My life полностью

I could understand why right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Dannemeyer, Jerry Falwell, and a paper like the Washington Times would say such things. The Washington Times was avowedly right-wing, financed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and edited by Wes Pruden Jr., whose father, the Reverend Wesley Pruden, had been chaplain of the White Citizens’ Council in Arkansas and an ally of Justice Jim Johnson’s in their lost crusade against civil rights for blacks. What I couldn’t believe was that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others in the media I had always respected and trusted had been sucker punched by the likes of Floyd Brown, David Bossie, David Hale, and Jim Johnson. Around this time I hosted a dinner at the White House to observe Black History Month. Among the attendees were my old law school professor Burke Marshall and his friend Nicholas Katzenbach, who had done so much to advance civil rights in the Kennedy Justice Department. Nick came up to me and told me that he was on the board of the Washington Post and that he was ashamed of the paper’s coverage of Whitewater and the “terrible damage” that had been done to me and the presidency over charges that didn’t amount to a hill of beans: “What is this about?” he asked. “It sure isn’t about the public interest.”

Whatever it was about, it was working. A poll in March said that half the people thought Hillary and I were lying about Whitewater, and a third of them thought we had done something illegal. I have to confess that Whitewater, especially the attacks on Hillary, took a bigger toll on me than I thought it would. The charges were baseless and unsupported by any reliable evidence. I had other problems, but except for occasionally being hardheaded, Hillary was above reproach. It killed me to see her hurt by one false charge after another, all the more so because I had made things worse by giving in to the naïve notion that an independent counsel would clear the air. I had to work hard to keep my anger in check, and I didn’t always succeed. The cabinet and staff seemed to understand and tolerate my occasional flare-ups, and Al Gore helped me get through them. Though I kept working hard and continued to love my job, my normally sunny disposition and innate optimism would be put to one severe test after another.

It helped to laugh about it. Every spring there are three press dinners, hosted by the Gridiron Club, the White House correspondents, and the radio and television correspondents. They give the press an opportunity to poke fun at the President and other politicians, and the President gets a chance to reply. I looked forward to these occasions because they allowed all of us to let our guards down a little, and because they reminded me that the press was not a monolith and was made up mostly of good people trying to be fair. Also, as Proverbs says, “A happy heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

I was in pretty good spirits on April 12 at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ dinner, and I got off some good lines, like “I really am delighted to be here. If you believe that I’ve got some land in northwest Arkansas I’d like to show you”; “Some say my relations with the press have been marked by self-pity. I like to think of it as the outer limits of my empathy. I feel my pain”; “It’s three days before April fifteenth, and most of you have to spend more time on my taxes than your own”; and “I still believe in a place called Help!”

The work of what Hillary would later call the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been chronicled in great detail by Sidney Blumenthal in The Clinton Wars and by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in The Hunting of the President. As far as I know, none of their factual assertions have been refuted. When those books were published, the people in the mainstream media who had been part of the Whitewater mania ignored their charges, dismissed the authors as being too sympathetic to Hillary and me, or blamed us for the way we handled the Whitewater problem and for complaining. I’m sure we could have handled it better, but so could they.

In the early days of Whitewater, one of my friends was forced to resign his government post because of something he had done wrong before he came to Washington. The Rose Law Firm filed a complaint against Webb Hubbell with the Arkansas Bar Association for allegedly overcharging his clients and padding his expenses. Webb resigned from the Justice Department, but assured Hillary there was nothing to the charges, saying that the whole problem arose because his wealthy but irascible father-inlaw, Seth Ward, had refused to pay the Rose firm for the costs of a patent infringement case they had lost. It seemed plausible, but it wasn’t true.