, 214-31; Penthouse, July 1995; The Chronology, 505ff.

398 Linkage to Nevada test site: Penthouse, July 1995; Las Vegas Sun, October 6, 1986; and confidential interviews.

398 CIA agent's call to Bush's office: The call was from Felix Rodriguez to Bush aide Samuel Watson. See The Chronology, 505; Washington Post, December 16, 1986; New York Times, December 16, 1986.

398 "couldn't find a soul around Mena": Author's interview with William Holmes.

398 "new activity ... an Australian business": Penthouse, July 1985; deposition of Russell Franklin Welch, June 21, 1991.

398 "something going on": Welch deposition, June 21, 1991.

398 "CIA or DEA operation": Arkansas State Police memorandum, August 25, 1987.

398 Missile system tested, etc.: Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1995.

398 "the CIA still has ongoing operations": IRS memorandum, October 8, 1991.

398 "rogue DEA operation": Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1995.

398 Duncan and Welch investigations: Depositions before Congressman Alexander and Arkansas Attorney General Bryant, June 21, 1991; Wall Street Journal, October 18, 1994; Welch diary; Arkansas State Police documents; IRS memoranda; and confidential interviews.

399 "sufficient for an indictment": Senate subcommittee report cited above, December 1988, 121.

400 "Mena tires of rumors": Arkansas Gazette, June 28, 1988.

400 Sheriff A. L. Hadaway: Arkansas Gazette, June 28, 1988; Hadaway letter to the Arkansas Committee, University of Arkansas, January 14, 1992.

400 Jack Anderson and Rodney Bowers: San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 1989; Arkansas Gazette, December 14-17, 1987, and February 23, 1988.

400 appeal to Hammerschmidt: Arkansas Gazette, December 14, 1987; sworn testimony of Terry Cape heart to Sheriff A. L. Hadaway, FBI agent Tom Ross, ASP agent Russell Welch, and IRS agent William Duncan, April 30, 1986.

400 "federal umbrella": Arkansas Gazette, April 11, 1988.

400 Black's approach to Clinton: letter from Charles E. Black to the Arkansas Committee, January 13, 1992; Unclassified, March 1992.

401 "extinguish a raging forest fire by spitting on it:" Black letter.

401 "superiors": New York Post, July 28, 1995.

401 "shredding party": Deposition of Michelle Tudor, July 25, 1995.

401 Files "dismantled": Confidential interview; Tudor deposition.

401 ASP investigation: New York Post, July 28, 1995.

401 "why no one was prosecuted": letter from Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant to Lawrence Walsh, May 30, 1991.

402 "credible evidence": Arkansas Gazette, September 10, 1991.

402 "conspiracy of the grandest magnitude": In These Times, February 18, 1992.

402 Clinton press conference: Arkansas Gazette, September 11, 1991.

404 L. D. Brown's account: deposition of L. D. Brown in Reed v. Young, July 25, 1995; plaintiffs response to defendant's Motion in Limine, December 14, 1995; Nation, September 25, 1995; American Spectator, August 1995; and confidential interviews.

413 Arkansas National Guard: Confidential interview; Nation, May 4, 1992.

413 "Arkansas Traveler" honorifics: Nation, May 4, 1992.

413 "dumping grounds nobody else wanted": Confidential interviews.

413 Wackenhut: Confidential interviews; author's interview with Jim Hougan; Arkansas Gazette, March 20, 1986, July 31, 1987, August 7, 1987, April 17, 1988, and November 18, 1988; Humanist, March-April 1994. The corporation was linked to the old Church League of America, an ultraconservative group dating to the 1950s. The late Hal Hendrix, a Wackenhut executive vice president, was also a self-confessed CIA operative.

414 "trying to be the tough guy": Confidential interview.

414 "no position to say no": Confidential interview.

414 Removal of mansion logs: Confidential interview; American Spectator, January 1994.

414 "worried about the girls": Confidential interview; American Spectator, January 1994.

415 "closet Contra supporter": Confidential interview.

415 Quiet lobbying outside state: Confidential interviews.

415 Hillary, POM, and Seth Ward: Confidential interviews; Nation, April 6, 1992; Village Voice, April 14, 1992; American Spectator, June 1994. See also the Baker, Young, Sanders, and Edwards depositions in Reed v. Young.

417 Lasater background: Confidential interviews; Economist, May 7, 1994; Newsweek, January 24, 1994; Washington Times, December 20, 1992; Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994, May 22, 1994,June 26, 1994, September 20, 1994; FBI interrogation memoranda, October 21, 1986. See also Auerbach.

418 Sanctions against Lasater and Company: Albuquerque Journal, September 20, 1994; UPI, April 23, 1987; see also Economist, May 7, 1994, and Newsweek, January 24, 1994.

418 Clinton-Lasater intimacy: Spivey deposition, August 9, 1995, Brown deposition, July 25, 1995, Patterson deposition, March 8, 1995 in Reed v. Young; Rocky Mountain News, July 27, 1 994; Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1 992; Gannett News Service, February 4, 1 994; confidential interviews.

419 Kentucky Derby trip: Spivey deposition, August 9, 1995; Louisville Courier Journal, September 21, 1994; Regional Organized Crime Information Center (Nashville); correspondence with Arkansas State Police, May 15, 1986; FBI memoranda of October 20-21, 1986.

420 Hillary keeps tabs: Confidential interview.

420 Lasater and Company state business: Bond Buyer, March 24, 1992; Arkansas Gazette, October1 2, 1986; Washington Times, March 25, 1992, and September 27, 1994; Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 24, 1992; Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1992.

421 Angel Fire: DEA memoranda and letters, January 19, 1989; US Customs Service investigative memorandum, January 19, 1991; Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994, and September 20, 1994.

421 "putting one in the boot": Arkansas State Police investigative memorandum, September 24, 1986.

421 Lasater and Madison Guaranty: Washington Times, February 16, 1994, and May 12, 1994; see also Gross, 148.

422 Patsy Thomasson: Confidential interviews; Washington Times, March 25, 1992, and December 20, 1993; Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994, May 22, 1994, June 26, 1994, and September 20, 1994. Lasater's durable power of attorney to Thomasson is dated March 11, 1987. A formal written request of the Clinton White House for Patsy Thomasson's resume went unanswered despite repeated efforts.

423 Dennis Patrick: Economist, May 7, 1994; Sunday Telegraph (London), May 8, 1994; Washington Times, June 9, 1994; author's interview with Patrick. 423 Lasater investigation: Arkansas State Police investigative files and memoranda, including witness statements, August-October 1986; Albuquerque Journal, September 20, 1994; A1kansas Gazette, October 30, 1986 and March 24, 1992.

424 Lasater FBI statement: FBI memorandum, October 21, 1986.

424 Angel Fire investigation falls apart: DEA and Customs memoranda cited above; Albuquerque Journal, May 8, 1994.

425 Lasater indictment and Proctor statements: Arkansas Gazette, October 26- 30, 1986, and November 15, 1986.

425 Clinton statements: Arkansas Gazette, September 18-19, 1986, and October 26-30, 1986.

425 Sequel and pardon: Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1992; Washington Post, March 3, 1994.

426 "large quantities of drugs": Patterson deposition in Reed v. Young, March 8, 1995; Sunday Telegraph (London), March 26, 1995.

426 "execute that search warrant": Patterson deposition, March 8, 1995.

426 "He was just interested": Patterson deposition, March 8, 1995.

426 "what the hell is going on at Mena?": Patterson deposition, March 8, 1995.

426 "I have been told": Patterson deposition, March 8, 1995.

427 "I guess I never really knew": Confidential interview.

20. Little Rock to Washington

Sources for the Hart episode include private manuscripts and files of my colleague investigative reporter Sally Denton; press accounts in the Denver Post, Miami Herald, and Washington Post; and a number of confidential interviews. The 1986 race is drawn chiefly from the Gazette and interviews. Sources for Clinton's withdrawal from the presidential race in 1987 include several confidential witnesses, the Gazette, and the Democrat. The issue of Clinton's extramarital relations has been discussed in several published sources, including the Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1993; Sunday Times (London), May1, 1994, and May 8, 1994; Sunday Telegraph (London), January 23, 1994; New York Times, April 19, 1994; American Spectator, January 1994 and April-May1 994; Albuquerque Tribune, February1 2, 1 994; Economist, April 16, 1994; Edith Efron's landmark article in Reason, November 1994; and Michael Issikoff's controversial piece in the Washington Post, May 22, 1994.

Published sources on Clinton's "corporate culture" in Little Rock include L.J. Davis's much-noted article in the New Republic, April 4, 1994; Sunday Times (London), February 13, 1994; Nation, March 14, 1994; Forbes, May 11, 1992, and December 21, 1992; Business Week, May 24, 1993, and May 16, 1994; Village Voice, June 8, 1993; Mother Jones, November-December 1993; Arkansas Times, February 1992; Trimble, American Spectator, June 1994; Southern Exposure, Spring 1990, Winter 1990, Fall 1990, Winter 1991, and Summer 1991; the files of the Arkansas Times and Spectrum; and Social Policy, Spring 1993. Mara Leveritt's stunning article "The Boys on the Track," about the 1987 murders of Don Henry and Kevin Ives, appeared in the Arkansas Times, January 1992.

Sources on ADFA include U.S. News and World Report, July 6, 1992; Arkansas Democrat, June 7, 1988; Washington Times, April 10, 1992; and John Crudell's remarkable series in the New York Post, January 6,23, and 30, and February 10, 1995.

The account of the 1992 campaign was drawn mainly from confidential interviews, with background in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and in Germond and Witcover. Marshall Frady's "Death in Arkansas," about the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, appeared in the New Yorker, February 22, 1993.

429 "personal and political purposes": Arkansas Gazette, April 30, 1986.

429 Lasater issue: Oakley, 330ff.; Starr, 202-04.

430 Hillary's outburst: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 19, 1986.

430 "Dear Supporter": Oakley, 330-31.

430 1986 campaign money: Arkansas Gazette, September 18, 1986, and October 10, 1986; Starr, 201-02; Blair, 278, 282, and 354; Oakley, 325; and confidential interviews.

430 "as surprised as anyone": Starr, 200.

430 "red-neck, black-neck": Blair, 276.

431 "if we got by good": Confidential interviews.

431 "running out of friends": Oakley, 340.

431 endorsements: Arkansas Gazette, March 13, 1987, and April 15-16, 1987.
432 "pretty good microcosm": Arkansas Gazette, April 16, 1987.

432 dinner with Lear, Don Henley, and others: Arkansas Gazette, April 19, 1987.

433 Hart scandal and withdrawal: Confidential interviews with participants, journalists, and law enforcement officials; Miami Herald, May 4, 1987 and May 10, 1987; Washington Post, May 5-10, 1987; Denver Post, January II-July 13, 1987; private files, interview notes, and manuscript of Sally Denton; New York Times, February 20, 1992. See also producer Charles Thompson's documentary for ABC's 20/20 on organized-crime connections in the Hart affair.

435 "scared the hell out of him": Confidential interviews.

435 "there has been erosion ": Arkansas Gazette, June 18, 1987.

435 "with a woman on his lap": Confidential interview.

435 "Let's go": Arkansas Gazette, July 18, 1987.

435 decision not to run: Confidential interviews; Arkansas Gazette, June 19-August 17, 1987; Oakley, 346ff.; see also Vanity Fair, May 1992; O'Clery, 28ff. The "By Her Man" photograph appeared in the Arkansas Democrat, July 16, 1987.

438 Dukakis and 1988 campaign: Oakley, 361-63; American Spectator, January 1994 and April-May 1994; Arkansas Gazette, July 20, 1988; Spectrum Reader, 31; and confidential interviews.

439 womanizing: Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1993; New York Times, April 19, 1994; Albuquerque Tribune, February 12, 1994; Sunday Times (London), May 1, 1994, and May 8, 1994; Sunday Telegraph (London) ,January 23, 1994, and July 17, 1994; Times (London), December 23, 1993; American Spectator, January 1994, April-May 1994, August 1994, December 1994; Washington Post, February 6, 1992, and May 22, 1994; Spectrum, February 19-25, 1992; Nation, February 10, 1992; Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, November 14, 1994; Reason, November 1994; Economist, April 16, 1994; Washington Post, July 7, 1994; transcripts of Clinton-Gennifer Flowers conversations, Floyd Brown, 151- 59; Sally Jessy Raphael Show, July 17, 1992 (appearance by Sally Perdue); Warner 110-l1; Radcliffe, 186-87; Floyd Brown, 160ff.; Fick, 129-33, 191, and 204; New Yorker, May 30, 1994; extensive interviews with confidential sources. See also Flowers.

444 Vince Foster: American Spectator, January 1994, and April-May 1994; American Lawyer, July-August 1992; Sunday Telegraph (London), February 6, 1994; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, August 23-29, 1993; New Yorker, August 9, 1993; Esquire, November 1993; National Enquirer, August 10, 1993; Village Voice, August 3, 1993; Economist, February 12, 1994; Hope Star (Arkansas), July 20, 1993; In These Times, September 6, 1993; New York Times, August 13, 1993; U.S. News and World Report, August 23, 1993; and confidential interviews.

445 finances and income: Arkansas Gazette-Democrat, March 25, 1990, and July 25, 1990; New York Times, March 27, 1992, and December 15, 1993; Oakley, 366-70; Gross, 95-97, 98-99, 134-41, and 224-25; Albuquerque Tribune, May 1, 1993; Washington Times, January 12, 1996; New York Times, October 23, 1995.

447 Hillary's activities: Mother Jones, November-December, 1993; New Yorker, May 30, 1994; Warner, 139-41; Arkansas Gazette, April 13, 1986, October 19, 1986, May 6, 1987, May 7, 1989, May 22, 1989, August 12, 1990, July 24, 1990; Forbes, May 11, 1992; confidential interviews.

450 New York money: New York Post, January 11, 1996; Washington Times, January 12, 1996.

450 "just pitched a fit": Confidential interview.

450 tax deductions: Albuquerque Tribune, May 1, 1993; Gross, 224-25; Arkansas Gazette, February 2, 1991.

450 "Her friends in the Heights": Confidential interview.

450 "Why can't we": New York Times, October 23, 1995.

451 "rich and dirt": Confidential interview.

451 "ready to listen": Forbes, December 21, 1992.

451 Stephens, Tyson, et al: Arkansas Times, February, 1992; Village Voice, June 8, 1993, and August 3, 1993; Sunday Telegraph (London), October 9, 1994; Forbes, December 21, 1992; Arkansas Business, January 15, 1992, and April 4, 1994; Nation, August 17-24, 1992, and March 14, 1994; Mother Jones, November- December, 1993; New York Times, May 17, 1978, and April 26, 1993; Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 21-27, 1994; Newsweek, January 24, 1994; New Republic, April 4, 1994, and April 24, 1994; American Spectator, October 1992; Business Week, September 14, 1992. See also Trimble; Schwartz; and Rosenberg.

452 Clinton "machine": Spectrum, November 7-13, 1990.

453 ADFA and Beverly: Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1992, and March 30-31, 1992; Sunday Times (London), February 13, 1995; Des Moines Register, June 13, 1993; Barron's, February 25, 1991; Wall Street Journal, February 1, 1993, February 8, 1993, February 9, 1993; New York Post, January 6, 1995,January 13, 1995, January 23, 1995, January 30, 1995, February 10, 1995; Arkansas Gazette, March 5, 1995; Arkansas Democrat, June 7, 1988; Washington Times, April 10, 1992; U.S. News and World Report, July 6, 1992; ADFA documents; investigative documents, State of Delaware, Department of Insurance, August 18, 1992; New Republic, April 4, 1994; Bartley, 19,260; Oakley, 409-10.

455 the toll of governance: Corporation for Enterprise Development, State Report Cards, 1993; Health Care Financing Review, Summer 1992 (on infant mortality); State Rankings, 1993; Arkansas Times, November 1990; Spectrum, Spring 1990, Fall 1990, Winter 1990, Summer 1991; Little Rock Free Press, June 17-30, 1993; Social Policy, Spring 1993; Government Executive, January 1993; New York Times, March 14, 1992, March 15, 1992, March 27, 1992, April 1, 1992, April 2, 1992, April 4, 1992.

457 "policy wonk" and knowledge of Washington: Confidential interviews.

458 1990 campaign: English manuscript; Spectrum, October 31-November 6, 1990; Fick, 150, 165; American Spectator, April-May, 1994; Allen and Portis, 134-39; Oakley, 409-42; Warner, 153-54; Arkansas Times, January 28, 1992; Bartley, 379-82; and confidential interviews with candidates, staff, and others.

461 Sperling breakfast: Arkansas Gazette, September 17, 1991.

461 meeting on health reform: Washington Monthly, November 1994.

462 Clinton staff: Newsweek, April 11, 1994, and National Journal, May 9, 1992.

463 chaos and blunders: Washington Post National Weekly Edition, May 24-30, 1993.

463 campaign money: Federal Election Commission releases, March 1, 1993, and March 19, 1993; Washington Times, March 13, 1994; Arkansas Business, February 3, 1992, and April 4, 1994; Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1992; Common Cause memorandum, June 21, 1993; Extra, May-June 1994; Village Voice, July 14, 1992; Economist, November 7, 1992.

465 ghosts: Confidential interview.

465 execution of Ricky Ray Rector: New Yorker, November 22, 1993; confidential interviews.

465 "dossiers": Confidential interview.

466 "You'd talk to a reporter": Confidential interview.

466 Perdue threat: Sunday Telegraph (London), and confidential interview.

466 "We all have to change": Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1992.
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Jun 30, 2016 2:59 am

Periodicals

Albuquerque journal, Albuquerque Tribune, American journalism Review, American Lawyer, American Spectator, Arizona Republic, Arkansas Business, Arkansas Democrat, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Times, Associated Press Wire Service, Atlanta journal and Constitution, Baltimore Sun, Bond Buyer, Boston Phoenix, Business Week, Columbia journalism Review, Common Cause, Congressional Quarterly, Des Moines Register, Economist, Esquire, Extra, Forbes, Foreign Policy, Gannett News Service, Governing, Government Executive, Grapevine (Fayetteville, Arkansas), Guardian, Harper's, Hillary Clinton Quarterly, Hot Springs Sentinel Record, Houston Chronicle, In These Times, Kansas City Star, Lies of Our Times, Little Rock Free Press, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Louisville Courier Journal, Maclean's, Sarah McClendon's Washington Report, Memphis Commercial- Appeal, Miami Herald, Money, Mother Jones, Nation, National journal, National Review, New Republic, New Statesman and Society, New York, New Yorker, New York Post, New York Review of Books, New York Times, Newsweek, Parade, Penthouse, People, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Progressive, Public Citizen, Reader's Digest, Reason, Rocky Mountain News, Rolling Stone, Social Policy, Southern Exposure, Spectrum (Little Rock), Sunday Telegraph (London), Sunday Times (London), Thomson's International Banking Regulator, Time, Times (London), Unclassified, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, Utne Reader, Vanity Fair, Village Voice, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Washington Spectator, Washington Times, Z.

Documents

Arkansas State Government documents: letters, files

Arkansas State Police: investigative files and interviews

US Attorney, Little Rock: Memoranda and interrogation files

Federal Bureau of Investigation: interviews, files, and telexes

Drug Enforcement Agency: investigative interviews

Internal Revenue Service: investigative files and memoranda

Adler Berriman Seal, Private Papers

Resolution Trust Corporation: memoranda and investigative files

US Department of Justice: memoranda and files

Federal Election Commission: reports and records

Business and legal files, INSLAW, Inc.

Unpublished manuscript, Professor Arthur English, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Reed and Reed v. Young, Baker, et at. legal files and deposition transcripts, etc.

Russell Welch, Diary and "Thesis"

Files and reports: Common Cause, Center for Public Integrity, Center for Responsive Politics
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Re: Partners in POWER: The Clintons and Their America

Postby admin » Thu Oct 27, 2016 10:03 pm

Select Bibliography

Abbott, Shirley. The Bookmaker's Daughter: A Memory Unbound. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992.

Allen, Charles F., and Jonathan Portis. Bill Clinton: Comeback Kid. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992.

Auerbach, Ann. Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America's Premier Racing Dynasty. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

---. America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Bartley, Robert, ed. Whitewater: A Journal Briefing. New York: Dow Jones and Company, 1994.

Beyle, Thad, ed. Gubernatorial Transitions: The 1983 and 1984 Elections. Durham: Duke University Press, 1988.

Birnbaum, Jeffrey. The Lobbyists. New York: Random House, 1992.

Blair, Diane. Arkansas Politics and Government. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

Brown, Dee. The American Spa. Little Rock: Rose Publishing, 1982.

Brown, Floyd. Slick Willie. Annapolis: Annapolis Publishing Company, 1992.

Brummett, John. High Wire: From the Back Roads to the Beltway-the Education of Bill Clinton. New York: Hyperion, 1995.

Byrne, Malcolm, et al., eds. The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras. New York: Warner Books, 1987.

Cockburn, Leslie. Out of Control. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987.

Corporation for Enterprise Development. State Report Cards, 1993. Washington, DC: Corporation for Enterprise Development, 1993.

Denton, Sally. The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Drew, Elizabeth. Finding His Voice': Clinton's Ambitious and Turbulent First Year. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Dumas, Ernest, ed. The Clintons of Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993.

Fick, Paul. The Dysfunctional President: Inside the Mind of Bill Clinton. New York: Carol Publishing- Group, 1995.

Flowers, Gennifer. Passion and Betrayal. Delmar: Emery Dalton Books, 1995.

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Germond, Jack, and Jules Witcover. Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992. New York: Warner Books, 1993.

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Gugliotta, Guy, and Jeff Leen. Kings of Cocaine: An Astonishing Story of Murder, Money and Corruption. New York: Harper and Collins, 1990.

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Levine, Michael. The Big White Lie, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994.

Lewis, Charles, Alejandro Benes, and Meredith O'Brien. The Buying of the President, New York: Avon Books, 1996.

Maraniss, David. First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Mermelstein, Max. The Man Who Made it Snow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

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Oakley, Meredith. On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1994.

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Parry, Robert. Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom. New York: Morrow, 1992.

Penny, Timothy J., and Major Garrett. Common Cents. New York: Little Brown, 1995.

Peters, Charles. How Washington Really Works. Reading, Mass.: Addison & Wesley, 1983.

Phillips, Kevin P. The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

---. Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

---. Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustrations of American Politics. New York: Little Brown, 1994.

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Schwartz, Marvin. Tyson. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

Scott, Peter Dale, and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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Stern, Philip. The Best Congress Money Can Buy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Trimble, Vince H. Sam Walton: The inside Story of America's Richest Man. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Warner, Judith. Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Work Projects Administration Writers' Program. Arkansas: A Guide to the State. New York: Hastings House, 1948.  
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