My life

“prosecutorial misconduct,” then referred to a 1993 Justice Department appraisal of Lewis’s inadequate knowledge of federal banking law, Lewis cried, slumped in her chair, and was led away, never to return. Less than a month later, in mid-December, the complete Whitewater story finally came out, when the RTC inquiry from Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was released. The report was written by Jay Stephens, who, like Chuck Banks, was a Republican former U.S. attorney whom I had replaced. It said, as had the preliminary report in June, that there were no grounds for a civil suit against us in Whitewater, much less any criminal action, and it recommended that the investigation be closed. This was what the New York Times and the Washington Post had wanted to know when they called for an independent counsel. I eagerly awaited their coverage. Immediately after the RTC report was released, the Post mentioned it in passing, in the eleventh paragraph of a front-page story about an unrelated subpoena battle with Starr, and the New York Times didn’t run a word. The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Times ran an Associated Press story of about four hundred words on the inside pages of their papers. The TV networks didn’t cover the RTC report, though. ABC’s Ted Koppel mentioned it on Nightline, then dismissed its importance, because there were so many “new”

questions. Whitewater wasn’t about Whitewater anymore. It was about whatever Ken Starr could dig up on anybody in Arkansas or my administration. In the meantime, some Whitewater reporters were actually covering up evidence of our innocence. To be fair, a few journalists took note. Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz wrote an article pointing out the way the RTC report had been buried, and LarsErik Nelson, a columnist for the New York Daily News, who had been a correspondent in the Soviet Union, wrote, “The secret verdict is in: There was nothing for the Clintons to hide . . . in a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which innocent people were convicted in secret, the President and the First Lady have been publicly charged and secretly found innocent.”

I was genuinely confused by the mainstream press coverage of Whitewater; it seemed inconsistent with the more careful and balanced approach the press had taken on other issues, at least since the Republicans won the Congress in 1994. One day, after one of our budget meetings in October, I asked Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming to stay a moment to talk. Simpson was a conservative Republican, but we had a pretty good relationship because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan. I asked Alan if he thought Hillary and I had done anything wrong in Whitewater. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you didn’t.” Simpson laughed at how willing the “elitist” press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: “You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important.” When I asked him to explain, he said, “Democrats like you and Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.” I appreciated Simpson’s candor and I thought about what he said for months. For a long time, whenever I was angry about the Whitewater press coverage I would tell people about Simpson’s analysis. When I finally just accepted his insight as accurate, it was liberating, and it cleared my head for the fight.