Left hand, right hand
Simon Hoggart
BLOOD SPORT: THE PRESIDENT AND HIS ADVERSARIES by James B. Stewart Simon & Schuster, £16.99, pp. 479 This is an astonishingly boring book, which is why I read it through with relish and pleasure. Whitewater long ago became a purely ideological scandal. Republicans claim that it proves Clinton's greed, dis- honesty and deep moral turpitude. Democrats say that it is a trivial matter at worst, and the pursuit of the story shows only that the conservative Right is vicious and obsessive. Stewart, an investigative reporter of distinction, has seemingly tracked every tiny aspect of the convoluted deal, examined every piece of paper, and apparently talked to virtually every partici- pant except the President and First Lady themselves. (At one stage they had offered co-operation; indeed Stewart had been recruited to dig out the whole story on their behalf, but typically they changed their minds.) Nevertheless, I suppose he has got as near the truth as anyone will, and by golly it is dull. Stewart writes well, but nobody can weave a rattling yarn out of short-term brokered deposits, investment subsidiaries, negative cash flow and cheque kiting, what- ever that may be. Yet the accretion of detail is, in its own way, quite fascinating. The picture that emerges is of a couple who wanted money, but had almost no interest in the process of making money. As is the way in a small place like Arkansas, a prominent young politician can be offered get-rich-quick schemes by sleazeballs who want favours and the reflected glory of being his friend. White- water was a dodgy operation run by a real- estate gambler who had had a lot of luck. What the Clintons couldn't know was that at the point they came in, the luck had just run out.
Stewart is also absorbing on the com- modities trading that enabled Hillary to turn $1,000 into $100,000 inside a year. This was a classic insider trading ramp, and when the ramp ended a lot of people sud- denly became very poor. By then Hillary had lost her nerve and got out. Insider trading in commodities is not illegal, though it isn't exactly honourable either but then much of the Kennedy fortune came from bootlegging.
On the death of Vince Foster the Right's equivalent of the Kennedy assassination — Stewart is firm: this was suicide. He accepts that Foster was deeply depressed, finds nothing wrong with the `suicide note' — in fact a few unhappy jot- tings made shortly before his death — and either ignores or dismisses the numerous theories assembled by anti-Clinton millionaires. To say that Foster was mur- dered is, he says, 'ludicrous' and the evi- dence for suicide 'overwhelming'.
I have no idea whether he is right, though I am certain that his conclusions will not end the hunt. The White House did behave with suspicious impropriety in the period after Foster's body was discov- ered, and there are reputable experts who say that the 'note' is a poor forgery. Still, as with JFK, the likelihood seems to be that the official version is more or less correct.
The book's comic relief comes with the descriptions of Clinton's love life, which was hectic and exotic. He liked to see his mistresses while he was meant to be out jogging. People who met him on his return were surprised to find that an hour's run- ning in the southern heat had not even made him break into a sweat. At one point Hillary puzzles how, with all that exercise, he has not lost weight.
In fact the whole book has a whiff of Dogpatch, the home of the popular Li'l Abner strip, in which easy-going corruption and raging lust existed together and nobody much minded. In the whole tangled affair almost no one gives the impression they thought they were doing anything wrong — or at least anything different from what everyone else did.
Why has this wretched little affair brought the President so much grief? (Clin- ton has implied that the lawyers' bills might bankrupt him, though even a Washington lawyer would find it hard to charge more than an ex-president's speaking fees, which will come on line for him in 1997 or 2001.) Stewart seems to blame a lethal combina- tion of the right-wing loonies and the Clintons' own deviousness.
For instance, when Hillary finally came clean about her commodities trading and changed her story, he quotes a White House official: 'The first instinct of everybody from Arkansas is to lie.' At Whitewater, the Clintons had accepted the chance to make easy money even if it put them into the pockets of people who might want favours and preferment. They were `reckless', and displayed 'wilful ignorance' of what was being done in their name. But then he wasn't President at the time, and he came from the Deep South, home of the last ethnic group it is politically acceptable for Americans to despise.
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