From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Will Bill Clinton Find Peace?
How sad to see him spend his retirement nurturing grievances.
Bill Clinton was president of our Republic for eight years, and what diminishes him diminishes us all. If I may speak for his critics, we have no desire to pursue him from now to eternity. We'd hope instead that in retirement he'd achieve a measure of inner peace and historical detachment, as Richard Nixon ultimately did after his presidential disgrace.
Still, when Mr. Clinton and his diehard defenders continue their political offensive against us, surely we have a right to reply. Perhaps indeed an obligation to balance the record in the interests of truth and history. The assertion that Mr. Clinton was exonerated in the independent counsel investigation is a Big Lie; no one takes it seriously just now, but it might prevail through sheer repetition.
What to do when the former president takes his self-pity to Newsweek? He complains that in the pardon controversy he was "mugged one more time on the way out the door." Jonathan Alter paid for his exclusive interview by posing the even-handed question, "Why do you think the right wing was so obsessed with you?" Mr. Clinton replied that "the people in the permanent right-wing establishment just thought they were entitled to rule." Taking David Brock as his authority, he asserts, "They knew all along that there was nothing to Whitewater and nothing to the Jones case."
Mr. Brock, of course, is the John Walker Lindh of contemporary conservatism. Once an investigative reporter for The American Spectator, he is now on the bookshelves with "Blinded by the Right," an account of how he wronged the Clinton family and friends. Frank Rich, libertine philosopher at the New York Times, revels in some of Mr. Brock's more implausible stories, but at least has the professionalism to note "by his own account, Brock has lied so often that a reader can't take on faith some of the juicier newsbreaks from the impeachment era in his book."
By contrast, the Times's Paul Krugman swallows whole everything Brock and Clinton say about the "vast right-wing conspiracy." He adds the howler that there is no "scandal machine" on the left--never mind the scalps of Charles Pickering, Bob Livingston or Robert Bork. With an attention to numbers befitting an economics Ph.D., he declares, "an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons."
Where does one start?
For the record, Bill Clinton was forced to admit wrongdoing, signing an "Agreed Order of Discipline" on his last day in office as president. It stipulated that he "knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers" about his relationship with Monica Lewinisky, violating Arkansas legal ethics. He agreed to accept suspension of his law license for five years and to pay a fine of $25,000 (see illustration). Earlier the Arkansas judge found him in contempt for the same testimony, and he paid more than $90,000, not to mention the $850,000 settlement in the Paula Jones suit.
As for Whitewater itself, the independent counsel did not find "no evidence" that the Clintons were involved in the financial shenanigans for which Jim McDougal was convicted. In two instances, rather, "while evidence does exist to indicate Governor Clinton's knowing participation, that evidence was, ultimately, of insufficient weight and insufficiently corroborated, to obtain and sustain a criminal prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt."
News of "exoneration" must seem ironic to Susan McDougal, suggesting as it does she really didn't need to spend nearly two years in jail for what the report calls "contumacious conduct" in refusing to tell what she knew. After his plea bargain, Webster Hubbell was equally uncooperative, while Jim McDougal and Vincent Foster were dead. Yes, "insufficient" evidence.
Then too, the independent counsel investigation obtained 14 convictions of and pleas from Clinton Arkansas associates, including the McDougals, Mr. Hubbell and governor Jim Guy Tucker. And while the Senate conducted only a pro forma trial, the House did vote out the second bill of impeachment against a president in American history.
While this largely concerns Mr. Clinton's private affairs, from the first "heads up" on the Whitewater-related criminal referral, he abused the powers of his office to impede justice and attack his critics. The 14 convictions vindicate Jean Lewis, the Resolution Trust investigator who made the referral. She was soon suspended from the case, her motives attacked and her computer disks invaded by government investigators.
The Clinton Administration unleashed the Justice Department on some frivolous charges against The American Spectator. Journalistic defenders were curiously unmoved that the publication was left near death by an official probe of how it spent its money investigating the president of the United States. The Spectator staff has recently launched a well-received Web site, AmericanProwler.com, and editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is trying to raise money for a new or revived magazine.
And of course, Mr. Clinton launched a legal and political offensive against the independent counsel. After citing a series of presidential statements Counsel Robert Ray's final report starts, "President Clinton's sustained attack, during the last year of his Administration, on independent counsel investigations as 'bogus' ignores the seriousness of the matters this Office has prosecuted."
The independent counsel law was devised by liberals upset that President Nixon fired Archibald Cox--futilely, it turned out. But whatever the merits of the law, it established the counsels as officials of our justice system. This assault on rule of law is President Clinton's most unfortunate legacy.
The Clinton scandals, too, were anything but a figment of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." Whitewater was originally uncovered by Jeff Gerth of the New York Times, who also exposed Hillary Clinton's futures-trading coup. The RTC criminal referral was reported by Sue Schmidt of the Washington Post. Mr. Brock's "Troopergate" story was important only in speeding the publication of an already reported and far sounder story by Douglas Frantz and William Rempel of the Los Angeles Times. The revelations were inevitable given the nature of the times and the personality of the incumbent.
So long as Bill Clinton is preoccupied with what we have done to him, he'll never reach meaningful peace or detachment. But he's still young, and perhaps in time he'll ponder what he did to diminish his presidency, and all of us as well.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
