TIME'S EMPTY
WHITEWATER EXCLUSIVE
The truth about James Stewart's much-hyped book excerpt is that he didn't find anything. That didn't stop Time's editors from splashing it on their cover.
Let's get one thing straight up front: If James B. Stewart's new book, "Blood Sport," were really the "Truth About Whitewater," as Time magazine bills it , then it wouldn't be on the magazine's cover this week. Like most of the Washington press, Time committed itself two years ago to a prosecution-only version of the story, and if the excerpt published this week is an example, that's all the magazine is going to print.
Time's latest Whitewater broadside comes complete with a cover of Hillary Clinton who is made to look pale and dead-eyed, as if she'd had her blood drained. The magazine paid former Wall Street Journal reporter James Stewart and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, many thousands of dollars for an extract from his long-awaited book -- the book that was supposed to make everything clear about Whitewater, once and for all.
And what did the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter come up with after two years of supposed diligent spadework? "As the legal process unfolds," he writes, "the question of whether specific laws were broken should not obscure the broader issues that make Whitewater an important story." I love that phrase "broader issues." It adds an air of solemnity to what is otherwise a tacit admission that, like everyone else who has dug into the ill-fated land deal, Stewart has come up with a dry hole. No laws were broken, "specific" or otherwise.
Of course, such an admission would not be good for book sales, so Stewart drags up our old friends "character and integrity." How the Clintons have dealt with Whitewater, he tells us, indicates that theirs is pretty bad. "Much of what appears here," Stewart writes, "will seem at odds with statements made by the President and First Lady, some of them under oath ... that the Clintons had virtually nothing to do with Whitewater and were simply 'passive' investors; that (James and Susan) McDougal didn't really absorb significantly more losses than the Clintons; that Hillary wasn't responsible for Madison Guaranty's becoming a client of the Rose firm; that she wasn't familiar with a real estate development called Castle Grande and didn't work on it."
O.K., let's talk character and integrity: James Stewart's. And let's see how "at odds" Stewart is with the facts as we know them.
1. The Clintons as "passive investors". The Pillsbury Report, a $3 million study done for the Resolution Trust Corporation by the prestigious Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro law firm concluded that the Clintons were right -- they were indeed passive investors in the Ozarks land development deal known as Whitewater. That is, up until the time that their partner, James McDougal, who had set up the deal, ran himself into bankruptcy and ended up in a mental hospital. At that point, Hillary Clinton stepped in -- which nobody, including the Clintons, has ever denied.
2. Who lost more money? The Clintons, to my knowledge, never disputed that the McDougals lost significantly more money on the failed deal than they did. In 1992, the Lyons report (no relation), commissioned by the Clinton gubernatorial campaign and conducted by Denver attorney James Lyons, documented that the McDougals invested more and lost more in Whitewater. And a quick reading of the Pillsbury Report leads one to the conclusion that the McDougals deserved to lose more money. As the managing partner of Whitewater Jim McDougal screwed the project up six ways from Sunday just as he ruined almost everything else he touched during that period. That happens to people with manic depressive illness, one of whose diagnostic criteria and I'm quoting here from the DSM-III is "expansiveness, unwarranted optimism, grandiosity, and lack of judgment (which leads) to such activities as buying sprees,..foolish business investments..."
3. Hillary Clinton denied she brought Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan (controlled by McDougal) -- to the Rose Law Firm, where she was a partner? That's pure crap. She has never denied that she brought Madison business to the law firm. Contrary to fevered press speculation, the Pillsbury Report recently absolved the Rose Law Firm, and Hillary Clinton, of any wrongdoing in the failure of Madison Guaranty.
4. Hillary's alleged involvement with Castle Grande -- another ill-fated McDougal scheme to build a housing development and shopping complex -- is more unadulterated rubbish, comprehensively debunked in the final section of the Pillsbury Report, released in late February.
But you don't see any of this honestly reported in Time magazine. Nor by Stewart and his publisher, who were in such a big hurry to cash in on the Whitewater story that they couldn't wait for the actual evidence. In the Time excerpt, there is no sign that Stewart is even familiar with the preliminary sections of the Pillsbury Report, which has been available for months. If he were, there's no way he'd have taken the McDougals' tales at face value. But then, with Whitewater, facts have rarely been allowed to get in the way of a good story.
Is Time gunning for Clinton? Is there any there there in the Whitewater case? Visit
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