Though the final Whitewater1 report clearly shows the Clintons were innocent,
the New York Times and Washington Post arrogantly refuse to admit they
were wrong.
Anyone who paid the slightest attention to the moldy
allegations subsumed under the heading of "Whitewater" has
known for years what the independent counsel grudgingly
conceded in the final report released last week -- that the
prime targets of the investigation of that little old Arkansas
land development, Bill and Hillary Clinton, had done nothing
that could be prosecuted as a crime. There was nothing
remarkable about that conclusion, nor about the
independent counsel's strenuous literary effort to justify a
breathtaking expenditure of time, not to mention $73
million, in the pursuit of partisan goals.
What may have surprised the naive reader was the
concluding commentary in the nation's leading newspapers,
whose editorial pages, opinion columns and news accounts
had encouraged noxious speculation about Whitewater and
the Clintons from the very beginning of the "scandal." Rather
than acknowledge the hollowness of the accusations they did
so much to publicize, America's most prominent editorialists
substituted "spin" for accountability.
The Wall Street Journal, whose editors have published four
volumes of bilious frothing on this topic, blatantly twisted
the final report's exculpatory findings into a guilty verdict.
"The lesson here isn't that there were no facts, but that the
coverup worked," according to the Journal editorial, which
found a way to compare the Clintons unfavorably with
Richard Nixon and to claim, falsely, that Whitewater itself
was "a serious bank fraud involving numerous Clinton
intimates." In fact, as the report reveals in excruciating
detail, Whitewater was simply a land deal that lost money for
the Clintons and their partners. The frauds that resulted in
prosecutions of various people -- some friends, some
enemies and some strangers to the former first family -- had
nothing whatsoever to do with that deal or the Clintons themselves.
Fair-minded analysis is too much to ask from the Journal's
bitter polemicists at this late date, but the editorial board of
the Washington Post might be expected to understand the
foundations of this country's justice system. Evidently they
do not. Like their colleagues at the Journal, the Post's
editorialists seem unable to transcend their newspaper's
failed journalistic investment in "Whitewater," their
longstanding friendship with former Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr and their inexhaustible fury at the Clintons.
Having long ago convinced themselves (and presumably
many of their readers) that the Clintons were guilty of some
criminal offense in Whitewater, they continue to insist that
the final report is "at the end of the day, inconclusive as to
whether the Clintons committed crimes in their dealings with
James and Susan McDougal and in their subsequent
interactions with investigators," and "leaves ample reason to
suspect wrongdoing by both the former president and Sen.
Hillary Clinton." Exactly what wrongdoing they don't bother
to specify -- the hallmark of a political smear. (They also
seem not to have noticed the headline in their own pages a
few days earlier that declared the Clintons to have been
"cleared" by the independent counsel.)
The Post editors apparently believe that, unlike any other
targets of a criminal investigation in the United States, the
Clintons aren't entitled to the presumption of innocence. For
them, a decade of extraordinarily costly investigation that
resulted in no indictments, let alone convictions, is not
enough to discourage insinuations of guilt.
That leaves the New York Times, where Whitewater first
sprang to public attention in a famously murky front-page
story by reporter Jeff Gerth. As the paper's Week in Review
section noted last Sunday, the Times "printed articles about
Whitewater and Madison Guaranty and editorials urging the
Clintons to cooperate with investigators." That's an amusingly
bland description of the paper's role in this fiasco, which
ranged from repeated accusations of a coverup on the
editorial page to repeated announcements by star Op-ed
columnist William Safire of impending indictments that never
came. (Safire promised to "eat crow" if his predictions proved
false, but he has remained strangely silent about the final
report so far.)
Gerth's original story suggested that the Clintons' Whitewater
partner, James McDougal, might have benefited from lenient
treatment by Arkansas regulators while Bill Clinton was
governor. That notion gets short shrift in the final report,
possibly because the evidence so clearly demonstrates that
McDougal received no special consideration from Clinton's
appointees. Yet the Times doggedly ignores those facts, a
habit that its editorials have exhibited time and again over
the past several years.
Rather than forthrightly admit the emptiness of all the
multifarious insinuations and allegations about Whitewater
(not to mention "Travelgate" and "Filegate"), the Times
editorial spews out additional chaff. With its references to
"the web of shady dealings that sprang up around" the
Whitewater land deal, to "missing files, destroyed documents
and unanswered queries," to "charges of tampering with
regulators and other questionable behavior" and to the
Clintons' supposed "strategy of denials and evasions," the
newspaper of record revives the implication of guilt that the
final report ought to dispel.
The Times does acknowledge the ultimate judgment of the
independent counsel more generously than the Post or the
Journal: "If an eight-year investigation fails to find any
substantial evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons,
the only fair response is to declare them cleared." Yet in its
ungenerous attempt to shift blame for the phony scandal that
it did so much to create and sustain -- without a whisper of
honest introspection about its own dubious role in this fiasco
-- the Times is just as evasive as Bill Clinton at his worst.
Joe Conason writes about political issues for Salon News
and other publications.
Reprinted from Salon:
http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/
2002/03/28/whitewater/index.html