He Crawled from the Deep: Ken Starr and Whitewater As with mosquitoes, horseflies, and most bloodsucking parasites, Kenneth Starr was spawned in stagnant water.
The independent counsel first emerged on the national scene in 1994 to investigate Whitewater, a failed Arkansas land deal that dated from 1978 in which the President and the First Lady had the misfortune to lose an investment of $42,000. With the craven aid of a tightly knit gang of right-wing operatives, Ken Starr came forth like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, hell-bent on terrorizing the inhabitants of Little Rock in a single-minded quest to defame the President of the United States.
And so before we look at Starr's more recent deceptions, intimidations, and screwups, it's important to revisit this old Arkansas haunt for a spell. Like me, most of you have heard so much mind-numbing blather about Whitewater, the last thing in the world you want to do is take a trip back there. But bear with me here, because the origins of the Whitewater scam shed light not only on the early stages of the anti-Clinton media madness, but also on the independent counsel's countless conflicts of interest since the first days of his appointment. Over four years and $40 million after he first started peeking under stones in Little Rock, the only thing Ken Starr ever exposed was himself: the fact that his investigation was an absolutely baseless, politically contrived, right-wing-backed, taxpayer-subsidized smear campaign from the get-go.
According to the original article that let the monkey out of the cage (written by Jeff Gerth for the New York Times in 1992 and widely promulgated since by the Times, the Washington Post, and other purported bastions of national journalism), the Whitewater story goes a little something like this: In 1978, the Clintons, along with old friends Jim and Susan McDougal, invested some money in a real estate deal in the Ozark Mountains. When it turned out that the McDougals had no capital, then Governor Clinton may or may not have helped to secure a $300,000 loan for his business associates so they could attract more investors to the land deal, which, along with that original loan, eventually tanked.
Some have speculated -- wrongly -- that $50,000 of this bad loan went toward covering the Clintons' interests in Whitewater. Further baseless speculation claimed that Hillary Clinton, then an attorney for the Rose Law Firm, may have cooked the books on the Whitewater deal in order to cover up any evidence of Clintonian wrongdoing regarding that loan. Of course, there never was, nor has there ever been, any evidence of malfeasance by either the President or the First Lady. But that didn't stop the scandal-hungry media and Clinton-hating Republicans from crazy-legging for the end zone with the fable.
Sometime after Gerth's confused and confusing 1992 newspaper piece, the national press went into full-froth mode. While the Sunday morning pundits professed their shock and indignation for the television cameras, every major newspaper, magazine, and news program in the country sent its crack journalists to Little Rock to uncover the "truth" about a busted twenty-year-old land deal. It wasn't too long before publications across the country were jam-packed with badly reasoned, badly written stories by Bob Woodward wannabes, each one trying desperately to inject some life into an absurd heap of baseless, nonsensical allegations.
Woodward on Whitewater
While most of the media community has tried every which way to make a Watergate out of Whitewater, journalistic legend Bob Woodward sees the Whitewater investigation in a completely different light. When Woodward was asked to compare the two investigations on Larry King Live, the man who brought down Nixon had this to say about the allegations against President Clinton:
"No, [Whitewater is not like Watergate], because there are no tapes. There are no witnesses that are really credible, who are contemporaneous, to say 'I was there, and Clinton said, let's do this that's illegal, or let's do this that's corrupt.' And we have years of inquiries, and you have to think as a reporter on all of these things, you know, maybe he didn't do any of them.
"There are kinds of allegations that shoot all over the place all of the time, and no one is a greater repository of allegations than Bill Clinton. And no doubt some of them, or maybe lots of them, are false -- or maybe even all of them are false.
"But the things linger. There's no closure. All of the Clinton scandals, if you look at them, they've piled up. They're like airplanes circling National Airport, and none have landed."
For example, check out this howler penned by columnist Michael Kramer for Time magazine (and later dissected by Gene Lyons in his book Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater):
"[Whitewater is] different -- or could be -- because the wrongdoing (if there was any) may have involved abuses of power while Clinton was serving as Governor of Arkansas. On the other hand, Whitewater too is from the past. So even if the worst were proved -- and no one yet knows what that is -- the offense might not warrant impeachment [italics Lyons's]."
Hmmm...With all that crazy logic, all those ifs, mights, maybes, and could bes, it sounds like something that might've been written by Seinfeld's Kramer instead of Time's Kramer. Back when I was a student at LSU Law School, we had a saying: If "ifs" and "buts" were beer and nuts, we'd have ourselves a heck of a party. Nevertheless, wrongheaded reporters like Michael Kramer weren't the only ones to lose their minds over Arkansas real estate. Still nursing their wounds from the 1992 presidential election, the fringe right was champing at the bit to find anything, real or imaginary, that could take down America's new President.
When conservatives caught wind of Whitewater, they flocked to the rumors like Newt Gingrich to a plate of hot pork chops. Faster than you can say "media hype," the GOP was hollering louder than a stuck pig. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson spun the yarn endlessly to their sycophantic audiences, while Senator Alfonse D'Amato, never one to miss a chance for free publicity at someone else's expense, initiated congressional hearings in order to have his face plastered all over C-SPAN.
With the knee-jerk help of the editorial departments of the scandal-hungry national press, the GOP soon raised such a racket that the able, conscientious, and long-suffering U.S. attorney general, Janet Reno, was politically compelled to appoint an independent counsel.
When Reno settled on Republican attorney Robert Fiske to look into Whitewater, there was a lot of rejoicing among conservatives. Senator Bob Dole remarked that "People who know him think he is extremely well-qualified [and] independent." Self-styled Whitewater conspiracy theorist Al D'Amato gushed that Fiske was "one of the most honorable and skilled lawyers." (It should be noted that D'Amato received $3,000 in campaign donations from Mr. Fiske.) "He is a man of enormous integrity," remarked the Republican senator from New York. "He's fine, he's talented, he is a man of great loyalty."
Unfortunately for the country at large, the fringe right was not so pleased with the credentials of Mr. Fiske. These folks, having gone to the considerable trouble of contriving and publicizing bogus criminal acts related to the Whitewater deal, hated seeing any independent counsel appointed (no matter that he was a good GOP member) who might discover how insignificant the whole episode truly was. Although Mr. Fiske had contributed several thousand dollars to Republican candidates and committees over the years, he still wasn't partisan enough to satisfy the wacko right. What t