Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

this pre-election effort to implicate us in a criminal probe was encouraged by people in the Bush White House and Justice Department.

To rebut her testimony before the Banking Committee, Ben-Veniste crossexamined Lewis intensely, suggesting that she was lying when she said she had accidentally made a lengthy tape recording of a conversation she had with an RTC official who visited Lewis at her Kansas City office. Ben-Veniste got Lewis to state that, while she was a conservative Republican, she had no political bias against Bill and had never called him a liar. He then presented a letter that she’d written in 1992 which made exactly that charge. Democrats also introduced evidence that Lewis had sought to market a line of T-shirts and mugs carrying messages that were critical of both Bill and me. Before the questioning concluded, Lewis collapsed and had to be helped from the hearing room.

The general public heard little about this development in the ongoing Whitewater drama. Among the television networks, only C-SPAN covered the details of the Lewis appearance. Days after her memorable and self-destructing testimony, The New York Times continued to give credence to Lewis’s unsubstantiated accusations and to refer to her as a “star witness.” Undaunted by the facts, the D’Amato committee continued to probe my association with McDougal’s savings and loan. Ken Starr’s investigation was supposedly confidential, but his team was displaying a remarkable talent for calculated leaks to the media.

In late 1995, Dick Morris came to see me to deliver a bizarre message: I was going to be indicted for something as yet undefined and “people close to Starr” suggested I accept the indictment and ask Bill to pardon me before trial. I assumed Morris was carrying water for his Republican clients or contacts, so I chose my words very carefully. “Tell your sources to report to Starr’s people that even though I have done nothing wrong, I’m well aware that, in the immortal words of Edward Bennett Williams, ‘a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if he chooses.’ And if Starr does, I would never ask for a pardon. I will go to trial and show Starr up for the fraud he is.”

“Are you sure you want me to say that?” Morris asked me.

“Word for word,” I replied.

In the ruckus over budgets and shutdowns, an important development in the Whitewater investigation passed almost unnoticed: Findings of the RTC report on Whitewater were finally made public just before Christmas. This independent report corroborated our contention that Bill and I had minimal involvement with the Whitewater investment and no liability in the collapse of Madison Guaranty. After examining forty-seven witnesses, compiling 200,000 documents and spending $3.6 million, the RTC investigators found no evidence of misconduct on our part and no factual basis for any aspect of the Whitewater “scandal.”

Like Jean Lewis’s discredited testimony, the report was minimally covered in the news media. USA Today didn’t acknowledge it at all; The Washington Post buried the news in paragraph 11 of a front-page story about Whitewater subpoenas and The New York Times ran a few paragraphs on the report. Republicans dismissed the RTC investigation as too narrow and continued their hearings.

I was encouraged by this news when I met with David Kendall at the White House early on January 4, 1996, for one of our periodic catch-up sessions. David always tried to keep things light at our briefings by photocopying his favorite political cartoons for me or clipping the most outrageous tabloid stories, such as “Hillary Gives Birth to Alien Baby”

or whatever they dreamed up that week.

We met in the Family Room, between the large master bedroom and the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the residence. The Bushes and Reagans relaxed and watched television there, and Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt had each used it as a bedroom.

Bill and I furnished it with a television and card table along with a comfortable couch and armchair. Midway through the meeting, an usher knocked on the door and handed David a note, which he folded up and put in his pocket. When we finished our conversation, David left.

The next morning David called and asked if he could come see me.

“Something has come up,” he said.

David explained that the note he’d been given the day before was from Carolyn Huber, asking him to stop by her East Wing office on his way out. Carolyn, our longtime assistant in Arkansas, came to Washington to handle our personal correspondence and to organize, catalog and archive personal papers―everything from old school report cards to vacation photos to major speeches―that were now stored in hundreds of boxes throughout the residence and at a special White House storage facility in Maryland.

David often asked Carolyn to help locate documents requested by the independent counsel, and, throughout the previous months, she had turned over thousands of pages of records from our boxes and her files.

When he arrived at her office, she handed him a sheaf of papers. David quickly realized what they were: a 1992 computer printout detailing the legal work I and others had done at the Rose Law Firm for Madison Guaranty back in 1985-86. Although Madison Guaranty billing records were included in the Special Counsel’s subpoenas, the logical place to find them was in the records of the Rose Firm and Madison Guaranty. Their absence in our records did not surprise David or me, although we were anxious for them to appear, since I was certain they would support my recollection about what little legal work I had done. I was relieved that they had finally been found.

“Where on earth have they been?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” said David. “Carolyn was going through a box of papers in her office and came across them. As soon as she realized what they were, she sent me the note.”

“What does this mean?” I asked David.

“Well, the good news is we found them. The bad news is this gives the press and prosecutors the chance to go wild again.”

And they did.