The Nation : Just When You Thought It Was Over, the Whitewater Saga Returns With a Roar

It’s back. The Whitewater scandal, submerged under the political surface for so long that most people thought it long since drowned, is producing big, fat air bubbles again. And the circum stances under which it has re-emerged strongly suggest that Whitewater is going to get much worse for the President and First Lady.

Should we welcome this development as much-delayed justice? Lament it as scandal politics of the type that poisons public life? By now, it hardly seems worth asking such questions, any more than it would be productive to keep inquiring as to whether or not we approve of death, gravity or the changing of the seasons. The Clintons have tried to evade the modern scandal machine. It is about to show them that the more you struggle, the tighter it grips.

Part of their current trouble comes from the office of Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating Whitewater.

When Starr was named to the job, two camps of critics called his appointment a sellout. First were those who claimed that because he had been an active Republican and had argued against exempting President Bill Clinton from prosecution in the Paula Corbin Jones case, Starr was a partisan who could not give the President a fair hearing. This criticism did not get very far: Starr had already built a reputation for professionalism, and it was hard to make people picture him as viciously vindictive.

Other critics attacked the appointment from the opposite direction. They pointed out that Starr, unlike his predecessor in the Whitewater counsel’s job, Robert B. Fiske Jr., was not a prosecutor by training. So Starr would be too soft and too easy for his targets to fool.

This theory was never plausible: Even if Starr had the temperament of a dish rag, the organization he inherited from Fiske was chock-full of prosecutorial talents and temperaments. If Starr had tried to wimp out on a case, every political news gourmand in the world would soon have known about it.

In any event, the prediction turned out to be wrong. Starr’s attorneys, we learned last week, have been doing just what careful prosecutors do in order to develop a big case. In Little Rock, they have been letting relatively minor, tangential or low-ranking figures in the Whitewater scandal plead guilty to reduced charges in exchange for cooperation with the ongoing investigation of more important wrongdoers.

First came a guilty plea from Robert W. Palmer, a land appraiser who falsified and backdated valuations of real estate. One of his phony appraisals helped justify a loan, part of which went to the Whitewater Development Corp., half owned by then-Gov. and Mrs. Clinton.

Next came a guilty plea from Webster L. Hubbell, formerly the Clinton Administration’s associate attorney general. Hubbell pleaded to charges not directly related to Whitewater. But the former Clinton official was a key figure in the Justice Department when the federal government was deciding whether or not to investigate Madison Savings and Loan, owned by the Clintons’ partner in Whitewater, and Hubbell pledged cooperation with Starr.

The Clinton White House has, as they say, tried to distance the President and First Lady from these goings-on. But you would be hard put to find a criminal-law specialist who thinks that Starr’s prosecutors would have allowed the pleas if Palmer and Hubbell had not offered information implicating others. It wouldn’t take all that much to put the Clintons under criminal suspicion: For instance, even if they simply had knowledge of these matters and hid it from investigators, they might be swimming in the famously murky swamp of obstruction of justice.

In short, when you see prosecutors start to make potential defendants offers they can’t refuse, you can be fairly sure that more action is coming.

There will probably be more journalistic action as well--from, among other media, the New York Times. Last week’s pleas, according to the Times editorial page, mean “those who have questioned the entire business of investigating Whitewater have been answered” and “(t)here is every reason . . . to keep seeking” still further answers.

It is not hard to understand why the New York Times would especially welcome Starr’s progress. The paper was in the forefront of media reportage on Whitewater. But the scandal has been hard to pin down and, so far, no one has been able to say for sure what particular illegal or grossly unethical act the Clintons actually committed. The White House has derided Whitewater suspicions as old news. Not long ago in Harper’s magazine, a long article by columnist Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, using documentary evidence and sources friendly to the Clintons, called the New York Times’ reporting on the issue a stew of false innuendo.

I remember something like this happening to me and my colleagues when I was in daily journalism. We were writing pieces in pursuit of a moderately sleazy, immensely self-righteous political figure. We hadn’t quite gotten him. He knew someone in the publisher’s office and had the chutzpah to use this connection to summon some of us to a meeting--where he berated us for lousy journalism.

We reported back to one of our editors, who sighed and said, “Well, I guess that means next time we’re really going to have to roll right over this guy.”

So, children, do not try to humiliate a marauding journalist unless you are sure you have no more little sheep left out there in the pasture for him or her to feed on. In the Whitewater scandal, the current activity by the independent counsel’s office looks like it’s going to be a veritable mutton-producing assembly line, and the journalists in question are busy tying their napkins around their necks.

Throughout American political history, individual scandals have come and gone. Waves of scandal have stormed the beach and receded. But 20 years ago, the Watergate scandal, when it finally washed out to sea, left an unprecedented pile of institutional debris on the beach. We now have the institution of the independent counsel, whose charter usually grants him or her an extremely broad mandate to investigate crimes in and around a high official’s neighborhood. Because the appointment of an independent counsel is generally a public event, it especially encourages the type of additional charges that, as prosecutors say, tend to “come out of the woodwork” during a big investigation.

Watergate also left us with a press corps with a strong investigative ethos. From time to time, journalists engage in bouts of self-criticism on this score, worrying that they have become too mistrustful and aggressive. So far, though, this ambivalence has been nowhere near enough to turn around the powerful organizational and professional incentives that keep investigative journalists going.

So if you want to bet even money, put it on further Whitewater scandal involvement for the White House. The news from Little Rock is not just unseen thunder on a distant horizon; it is a warning to run home right now and break out those umbrellas.