Den of Sleaze

Jeff Taylor from the June 1996 issue

Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries , by James B. Stewart, New York: Simon & Schuster, 479 pages, $25.00

There are at least two good reasons why the definitive treatment of Whitewater is probably several years away. For one, the subject virtually demands multimedia. Several gigabytes of charts, diagrams, video clips, and hypertext links could bring the multi-threaded mess together.

The other reason is legal. The passage of time means expiring statutes of limitations for all manner of skullduggery. The truth tends to bubble up when indictments are impossible.

Until that day, James Stewart's well-built examination will have to do. For the most part it does quite well. Only a staff apologist for the Clintons could come away from Stewart's portrayal without feeling a little ashamed of having their ilk in the White House. The new information Stewart adds to the Whitewater canon will not jump out at most readers. Instead what Stewart has described as the Clintons' "pattern of deceit" will.

This is striking enough, given the genesis of the book. Stewart relates that in March 1994 he was approached by Clinton confidante Susan Thomases. Thomases, a New York lawyer and unofficial Clinton adviser, was acquainted with the Pulitzer Prize- winning author via friends.

In 1987, Stewart's Den of Thieves followed the ins and outs of the junk bond trade. Bashing that aspect of the 1980s put him on the same team as the Clintons. Thomases must have surmised Stewart would put the Clintons' own '80s adventures in the "proper" perspective. Thomases prom ised access, and Stewart in fact received a session with Hillary Clinton. But such cooperation soon melted away. By then Stewart was hooked on the Whitewater saga.

More than just a raw land deal gone bad, Whitewater has come to represent the Clintons' Arkansas roots. For Democrats, that just means the way things are done in a small state; the governor simply knows everyone, so every deal is "inside." For Republicans, Whitewater is a money grab by a crooked draft dodger.

In Washington, reaction to Blood Sport has been colored by those two extremes. Clinton supporters point out the lack of a "smoking gun" while Clinton bashers label Blood Sport a whitewash. The irony is both extremes tend to discount the new information Stewart has turned up.

For example, Blood Sport takes the time to paint the first well-rounded picture of the late Vincent Foster, whose suicide is the one undeniably tragic aspect to this story. The White House lawyer was sober-minded, even a little square, Stewart asserts. Foster was intelli gent enough to fall into practicing law without a lot of effort. He relished legal research and seems to have enjoyed it more than dealing with clients. Rounding up clients simply wasn't his forte.

"Foster did not golf. It was a game for which he had little natural aptitude, and rather than risk something at which he didn't excel, he preferred not to play at all," Stewart writes. A lawyer who eschews golf is an outsider at most firms. Hillary, along with Foster, was an outsider at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock during the 1980s. A Yankee woman who was wired politically, she was one of a kind. That she and Foster would become close friends is not a surprise.

Stewart concedes it is impossible to prove that Foster and Hillary never had an affair, as has been widely rumored. But he clearly thinks it is implausible. "Foster never joked about women, flirted, or repeated even mildly off-color stories," he writes. Thus Stewart concludes Foster could not abide the scrutiny and gossip an intraoffice affair would bring. That Hillary was a public figure makes it even less likely, he believes.

Foster's retiring nature also makes the idea that he functioned as a super-secret agent--as some of the wilder Whitewater conspiracy theories posit--far-fetched. Stewart finds no evidence Foster ever went to Switzerland, the starting point for theories that wind through Pentagon slush funds, the National Security Agency, and Mossad hit teams. Peddlers of such theories will no doubt take this as proof Stewart is really working for the Clintons.

Stewart does conclude Foster was a profoundly unhappy man in the middle of 1993, unhappy enough to take his own life. That does not mean his death was investigated in textbook fashion or that the White House did not immediately clam up. But the conspiracy buffs might want to return to pamphleteering on the Trilateral Commission or writing scripts for The X-Files until they can generate more light than heat on the topic.

By talking to real people, Stewart does turn up a meeting between Foster a nd Thomases at a supposed "safe house" a short time before his death. There Foster unburdened himself of concerns about his job, his marriage, and life in general, according to Stewart. Foster had good reason to be troubled by White House handling of the t ravel office. Contacts between White House flunkies and the FBI and IRS were improper at best. A special counsel seemed to be in the cards. Thomases is supposed to have been troubled by the meeting and relayed her concerns to Foster's boss, White House cou nsel Bernard Nussbaum.

This account is at odds with what Thomases has told Congress. Foster's July 1993 death came as a shock, she said, which has been the official White House line. Investigators will no doubt probe Thomases's recollections further on the matter.