Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (16 page)

He was also an eloquent essayist whose most recent work, titled
Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
, argued forcefully that relying on AIDS prevention alone in “resource-poor settings” like Haiti and Africa had failed dramatically. It was neither moral nor practical to reserve treatment solely for wealthy countries, while allowing people in the poorer nations to sicken and die by the millions. Only a fresh global commitment to health equity, and the creation of structures supporting that commitment, could begin to stem the pandemic, by pursuing treatment and prevention as elements of a single, integrated “platform to halt AIDS.”

Public health authorities steadfastly denied treatment to those resource-poor nations as “not sustainable,” meaning too expensive, he wrote, pointing a finger at the pharmaceutical sector—“an industry that, as noted, has consistently had among the highest margins of profit.” Institutions of “neoliberalism” such as the World Bank were likewise to blame, he charged, and so were the skewed priorities of Western governments, especially the United States.

In that essay, Farmer specifically mocked the extravagance of the $10 billion crash program that Clinton had proposed in 1999 to counter potential bioterrorist attacks, describing the president’s message to Congress on the plan as “almost incomprehensible” and epitomizing “a sort of officially blessed paranoia.”

Yet there in Farmer’s tiny office stood Ira Magaziner, the representative of Bill Clinton, telling him that the former president wanted to do something to help, although exactly what that might be remained unclear. Farmer could scarcely be blamed for thinking that this seemed much too little, much too late. No longer president, with no discernible influence on the current president or anyone else in power, no political constituency, no capacity to pass legislation, no budgetary authority, and no money to spend, even with the best intentions—what could Clinton possibly do now?

CHAPTER FIVE

No matter what Bill Clinton hoped to do with the rest of his life, as he began his second year out of the White House, he knew the controversies that haunted his presidency might never quite be put to rest—except perhaps in the matter of Whitewater.

Almost exactly a decade after the “Whitewater scandal” had commenced with a confusing front-page headline in the
New York Times
, it finally concluded on March 21, 2002, with the release of a five-volume, two-thousand-page-plus report from the Office of Independent Counsel. That massive document represented seven years of exhaustive legal investigation, still captioned under the anodyne title
In re: Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association
, the tiny thrift institution that had financed the Clintons’ ill-fated rural real estate partnership with James McDougal—their colorful old friend from Arkadelphia, Arkansas, who turned out to be an angry, dangerous, mentally unstable con man.

Preparation of the final OIC report had been overseen for many months by Robert Ray—a New Jersey Republican named to succeed Kenneth Starr as independent counsel after Clinton’s acquittal in the 1999 Senate impeachment trial. In describing the final report, the national headlines, or at least some of the national headlines, reflected reality. Unlike all the “scandal” coverage of years past, however, these acknowledgments of ultimate exoneration were buried deep inside the newspapers. “Final Word on Whitewater Probe Clears Clintons,” announced the
Washington Post
. “Report Caps Whitewater Saga,” according to
Newsday
, “Finds No Link Between Clintons and Misdeeds.” Relegated to page 30, the
New York Times
headline—“Final Report by Prosecutor on Clintons Is Released”—didn’t reveal much, but the story’s first two paragraphs did:

In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel’s office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.

Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons’ principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.

Ray, having begun an effort to secure the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in his home state, deliberately sought to cast suspicion on the Clintons, repeatedly claiming that the probe had been stymied by “insufficient evidence”—and insisting that Hillary Clinton’s testimony on her law firm’s relationship with McDougal was not fully accurate. Perhaps he believed this would enhance his popularity among his fellow partisans in New Jersey. (It didn’t help, and Ray soon abandoned his quest for the Senate seat.)

Whatever his motives, the independent counsel had tried to admit failure without fully exonerating his quarry. Perusing the thousands of pages of turgid prose produced by the OIC—at $73 million, or more than $33,000 per page, probably the costliest single publication in human history—showed just how stubbornly the prosecutors had evaded the moral obligation to admit that their primary targets were in fact innocent. Instead, the report repeatedly complained of “insufficient available evidence to establish [guilt] beyond a reasonable doubt.”

By March 2002, it was safe to assume that most Americans had forgotten what, exactly, Kenneth Starr, his persistent associates, and his successor, Ray, had hoped to prove. The Whitewater allegations were vague and constantly shifting, as each headlined accusation quietly evaporated. The few clear and pertinent questions about the defunct development deal were answered with finality by 1995, roughly a year after Starr began his probe.

Had the Clintons abused Bill’s political authority as governor to
help McDougal keep afloat Madison Guaranty, his insolvent savings and loan, as the original
Times
article had suggested? The investigation had swiftly proved that then-Governor Clinton ordered his appointees to treat McDougal no differently than anyone else. Then, did the Clintons profit illicitly from McDougal’s manipulations? Within months after the probe began, investigators determined that McDougal swindled the Clintons, who had lost around $40,000 on the deal. Finally, did Bill Clinton help McDougal to obtain an illegal loan from the crooked businessman and former municipal judge David Hale? The only evidence to that effect came from the unsupported testimony of Hale and McDougal—both sources who had changed their stories repeatedly, sought leniency deals with the OIC, and were bereft of credibility.

Throughout the decade of investigation, no one had mounted a plausible theory, let alone proved, that the Clintons ever committed a single illegal act, or that they even had the slightest inkling of the frauds perpetrated by McDougal. The footnotes to the final report showed that the OIC failed to uncover any significant information about Whitewater beyond what the lawyers at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro found when they completed an exhaustive (and exculpatory) report late in 1995 for the Resolution Trust Corporation on the Whitewater land deal “and related matters.”

When they realized that the Whitewater deal itself would never yield an indictment against either of the Clintons, Starr and his zealous associates decided to rake through the files of the Rose Law Firm, in pursuit of any potential violation of law by Hillary Clinton or any of her former partners. Rose had represented Madison, which sounded suspicious, or could be made to sound suspicious. And the Starr prosecutors did find that Webster Hubbell, a Clinton friend and former Rose partner appointed to a high position in the Justice Department, had committed multiple frauds, mostly against his own firm. From the prosecution viewpoint, however, the problem was that Hillary Clinton, instead of being complicit in Hubbell’s crimes, had been among his victims.

As the final report showed, Starr’s prosecutors had then tried proving that Mrs. Clinton once lied about or concealed something—and to them the actual significance of the supposed lie didn’t matter much. The OIC spent years attempting to show that she had testified falsely
about who had first arranged for the Rose Law Firm to represent Madison Guaranty, and whether Jim McDougal had or had not paid his legal bills on time. Had she correctly remembered a brief conversation that occurred eight or ten or twelve years earlier? Could she recall, with perfect accuracy, every minute she had billed any client connected to Madison from that bygone era?

Taking up hundreds of pages of small print, Ray’s account of that phase of the investigation seemed numbingly pointless. Hillary Clinton’s version of various events differed in minor detail from testimony offered by her former partners and associates—but then none of them agreed precisely with each other. The notion that anyone might face criminal charges over such minutiae would have seemed hilarious if it weren’t so sinister. Nobody at the news organizations that had pursued Whitewater as if it were Watergate ever bothered to ask Starr why he considered such endless parsing of trivia to be a mission of national importance.

The final report also contained a tantalizing reference to the missing Rose billing records that caused all of Washington to swoon in January 1996, when those records were found in the White House. Evidently, Starr’s theory was that Hillary had concealed her billing records because they would prove that she had guilty knowledge of swindles by McDougal and others. But the records proved the opposite, confirming her testimony (and reaffirming information previously available in other copies of the same documents). She had no conceivable reason to hide the billing records, and even less motive for producing them suddenly at the beginning of an election year.

But Ray could not resist the impulse to impugn the former first lady’s reputation one last time, by noting that three witnesses claimed to have seen her carrying a box of what “could have been” a “rolled-up sheaf” of billing records in the White House, sometime in July 1995. Actually, only two of these individuals said they saw her carrying any papers, and none explained how they would have guessed what the billing records looked like. One of the supposed witnesses saw a box but not its contents, another saw “something that could have been a rolled-up sheaf of billing records,” while the third thought Hillary might have been carrying some “engineering or technical drawings.”

To call that kind of testimony “insufficient evidence” was to put it
very mildly. As Clinton attorney David Kendall complained in a twenty-six-page letter responding to the report, there was little basis for Ray’s insinuations of wrongdoing. He wrote that ‘’when fairly and carefully read, [the Final Report] lends no support to such an innuendo. One might say with equal justification that the Office of Independent Counsel has uncovered no evidence from which a jury might infer beyond a reasonable doubt that the Clintons had pilfered Powerball tickets, trapped fur-bearing mammals out of season, or sold nuclear secrets to Liechtenstein.’’

Kendall sardonically noted the “extraordinary” similarity between the OIC report’s conclusions, revealing nothing new, and the March 1992 report compiled by attorney James Lyons and issued by the Clinton presidential campaign (“which cost $25,000 and was done in three weeks”). Both reports found that the Clintons had lost money in Whitewater and that Jim McDougal had swindled them.

With all of its lengthy discussion of obstruction and concealment, its massive size and complexity, featuring thousands of footnotes, the OIC’s Final Report nevertheless read as if it had been conceived mainly to obscure one fundamental truth: The Whitewater case was dead as early as July 1995, when the Clintons were cleared by the Pillsbury report—still a comparative bargain at only $3.5 million—and no later than January 1997, when Starr made his first abortive attempt to resign in frustration, just as Clinton prepared to celebrate his second inaugural.

There was never a “Whitewater case” in the normal sense, as Ray finally acknowledged with the utmost reluctance. There was only a political prosecution, eventually reshaped from a failed financial investigation into a successful sexual inquisition, encouraged by a Washington media elite that ought to have exposed rather than applauded a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.

Over the years, a measure of very rough justice had been achieved, at an enormous cost to the Clintons and their friends, some of whose most onerous legal expenses they had personally defrayed. Hillary Clinton had gone on to win a United States Senate seat. Jim McDougal had died in prison. David Hale had served more than two years in state prison on multiple state fraud charges, suffering two heart attacks before Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence. Ken
Starr had forfeited his lifelong dream of a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, which had seemed within his reach someday when the Whitewater saga began. (Years later, the trustees of Baylor University would remove him, in disgrace, as the school’s president for covering up sexual assaults by members of its football team.)

To friends, Clinton privately confided a lingering Whitewater regret. He had pardoned McDougal’s ex-wife, Susan—an exceptional woman who bravely refused to deliver false testimony against the Clintons, despite her imprisonment by Starr on contempt charges—but had not pardoned Webb Hubbell or Jim Guy Tucker, the Arkansas governor convicted by the independent counsel on a thin set of fraud charges unrelated to Whitewater.

And Starr would be the last independent counsel. His performance had proved sufficiently appalling in expense and consequence—like those of three other independent counsels appointed during the Clinton years—that Congress had quietly allowed the Independent Counsel statute to expire without renewal.

Despite its shortcomings, the Final Report represented a satisfying denouement upon which Clinton could meditate as he began to consider the outline of his memoirs. And the report’s release underlined once more that his past, with all its triumphs and tribulations, could no longer be changed, while his future remained to be written.