Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [19]
Of course, Clinton and Starr would never have crossed paths in American history if not for the activities of an eccentric real estate developer who made his mark in the late 1970s, purchasing investment property along the scenic White River. In that remote venue, the developer constructed a grand vision that included sharing the fruits of his business genius with a few of his special political friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.
That man’s name was James Bert McDougal.
PART ONE
ARKANSAS MISCHIEF
CHAPTER
3
BREATHTAKING “WHITEWATER”
Little Rock occupies the intersection of two worlds in Arkansas, as if God sketched a neat map before creating this town connecting the rich alluvial country of the Mississippi Delta—where cotton and rice are cash crops—and the rocky, remote terrain of the highlands, which slip into the Ouachita National Forest and the desolate reaches of eastern Oklahoma.
If one were to divide the state of Arkansas diagonally, drawing a line from the northeast corner near the Missouri border to the southwest point at Texarkana, the town of Little Rock would appear smack in the middle. Settled by the Quapaw Indians and white explorers who valued its location flanking the Arkansas River, this charming Southern town (named for a distinctive rock that jutted out and guided travelers up the river) became the capital of the territory of Arkansas in 1820. When the state was admitted to the Union in 1836, Little Rock was the natural choice for its capital. It sealed together two divergent halves of topography, interlocking two otherwise dissimilar types of inhabitants and ways of life.
It was here that Jim McDougal established his base of operations, with grand plans to achieve wealth and roaring success. Later accounts, after the Whitewater scandal broke in the national press, would tend to describe him as “crazy” or “manic” or “drug-induced.” But the McDougal who orchestrated land deals and navigated the dual world of Arkansas business and politics during the 1970s was an infinitely more complex—and more interesting—figure than those later depictions would imply.
McDougal’s psychological records at the federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, where he would be housed for nearly a year until his sudden death in 1998, would describe him as a fifty-seven-year-old white male “who has served two months of a 36 month sentence for conspiracy.” The intake forms recorded: “He noted he has no family to speak of and no one with whom he maintains contact.” Documents also revealed that before his final decline in prison, McDougal was on a regular diet of psychotropic medication, taking sixty milligrams of Prozac per day for depression and “29 mg. of Buspar per day for anxiety.”
But this portrait of a broken man would not accurately reflect the early life of James Bert McDougal. At the time of his birth in the tiny town of Bradford in northeastern Arkansas in 1940, his parents were running the town’s general store, where they were, in his mind’s eye, “the original American Gothic couple in both appearance and in demeanor.” Leo and Lorene McDougal had earned the reputation among local country folk as pillars of the 800-person community. Enthralled at an early age by politics, a young Jim McDougal had listened to speeches of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on long-playing records, memorizing the words and even “mimic[king] the voice and articulation.” He was youth director for the Arkansas Democrats for Kennedy during the 1960 election. This propelled him into a job on the staff of the Senate Rackets Committee, chaired by Senator John L. McClellan in Washington.
Although he rarely chose to speak of this episode of his life later, McDougal had been briefly married in 1970 to one Delores Winston Lieberman, who worked for Arkansas Congressman Wilbur Mills. When the couple was quickly divorced after Delores was hospitalized as a manic depressive, Jim fell apart. McDougal himself had been a card-carrying member of Alcoholics Anonymous since age