Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [38]
A day or two after the jury acquitted Jim, the phone rang in the Riley home. It was Governor Clinton, asking for Jim. As Claudia Riley would recall that unforgettable episode: “Jim was living in the house with us at that time as we had nursed him—we continued nursing him back to health.” When Claudia handed Jim the phone, he was beaming from ear to ear. He “had been longing for communication from Bill Clinton.” He was also excited because there had been the promise of “some kind of employment that went along with this.”
Jim listened as Clinton congratulated him on his acquittal. Then, as Claudia Riley remembered vividly, Jim’s face turned pale. It was evident that “somebody else had got on the line.” It was Hillary Clinton. Hillary and Bill now spoke as one, reminding Jim that they “had incurred $3,000 in expenses since taking over the Whitewater records” and asking if Jim “could reimburse them.” According to Claudia Riley, who watched the scene from the living room, “Jim visibly crumbled. I had been standing there in the room, and he absolutely slumped and then he hung up very quickly. He came in here and he sat in a chair by the window, and he never uttered another word that day and that night and for days.”
Susan later explained that the disrespect shown to Jim’s mother, as she was dying, made McDougal forever bitter: “Jim could never forgive that Lorene got her hopes up and then got them dashed like that.… That was really the start of the terrible hatred.”
Then in early October 1991, the other shoe dropped. Bill Clinton announced that he was running for president.
IF William Jefferson Clinton, in the fullness of 1992, had not become a serious contender for the presidency of the United States, it is likely that the rest of the world would never have heard the name Jim McDougal or the word Whitewater.
Betsey Wright, Governor Clinton’s longtime chief of staff, had written off the Whitewater fiasco as a nonissue. In filling out Clinton’s annual disclosure forms, the governor’s staffers had dutifully listed Whitewater as an investment. By 1992, however, they believed the Clintons were completely “out of it,” free and clear of the McDougals. When Wright discovered that the Clintons had never fully extricated themselves from the Whitewater mess, the staff decided that this demon had to be exorcised. The principal problem was not Whitewater itself—this had lost money for the Clintons and was viewed as nothing more than an albatross around their necks. Rather, the new worry was that “Jim McDougal was a friend of Bill Clinton’s and had been on his staff.” The concern was that “there was an association.” The Clinton campaign knew this sort of linkage could create issues. “We all viewed Jim as a fairly sick, unbalanced person,” Wright explained.
Although the essence of the Whitewater story had been rattling around in the local Arkansas papers for years, it had been relegated to old news. It only got legs again, bringing an unexpected scandal to life, because of a story that appeared in the New York Times in March 1992, written by journalist Jeff Gerth.
Former President Bill Clinton would later reflect on the Gerth article and the sweeping investigation it triggered, saying with an air of disbelief, “I mean, you really got to hand it to the Republicans and the New York Times and the Washington Post. It’s the first time in history we ever had a major investigation of a guy over an S&L he didn’t borrow money from and the land deal he lost money on.” Clinton added, “And they turned that into a seventy-million-dollar criminal investigation that wrecked the lives of countless people. I mean, it’s quite a tribute to the ability of the Republicans to make sure their own misdeeds aren’t investigated and [to] make something out of thin air, and to sucker punch the great institutions of the country, including the [news media] who were supporting it.… I mean, it was amazing.”
Yet for Jim McDougal, there was a