Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [65]
It was in this highly charged atmosphere that Hale began telling journalists that Jim McDougal and then-Governor Bill Clinton had pressured him into giving a $300,000 loan to Master Marketing, Susan McDougal’s advertising company. Some of the proceeds of this loan, Hale started whispering to reporters, were specifically earmarked to go into the failed Whitewater deal in an attempt to salvage it. In return for that bogus deal, the McDougals allegedly would loan Hale $825,000 from Madison Guaranty so that he could leverage another $1 million from the SBA and reap a huge profit.
In footage of an NBC interview with David Hale dated November 6, never aired in full but later subpoenaed by Jim McDougal’s lawyers for trial, Hale was filmed sitting in front of a row of law books, wearing a black suit and red-striped tie. Hale admitted to engaging in shady business deals, at which point the interviewer pressed for details:
Q: Who brought about your downfall in your view? Yourself … ?
HALE: Myself …
Q: Would you consider it was a criminal conspiracy, a scheme to defraud federal regulators? And were there others involved?
HALE: Yes, sir.
Q: Who were they?
Hale stared into the camera, blinking with as much sincerity as he could muster before replying: “Then setting [sic] Governor Bill Clinton, James McDougal, then the owner of Madison Savings and Loan, and Jim Guy Tucker … the present Governor of Arkansas.”
Hale’s early appearances pointing the finger at the Clintons and others, research now confirms, was accomplished with the direct assistance of “Justice Jim” Johnson, an unabashed Clinton enemy. A former judge on the Arkansas Supreme Court and a colorful political creature who spoke in Southern colloquialisms, Justice Jim lived north of Little Rock in Conway and was a white-haired relic of the segregationist South. Bill Clinton’s rise to power in his home state irked Justice Jim, so he vowed to do something about it.
Johnson was born in 1924, when segregation was still thriving in Arkansas. He had served as the local coordinator for then-Governor Strom Thurmond’s campaign in 1948, when the South Carolina governor ran for president on the “states’ rights” ticket. Johnson rose in the ranks of old-time Southern Democrats in Arkansas politics. He made a “hell of a showing” in the 1955 governor’s race against popular incumbent Orval Faubus, largely by promoting the Johnson Amendment, which would have rewritten the Arkansas Constitution to invalidate the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, preventing public schools from becoming integrated in Arkansas. (Although the Johnson Amendment passed overwhelmingly, the federal courts swiftly struck it down as unconstitutional.)
Johnson also served as editor of Arkansas Faith, a newsletter published by the White Citizens’ Council. In one issue, he penned a column declaring that “the South will never accept integration, be it immediate or gradual.” Another issue, during his tenure as editor in the spring of 1956, published photos of black men kissing white women and warned of “mongrelization.” A cartoon in the April 1956 newsletter depicted Arkansas Governor Faubus taking a meat cleaver to segregation underneath the caption: “This will please the niggers and confuse the White Folks!”
After his election to the state senate, Johnson played a leading role in attempting to block African American students from attending Central High School in Little Rock, during the infamous standoff between Governor Faubus and President Dwight D. Eisenhower—a standoff that caused President Eisenhower to dispatch the National Guard to Arkansas.