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Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater

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Liking Clinton, I always felt nagging worry as Whitewater was constantly mentioned. "How the Media Invented Whitewater" INVENTED!! Surely that's biting off more than could possibly be said with confidence and a straight face. Then I read the book. Apprehension turned to outrage. Jeff Gerth of the New York Times went to Arkansas looking for a story. He extensively interviewed Clinton's Commissioner of Securities regarding S&L regulation. Finding Gerth long on opinions and shakey on the facts, the Commissioner wrote Gerth long memos (reprinted in "Fools for Scandal") detailing the facts of regulatory activity, corroboration existed in state government files and the RTC office that had participated in the joint regulation that included ultimately kicking Jim MacDougal out of Madison Guaranty, then the RTC taking it over. With these facts, Gerth went on to write "news" stories that are half false and half disinformation, published at a time when Clinton's 1992 campaign was imploding and this kind of story could have been the last straw. But nobody is tougher than Clinton. Lyons details each basic fact of Whitewater as a business, as a deal, and as a scandal. That it has been turned into a scandal is a tribute to how easily we can become victims of a hoax. Take the case of Jean Lewis, the so-called RTC whistle-blower. Since Madison Guaranty had no assets to recover for the RTC, Jean Lewis was assigned to other Arkansas S&Ls that had cost the government 20x more and did have recoverable assets. Jean Lewis announced to the coworker she was "out to change history" during the fall 1992 campaign and disobeying her superiors and her assigned case load worked full time to follow Madison Guaranty. She referred criminal charges and pressed the Republican Federal prosecutor in Little Rock, who said he would be guilty of prosecutorial misconduct if he brought a case with such a lack of evidence. Did you know that Jean Lewis had a side business selling "Presidential Bitch!" coffee cups with Hillary's picture on them, and on her company's business cards she used her RTC's office phone number? Jean Lewis is a cross between Mary Matalin and Gordon Liddy. She bought a tape recorder, and secretly taped her coworkers as she attempted to get them to make implicating remarks. She testified to the Whitewater Committee quoting coworkers based on her tapes, but adding insult to injury she misquoted what they had said. She testified she had bought this tape recorder after these quoted conversations occurred. Richard Ben-Veniste, the Committee's Democratic counsel, subpeoned the records of the store to find the tape recorder was bought before any of these conversations started. Jean Lewis committed perjury about half a dozen times in her tesimony to the Whitewater Committee. Having watched her testimony that day, and Richard Ben-Veniste's interrogation of her, I couldn't believe she was still being called a whistle blower. Afterwards, she puked from stress, and was too nervous to testify the next day. But the Republican propaganda machine was in full swing, with Jim Leach as pointman, who I lost all respect for as a result of his reckless attacks. Ken Starr, who continued to represent clients in litigation against the RTC even while serving as Independent Counsel, took Jean Lewis as an "advisor" since nobody at the RTC wanted her back. Those big S&L's in Arkansas she was assigned to recover money from? The statute of limitations expired while she ignored her assigned work and changed history. Don't expect Ken Starr to prosecute her for perjury. Don't expect the news media to put her tesimony up to scrutiny. Personal sarcasm not in the book: Arkansas politics, always referred to in the media as "inbred" (read: hillbilly), is an easy target of the "sophisicated" Eastern media. A subliminal message is they're looking down their collective nose at Arkansas - as if no scandal in New York politics? Or no one who would subscribe to a scandal sheet for entertainment? No, everything we print is true. I see why The Star is now quoted in the same company with this media, and reeking of resentment that a little hillbilly from a backwater state, took the government from its self-appointed owners, and "now we'll punish them for being successful" mentality. Arkansas the state has taken such a beating from national Republicans that the Arkansas Republicans started complaining. Negative politics, which we profess to hate, is recycled in the form of smear, scandal and the Rush Limbaugh School of Character Assassination. Bill Clinton is smarter and tougher than can be imagined. He is tough enough to withstand this unbelievably insane assault, and he is the real victim of Whitewater both financially and politically. Finding no substance in Whitewater, we have watched all year while attacks are packaged into another series of accusations. The media parrots the Republican smear campaign, and are insulted at non-cooperation from the Clintons, having distorted quotes and facts. Clinton is smart enough to use the legal protections of the justice system for the innocent. He is also smart enough to keep his mouth shut, and suffer the slings and arrows. Bill Clinton went into business with Jim MacDougal. Other people went into business with Jim MacDougal, such as Sheffield Nelson, Clinton's 1990 Republican opponent for governor, and Jerry Jones, natural gas/real estate wheeler-dealer turned Dallas Cowboys owner. "Fools For Scandal" provides considerable perspective of the business activities engaged in by these people. It's a big story. Don't make the mistake that you think you understand what's going on. Many people are convinced Clinton is guilty of crimes in Whitewater. Ask them what they are, though, and they can't tell you. Ask them why it's illegal to have lost $42,000 in a business venture, which the Clintons did, and they can't explain why that's a crime. Then neither is any thing else. There are other victims in Whitewater, I think. Like Roger Altman, who may have made the mistake of believing what The New York Times reported about the President, and got nervous, like I felt hearing it too. It's always easier to announce the conclusion of a book in a review than it is to recount the facts point by point. I feel the book stated the facts convincingly and the facts were woven together with background and context. If you can find any thing in this book that can't be verified by original documents, I'd like to know. This book is an investigative report where the media is investigated and scrutinized and found untrustworthy. And it took somebody from Arkansas to show us that.

Lyons makes it depressingly clear how the contemporary media, particularly the New York Times and Washington Post, is owned by the Republican party. That fact became obvious to millions of previously naïve Americans in the aftermath of the stolen presidential election, and certainly explains reporter's fascination with Whitewater in the absence of public concern. At the time of Clinton's Presidency, I subscribed to the NY Times, and had no idea how corrupt and biased they were and are, but couldn't understand why they were latching onto the Whitewater story, when there didn't seem to be any substance. I now know better, thanks in part to this book.

It's really quite chilling to read Lyons' account of how processed the NY Time's version of "news" was, how much of the truth they covered up, and how few of the inconvenient facts they allowed their readers to see. The Time's just prints all the news that fits the myth. It's very scary that most other newspapers follow the mighty Times like sheep and just accept their accounts.

I really didn't have much sympathy for Hillary Clinton until I read this book, and now I have some insight into what she endured, and why she made certain decisions. It's a disturbing and uncomfortable truth that Lyons tells, but Americans need to know.

Lyons's first book on the fabrication of the Whitewater hoax by the New York Times is even more compelling reading now than it was when it was published. In 2000, it is easy to see how the impeachment became inevitable; it will soon enough become evident why it failed (because the President is a sinner, but not a lawbreaker); and Lyons, almost alone among the country's journalists, demolished Whitewater as a credible scandal in 1996. Lyons demonstrates that Governor Clinton was not guilty of any abuse of power, because no such abuse took place. The Times did not make a mountain out of a molehill, it made it out of nothing at all. After Lyons briskly explains the banking law and practice that governed the decline and takeover of Madison Guaranty, the facts of Beverly Bassett Schaffer's appointment and actions regarding the supervision of this bank, there is simply no case left at all for believing the Clintons violated any standard of ethics or broke any law. And it doesn't take long for Lyons to demonstrate this--what he moves on to is an explication of how the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post soon began to make their own news. They could not, after all, report show trials in the U.S. Senate, or throw up their hands in shocked amazement at the findings of the Pillsbury Report without raising questions in their readers' minds as to why these trusted newspspers had been mongering this scandal for so long. Rather than admit their error, they simply hammered home, day after day, ever more nebulous accusations of the Clintons' character flaws and raised new "questions" about their behavior. In this climate, there was no voice of reason or justice to oppose Kenneth Starr's ever more desperate prosecutorial tactics in finding something to impeach the President for. Lyons also takes up the lesser "scandals" variously "reported" by the Times and others, including Mrs. Clinton's commodities trades, Governor Clinton's treatment of Tyson Foods and Stephens, Inc., and James B. Stewart's accusation of financial dishonesty on Mrs. Clinton's part in filling out a loan application (Stewart had neglected to check the back of a two-page form, on which Mrs. Clinton had given the information he accused her of hiding). Mr. Lyons got an awful lot of significant facts, and he got them first. He laid them out in damning order, and told the story in a tone of dry irony just this side of scathing. After reading this book, you will want to give it to any of your friends who are capable of distinguishing fact from propaganda. And your level of trust in the New York Times will drop precipitously. It is required reading for citizens with a sense of decency.

Not since the late I. F. Stone debunked the Pentagon's PR campaign for Vietnam has a journalist so completely destoyed a popular myth perpetuated by a lazy press in service of the forces of reaction. In a year of searching, I have never found any reviewer who has rebuted a single factual claim or historical inference made in this book. The book reads like a great short story (just when you think the bad guys could not get away with anymore, they do) and the ending is better than any pulp fiction. After reading this you won't care about Monica. After all the perjury Starr and the GOP sponsored against him, Clinton still has a few more 'Get out of jail free' passes.

This book was written four years ago and has stood the test of time. When future Historians study our era they will be referring to this book to understand the massive hysteria that gripped the country for 6 years.

After the biggest witchunt since Salem, countless Congressional investigation, 3 independent counsels, dozens of prosecutors, FBI agents......still not a shred of evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons in Whitewater. So what happened? This book details the origins of the hysteria.

When future Historians look at all the facts and pass judgment their harshest condemnation will be reserved for the New York Times for their journalistic malpractice. Not far behind will be the rest of the mainstream press for blindly following the newspaper of record.

This book has stood the test of time. Despite all the carping of the Clinton Crazies, none have been able to factually refute what's in this expose. A pity more haven't read this, since Lyons' voice in the wilderness has accurately skewered the "accuracy" of one of America's icons, The New York Times. Had everyone been paying attention, the Starr investigation may have wound down much sooner, and Wen Ho Lee may have been spared being called a traitor based on the usual inaccurate, slanderous reporting of the Times' Jeff Gerth.

The anti-Clinton comments in these reviews are, in hindsight, kind of funny. One writer couldn't wait for Ken Starr to tell us the real truth about Whitewater. Well, he has, and he was forced to admit that there was no scandal there after all. The other anti-Clinton comments are notably lightweight, since they in no way even attempt to factually refute this book.

Because they can't.

I remember when Bill Clinton won his second presidential election the media was kind of shocked and basically said, "The American people just don't get it!" On the contrary, the American people did get it and this book proves it. Never in my life time have I seen the media try so vigorously to sway public opinion through such deception and then public opinion going the opposite direction. Perhaps Americans are much smarter than the press thinks we are. It will be interesting to see how all their hard "work" influences the results of the next election. The media needs to reclaim the journalist standards it once had in the days of Edward R. Murrow but I don't see that happening.

The nucleus of Lyons' book began as an October 1994 article in Harper's Magazine. In it he confirmed what I and others had suspected: There was no there there in the Whitewater story, and that it was a hoax with regard to the Clintons.

Two years later, at around the 1996 elections, Lyons and the editors of Harper's came up with this book. More than just a recounting of the Whitewater saga, this book is one of the most damning indictments of journalistic malpractice ever written. At the core of the book is the behavior of journalists at various newspaper and broadcast media outlets in general, with particular emphasis on the New York Times and the now-discredited reporter Jeff Gerth. Needless to say, Lyons' book got a lousy review in the NYT Book Review, yet nobody has ever refuted anything Lyons wrote. Indeed, his book has stood the test of time.

Breezily written, yet meticulously researched, Lyons' book can be read in a sitting or two. I also recommend the section in the back of the book featuring a discussion with Lyons and a number of other journalists with regard to the lack of journalistic standards in the Whitewater reporting.

This book can also be seen as a forerunner to Lyons' (and Joe Conason's) upcoming book on the so-called Clinton Scandals, "The Hunting of the President." If that book is anything like "Fools for Scandal," it should be very good, indeed. Lyons and Conason will still not be invited to the Georgetown cocktail parties, however.

I did not vote for Clinton. I read this book two years ago and it opened my eyes how the media can botch a "story". There is no "conspiracy" going on here, it's a fact-by-fact account of the so-called Whitewater scandal. Before this book, I actually thought the media was "moderate" in it's spin. But it's obvious how far to the right it has become since the Reagan spin doctors came along. They were instrumental in the demonization of the term "liberal".

This book is overwhelming proof of the current control of the news and information media by the enemies of our Democratic President, if not the enemies of our democracy. Kenneth Starr has conclusively proven by his unconfessed total failure to find fault in all of the matters that he pursued against the President that Gene Lyons was the ONLY HONEST AND INFORMED newsman on this story LONG BEFORE everybody else in America learned by Starr's silence that the Clintons were innocent of all the Whitewater matters ferociously investigated by the laughingly referred to "Independent" Counsel. It is imperative that Americans ALL learn from this book AFTER THE FACT how badly they were MIS-INFORMED in this matter by the so-called "news and information media", so that they can start demanding a stop to this same bias in the "mainstream media" post haste!