Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [40]
It was hardly surprising, in retrospect, that the national media would dig into a story that featured shady business dealings between a broken Arkansas businessman living in a trailer in Arkadelphia—who had recently raised an insanity defense in an S&L criminal prosecution—and his former partner, who happened to be running for president of the United States.
Yet media scrutiny alone did not transform Whitewater into a Frankenstein monster. In part, the Clinton campaign itself contributed to creating this nightmare by issuing a series of hasty public statements denying Gerth’s account and giving its own adamant version of Whitewater-related events, locking Bill and Hillary Clinton into a story from which they would have trouble extricating themselves, like politicians snagged on barbed wire. Yet the Clintons’ foes, too, helped to resurrect those ghosts of Arkansas past. In large measure, the Whitewater story rose from the dead and nearly derailed Bill Clinton’s candidacy, because of certain strange events that were set into motion on the eve of the November elections.
IN early September 1992, as the presidential campaign was galloping into the home stretch, Governor Bill Clinton took a surprise lead over incumbent President George H. W. Bush. As this unexpected turnabout occurred, U.S. Attorney Charles Banks received an unexpected “referral” from Jean Lewis, an investigator from the Tulsa-based Resolution Trust Company. RTC was a federal agency created by Congress to sort out the S&L mess; it was empowered to recommend prosecutions to the FBI and federal law enforcement officials in appropriate cases. In this case, Banks could not disguise his surprise when his first assistant placed the referral on his desk: It related to Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. That case against McDougal had been lost and closed out three years earlier. Oddly enough, the new referral named as “potential witnesses” Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Lieutenant Governor Jim Guy Tucker.
Recalled Banks: “I didn’t like the smell of it the minute it came in the door. Because it came with a sense of urgency and came from a source that I did not recognize.”
Banks, a card-carrying Republican, stood to gain both personally and professionally if George H. W. Bush was reelected. Bush had already nominated Banks for a seat on the federal bench. That appointment was currently held up in the Senate, pending the results of the election. Bush’s reelection would virtually clinch his confirmation. Yet Banks did not cotton to the notion of using the criminal justice system to meddle with presidential elections. Banks had lost the first McDougal case fair and square; he was not in the habit of retrying cases and throwing in prominent political figures as shark bait. The U.S. attorney was especially concerned that if a criminal investigation was commenced, even as a “favor” to RTC, the details would be swiftly leaked to the media. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette employed two astute federal beat reporters who would sniff out this case within minutes of a grand jury’s being impaneled. Banks had no desire to be used as a political pawn or to throw the election into pandemonium. “I did not want to be responsible for any type of leak that would suggest that he [Clinton] was guilty of a crime,” said Banks, “or being the target of a grand jury investigation, before we even knew what the hell was going on.” As Banks sized up the situation, the “climate right then was politically very, very highly charged with passion. I mean, we had a major race going on here for the presidency of the United States. And then here this comes in.”
A few days after the referral, Banks’s first assistant walked back into his boss’s office and said, “I’ve got a woman on the phone from RTC.” The first assistant wiped his forehead. “Man,” he continued, “she’s really pressuring me and the office. What are we going to