My life

On April 17, even the New York Times couldn’t take it any longer. Calling Starr “defiantly blind to his appearance problems and indifferent to the special obligation he owes to the American people” for his refusal “to divest himself of his own political and financial baggage,” the Times said Starr should step down. I couldn’t deny that the grand old paper still had a conscience; they didn’t want Hillary and me handed over to a lynch mob. The rest of the Whitewater media was silent on the subject. On April 28, I gave four and a half hours of videotaped testimony in another Whitewater trial. In this one, Starr had indicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker for misappropriating funds from Madison Guaranty and from the Small Business Administration. The loans were not repaid, but the prosecutors didn’t dispute that the defendants intended to repay them; instead, they were charged with crimes arising from the fact that the borrowed money was used for purposes other than those described on the loan application papers.

The trial had nothing to do with Whitewater, Hillary, or me. I mention it here because David Hale dragged me into it. He had swindled the SBA out of millions of dollars and was cooperating with Starr in hopes of getting a reduced prison sentence. In his testimony at the trial, Hale repeated his charge that I had pressured him to make a $300,000 loan to the McDougals.

I testified that Hale’s account of his conversations with me was false and that I knew nothing of the dealings between the parties that had given rise to the charges. The defense attorneys believed that once the jury knew that Hale had lied about my role in his dealings with the McDougals and Tucker, his entire testimony would be compromised and the prosecutor’s case would collapse, and therefore the defendants themselves did not need to testify. There were two difficulties with the strategy. First, against all advice, Jim McDougal insisted on testifying in his own defense. He had done so in a previous trial arising out of the collapse of Madison Guaranty in 1990, and he had been acquitted. But the manic depression from which he suffered had progressed since then, and according to many observers, his rambling, erratic testimony damaged not just himself but also Susan and Jim Guy Tucker, who did not testify in their own defense, even after McDougal had unwittingly imperiled them. The other problem was that the jury didn’t have all the facts about David Hale’s connections to my political adversaries; some of them weren’t yet known, and others were ruled inadmissible by the judge. The jury didn’t know about the money and support Hale had been receiving from a clandestine effort known as the Arkansas Project.

The Arkansas Project was funded by the ultra-conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife from Pittsburgh, who had also pumped money into the American Spectator to fund its negative stories on Hillary and me. For example, the project had paid one former state trooper $10,000 for the ridiculous yarn accusing me of drug smuggling. Scaife’s people also worked closely with allies of Newt Gingrich. When David Brock was working on the Spectator article featuring the two Arkansas state troopers who claimed they had procured women for me, Brock had received not only his salary from the magazine but also secret payments from Chicago businessman Peter Smith, the finance chairman of Newt’s political action committee.

Most of the Arkansas Project’s efforts centered on David Hale. Working through Parker Dozhier, a former aide to Justice Jim Johnson, the project set up a haven for Hale at Dozhier’s bait shop outside Hot Springs, where Dozhier gave Hale cash and the use of his car and fishing cabin while Hale was cooperating with Starr. During this time Hale also received free legal advice from Ted Olson, a friend of Starr’s and a lawyer for the Arkansas Project and the American Spectator. Olson later became the solicitor general in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department after a Senate hearing in which he was less than candid about his work for the Arkansas Project.

For whatever reasons, the jury convicted all three defendants on several of the charges against them. In his closing, the lead OIC prosecutor went out of his way to state that I was not “on trial” and that there had “been no allegations of wrongdoing” directed at me. But Starr now had what he really wanted: three people he could pressure to give him something damaging on us in order to avoid a jail sentence. Since there was nothing to tell, I didn’t worry about it, though I regretted the cost to the taxpayers of Starr’s far-flung efforts, and the mounting casualties among people in Arkansas whose principal sin was that they had known Hillary and me before I became President.