It’s Getting Hotter in Washington : Whitewater roils the presidential waters

Sometimes the news media are too quick to judge, but if you hear or read the troubling term cover-up being applied to the Whitewater controversy more and more, it may not be the media’s fault. The White House may have only itself to blame.

On Thursday President Clinton said that high-level briefings that took place shouldn’t have. The sessions were held among top White House aides--but did not include the President--and featured an extremely questionable briefing last month by Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. He is not only the No. 2 Treasury official but also the acting chief of the Resolution Trust Corp. That is the government agency investigating the failure of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Assn. in Arkansas. Altman’s briefing gave White House staffers an inappropriate advance peek at what the RTC was up to in its probe of the failed thrift.

Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton were real estate partners with the head of that S&L; in a development known as Whitewater, a 1980s land venture in Arkansas. The controversy centers on whether a sweetheart deal was arranged to benefit the Clintons and whether Clinton as governor kept at bay the regulators concerned about the thrift.

Now the White House has confessed to the sin of looking bad. It says that although it has done nothing wrong, it does itself no good when it does anything that appears to be blocking disclosure. That’s the right position to take. White House officials must recuse themselves--as Altman belatedly has done--from all matters related to the Whitewater probe. What is at stake is not only their careers and their reputations--serious matters in themselves--but possibly this presidency.

Washington old pro Lloyd Bentsen understands this. The Treasury secretary has asked the independent Office of Government Ethics to probe the contacts between Treasury officials and the White House about the S&L.; That was the proper thing to do. The government’s integrity must not be in question. The appearance of misconduct can be as corrosive as actual misconduct.

The phrase Whitewater-gate is already making the Washington rounds these days. That’s a little too glib. What Whitewater originally was, after all, was a financial deal of somewhat lesser magnitude than, say, a good-sized political payoff scandal. But if the White House or the President’s allies orchestrate in any manner a cover-up, or even offer the appearance of a cover-up, then the gate suffix will be appended to Whitewater without objection. The White House is perilously close to that point. One more major misstep and it may have arrived.