Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [45]
The Travel Office tussle, now a relatively obscure footnote in the history of the Clinton presidency, occurred in May 1993, just four months after Bill Clinton took office. This tempest in a teapot flowed from the new administration’s assessment that the White House Travel Office—charged with handling domestic and overseas travel for the national press corps accompanying the president—was awash in mismanagement and bad business practices. Some of the ugliest stories involved embezzlement and accepting kickbacks. Vince Foster assigned Bill Kennedy, now an associate in the White House counsel’s office, to investigate the matter. Independent auditors from Peat Marwick dug into the Travel Office’s accounting records and found “gross mismanagement.” After ordering the FBI to commence a criminal probe, the Clinton White House fired seven employees of that tiny office. Much of the business was slated to be transferred, temporarily, to a Little Rock travel agency run by a distant relative of President Clinton’s. There was talk that Clinton friend Harry Thomason and other campaign backers wanted a piece of the action. The First Lady, according to press reports, was up to her elbows in the house-cleaning.
Assertions now began flying that the Clintons and their Arkansas cronies were trying to dispense jobs to kinfolk back home in the hills of Little Rock, and ginning up criminal allegations to do it. Bernie Nussbaum later explained that the White House had inadvertently stirred up a hornet’s nest. “People in the Travel Office were doing many inappropriate things, but their patrons were the press. How naive we were.” The Travel Office, it turned out, “arranged for trips, and did favors for reporters,” even deciding on foreign trips whether the press corps “could bring liquor, furs, and rugs back into this country.” Taking on the Travel Office was like taking on the media’s sugar daddy.
Bill Kennedy, who led the investigation, personally took a beating in the press. Those closest to Bill and Hillary Clinton, especially their inner circle from Arkansas, believed there were political factors driving the attack.
Hillary Clinton was trying to carve out an unprecedented role as a First Lady, leading the charge on health care reform and further infuriating the Clintons’ detractors. Kennedy would later explain: “Some of this stuff was aimed at [Hillary’s] health care task force. Some of it was aimed at, you know, ‘How dare they bring Arkansans up here and stick them in the White House.’” Some of it, however, was “pure palpable hatred of the Clintons. It started and it never quit.”
The FBI submitted a report critical of the White House’s handling of the Travel Office matter, forcing the Clinton White House to issue mild reprimands of its own officials, concluding that Travel Office employees “should have been placed on administrative leave rather than fired.” It was an embarrassing episode for the fledgling administration.
The Travel Office flap blew over soon enough. But Foster appeared visibly shaken by the dressing-down that his office took—especially because he believed that he and his colleagues had acted honorably and legitimately in every way. “He was depressed not only by the attacks,” Nussbaum would recall, “but by our weakness in response to these attacks.”
The White House Counsel’s Office took a pounding in other areas. The invention and proliferation of cable television had created a twenty-four-hour