As Theater, Hearings Have Slow 1st Act

Senate historian Donald A. Ritchie is an authority on congressional investigations dating back to 1792. He knows the ins and outs of the Teapot Dome, the nuances of the House Un-American Activities Committee and every twist and turn of Watergate.

Yet even he, an investigation wonk with an office across the hall from where the Senate’s campaign fund-raising hearings are playing out, is not engaged in Sen. Fred Thompson’s attempt to air the dirty laundry of the 1996 presidential campaign.

“It certainly can be difficult to follow,” Ritchie said of the multifaceted fund-raising probe. “And I love congressional investigations.”

But Ritchie knows too much about inquiries of the past to write this one off so quickly. The current hearings may be monotonous, disorganized and largely ignored by the public, but they may yet prove successful.

The picture emerging after three weeks of testimony is a U.S. election system wide open to overseas interests, where political parties put a premium on the creative sidestepping of porous laws, and access to power is cataloged and priced like wares peddled at a retail outlet.

Amid Republicans’ efforts to smear the Democrats, and Democrats’ efforts to smear the Republicans, the two parties are exposing political fund-raising for what it is: a frenzied and often ugly scramble for cash that has left both parties tottering on the very edge of what is legal--and occasionally plunging over it.

As far as engaging the public, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee had its work cut out even before the sounding of the hearings’ opening gavel. The financing of campaigns is already widely viewed as sleazy, making it difficult to shock.

“In Watergate and Iran-Contra . . . there was a kind of national paralysis,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a committee member who considers these hearings of critical importance but nevertheless dull sometimes. “Here in this investigation, I don’t think, respectfully, that we’re dealing with that kind of national paralysis.”

Whether the Senate’s attempt to detail the dark side of campaign finance leads to an overhaul of the system or nothing more than attack ads during the next campaign will be the ultimate test of how the hearings are remembered.

“As a historian, I have seen congressional investigations that fell apart and didn’t even file a final report, and others that shocked the public, got legislation, sent people to jail and really had an impact,” Ritchie said. “All you need is one really exciting witness to revive a hearing.”

Even with the public largely disengaged, there is growing support for the outright banning of “soft money”--the vast, unregulated contributions to political parties that are at the center of the investigation. Former Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush all endorsed the idea last week, as did a bipartisan group of House freshmen. The leadership in both parties has been resistant to the idea.

Thompson, the committee chairman, is a former actor who is well aware that his production has not yet become a hit. But his aides say there may well be Hollywood moments mixed in with the minutiae in the weeks ahead.

“We’re not the ‘Entertainment Tonight’ show with Fred Thompson,” said Paul Clark, the committee’s GOP spokesman. “We can tip our hat to the need for glitz and glamour. In fact, we’re going to have more of a star cast and a little bit more get-up-and-go as we move along. But this is serious business.”

This is not the first time, of course, that a congressional investigation did not make it on prime time. Republican Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato’s Whitewater probe ran on so long that it became one big yawn. And way back in 1966, veteran newsman Fred Friendly resigned in protest from CBS when the network ran an “I Love Lucy” episode instead of a critical Senate Foreign Relations Committee review of the Vietnam War.

Ironically, it was the Democrats last week who produced the first really exciting witness in the GOP-led investigation. When former Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour entered the hearing room Thursday with an entourage of dark-suited lawyers and aides, 18 news photographers clicked away madly. All of a sudden the ho-hum hearings received prominent mention on the evening news.

Thompson (R-Tenn.) grows impatient with early score-keeping of which party is ahead and which is behind. The hearings will break at the end of this week, but he reminds observers that they will resume in September with continued probing of some of the controversy’s meatier elements.

Still to come, for instance, is a review of the fund-raiser last fall at a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights. Vice President Al Gore has been embarrassed by his attendance at the affair, and the committee is expected to call several nuns involved in the controversial event to the witness chair.

From the start, Republicans set out to investigate troubling allegations about the complicated saga of foreign-linked contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Political motives were high among some Republican senators, although Thompson says his ultimate goal is to change the laws.

“What we’re trying to do here is, first of all, deal with the past,” Thompson said at Thursday’s session. “That’s what any investigation does--determine whether or not laws were violated, determine whether or not there were gross improprieties that affect the basic integrity of our system and our government.”

But that is not all.

“Then, I would hope . . . we’ll take a look at . . . the things that we have learned and see if we can make our system better,” Thompson said. “I’m one of those who thinks that our system can be made a lot better, that it would be hard to devise a system that could be more problematic than the one we’ve got now.”

Democrats have different, yet overlapping, aims. Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the panel, has sought to soften the blows to his own party by highlighting instances of Republican wrongdoing. Yet he would much prefer if the proceedings focused on ways to improve the campaign finance system rather than rehashing the fund-raising abuses that have been the subject of newspaper headlines since last fall.

“We can’t just leave this system in place, because if we do, we’ll correct all the illegalities and see the same old system that spawned these problems just come back to haunt us later,” Glenn said at the hearings Thursday.

Too much partisanship is one dynamic that has caused past investigations to fizzle fast. That was the rap on D’Amato’s Whitewater investigation, which is widely derided as a flop.

Asked last week what makes a successful congressional probe, D’Amato responded: “I don’t know. I haven’t had one.”

With the Whitewater probe under his belt, the New York Republican said he sympathized with what Thompson is going through but does not have any good advice to offer him.

“People don’t have time to get involved in long, involved things,” he said. “People are busy working and planning a family and worrying about where the next tuition payment will come from. It’s tough to have a complicated hearing catch on.”

Unlike the Whitewater investigation, however, the fund-raising hearings are showing signs of breaking through their early partisan gridlock.

Last week, for instance, Democrats sided with Thompson in offering immunity to five witnesses, including four Buddhist nuns, in exchange for their testimony in the hearings. And Thompson reached across the aisle when he challenged Barbour’s handling of a loan arrangement with Hong Kong businessman Ambrous Tung Young.

“These hearings will rise and fall on whether . . . they are an honest and fair attempt to lay out the facts, or a partisan bludgeon,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic committee aide.

In the end, whether the hearings engage the public may boil down to whether most people are more like Joe Aberlarde or more like his wife, Nancy. Visiting Washington on vacation last week, the Chicago couple spent the afternoon in the hearing room watching senators try to get to the bottom of campaign fund-raising abuses. For Joe, it was a fascinating peek at democracy in action. Nancy was eager to move on and see the sights.

“I’d like to find out the whole truth,” said Joe Aberlarde, who added that he knows about the intricate web of allegations involving fund-raisers such as John Huang, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie and Johnnie Chung.

Nancy Aberlarde rolled her eyes, admitted she would not know Huang if he were standing next to her and remarked: “It’s not something I follow that much.”