Living History (57 page)

This time Tucker and the McDougals were charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, mail fraud, misapplication of S&L funds and making false entries in S&L records. Most of the accusations against them could be traced to David Hale, a shady Arkansas Republican businessman. The indictment alleged that Hale had connived with Jim McDougal to get loans from Madison Guaranty and from the Small Business Administration for various projects, including for land deals or for companies of Hale, the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker; that these loans were not repaid; and that the uses of and justifications for the loans were falsely described. The twenty-one-count indictment made no mention of Whitewater Development Co., Inc., the President or me.

Hale was an accomplished thief and a con artist-and he was motivated. He was cooperating with Starr in the hopes of avoiding a long prison sentence for his previous crimes.

The Small Business Administration, which had lent Hale’s company millions of dollars intended to benefit small businesses and low-income people, reported that it had lost $3.4

million due to Hale’s improper activities, self-dealing and prohibited transactions. The SBA finally placed his company in receivership, and in 1994, Hale pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the SBA of $900,000, but his sentencing was postponed until just before the McDougal/Tucker trial two years later. His story had changed greatly over time, and he was eager to provide whatever testimony the prosecutors wanted. The defense lawyers argued hard to convince the judge to admit testimony about Hale’s connections with rightwing activists, financial payments from the OIC, his more than forty phone calls with justice Jim Johnson before and since his deal with Starr, and the free legal counsel he received from attorney Ted Olson, an old friend of Kenneth Starr and a lawyer for the Arkansas Project and for the American Spectator, the rightwing propaganda publication.

Olson would later mislead the Senate Judiciary Committee about his involvement in these activities during the consideration of his nomination to become Solicitor General under President George W Bush. Despite his evasiveness, he was confirmed.

Although the presiding judge at the McDougal-Tucker trial wouldn’t admit evidence of most of Hale’s lucrative connections into court records and the full story would not come out for years, details of the secret Arkansas Project began to be aired in public for the first time. Hale was a well-paid pawn in a furtive campaign designed to discredit Bill and bring down his administration. Not only was Hale paid at least $56,000 in cash by the OIC after he agreed to testify, Hale was also secretly paid by the Arkansas Project. Journalist David Brock later disclosed that Hale was paid from the “educational” slush fund at the American Spectator financed by Richard Mellon Scaife. Brock later wrote, “At its inception … the Arkansas Project was a means of providing covert support for Hale to implicate Clinton in a crime.”

When Judge Henry Woods was shown evidence of the group’s complicity in the smear campaign against him, he demanded a federal investigation of the Arkansas Project.

The federal judges of his district―who had been appointed by both Democrats and Republicans―unanimously joined in this demand. But no investigation of Judge Woods’s charges ever took place. Judge Woods took senior status in 1995 and died in 2002. He was one among many good people tarred by Starr’s partisan brush.

After the OIC had finished presenting its case, which relied heavily on Hale’s testimony, Jim McDougal, increasingly erratic, insisted on testifying in his own defense.

Many observers felt that his testimony seriously damaged the defense case for all three defendants. The prosecutors were able to convict the three on several felony counts. Tucker resigned as Governor while pursuing his appeals. And Kenneth Starr turned up the pressure on Jim and Susan McDougal to produce incriminating evidence that didn’t exist.

As the convoluted facts of Whitewater finally started coming out in court, I could feel a subtle change in the atmospheric pressure in Washington. On Capitol Hill, Senator D’Amato stopped his Whitewater hearings when the Democrats threatened a filibuster to block his funding. For the first time in years, I was beginning to hope that we could put Whitewater behind us.

Yet despite these hopeful moments, the spring of 1996 was not destined to be a time of celebration. On April 3, an Air Force T-43 jet carrying the Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, his staff and a delegation of American business leaders crashed into a hillside along the coast of Croatia in a violent rainstorm. Ron had gone to the Balkans to promote investment and trade as part of the administration’s long-term strategy for peace in that troubled region. This was typical of Ron’s approach in the Cabinet. He instinctively understood that promoting global economic opportunity was good for America’s strategic interests and good for American business. Ron and thirty-two other Americans and two Croatians died in the crash.

I was devastated. Ron and his wife, Alma, were dear friends. They had been among our staunchest allies since the 1992 campaign, when Ron served effectively as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ron had guided the party through the ups and downs of that campaign with aplomb and good humor. Even when Bill’s prospects dimmed in the face of relentless attacks, Ron never faltered. He believed Bill could and would win if Democrats persevered. And he was right. Ron was also great fun. With a smile on his face and a perpetual twinkle in his eyes, he could cheer up anyone, and I was his beneficiary time and again. “Don’t let the whiners get you down,” he’d remind me.

Upon hearing the news, Bill and I went to see Alma and Ron’s children, Michael and Tracey. Their house, full of family and friends, felt like the site of a revival meeting as we all laughed and cried and told stories about Ron. I later learned that Ron’s plane was the same aircraft―and had been staffed by some of the same crew―that had flown Chelsea and me only a week earlier, on that resplendent clear afternoon over Turkey.

Bill and I met the U.S. Air Force plane carrying thirty-three flagdraped caskets at Dover Air Base in Dover, Delaware. Among the victims was Lawry Payne, a smart and enterprising man who advanced some of my trips, and Adam Darling, a twenty-nineyear-old Commerce Department staffer who had become a favorite of Bill’s and mine after he volunteered to ride his bicycle across the country in support of Bill’s 1992 campaign.

In his brief remarks on the tarmac, Bill reminded us that the crash victims who died in the service of their country represented the best America had to offer.

“The sun is going down on this day,” he said as I blinked back tears. “The next time it rises it will be Easter morning, a day that marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption, a day that more than any other reminds us that life is more than what we know … sometimes even more than what we can bear. But life is also eternal … What they did while the sun was out will last with us forever.”

When I ventured for the first time to Central and Eastern Europe over the Fourth of July in the summer of 1996, infant democracies had replaced communism in the former Soviet-bloc countries. Hundreds of millions of people had been liberated from lives of tyranny behind the Iron Curtain, but as I was to see for myself, embracing democratic values is just the first step. Building functioning democratic governments, creating free markets and establishing civil societies after decades of dictatorship requires time, effort and patience as well as financial aid and investment, technical training and moral support from countries like ours.

As part of his foreign policy agenda, Bill supported the expansion of NATO eastward from the Atlantic to include countries of the former Warsaw Pact. He believed this was essential to strengthening America’s long-term relationships with Europe and to further European integration. There was significant opposition to NATO expansion from within the United States and Russia, which did not want to see NATO at its own borders. The challenge for Bill and his team was to determine which countries were already eligible for NATO membership and to keep the door open for other Central and Eastern European nations that aspired to future NATO status by reassuring them of America’s continuing support. I was asked to represent Bill in a region he thought needed U.S. encouragement and a show of solidarity.

For part of the trip I teamed up with our United Nations Ambassador and later Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, whose family had first fled Nazism in her native Czechoslovakia only to return after the war and flee again when communism took over.

They eventually settled in the United States. Madeleine was herself an emblem of the opportunities and promise that democracy represents.

My trip began in Bucharest, Romania, once among the most beautiful capitals in Europe. Bucharest had been compared to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century but had lost much of its elegance and luster during forty years of Communist rule. I could see remnants of an earlier cosmopolitan era in the neglected fin de siècle buildings along broad boulevards once lively with cafés. Now the dominant architecture was Soviet-style Socialist realism, visible even in the empty carcasses of giant buildings that were never completed.

No one could possibly quantify the horrors suffered in Romania before the violent downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Communist dictator who, along with his wife, terrorized the nation for years until he was ousted and executed on December 25, 1989. My first stop was the Square of the Revolution, where I placed flowers at the monument honoring victims of the uprising that finally toppled the Ceausescus. I met with representatives of the December 21 Association, named for the first day of the uprising, who described the history of their revolution. A crowd of three thousand Romanians had gathered to greet me in the city’s main square, a lovely setting marred by the bullet holes in the walls of adjacent buildings. I was surprised by the packs of wild dogs roaming the streetssomething I hadn’t seen in any other city―and I asked our guide about them. “They’re everywhere,” he told me. “People can’t afford to keep them as pets, and there’s no system for rounding them up.” The dogs proved to be an omen of far greater neglect in Romania.

Among the horrific legacies of the Communist regime was a swelling population of children with AIDS. Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortion, insisting that women bear children for the sake of the state. Women told me how they had been carted from their workplaces once a month to be examined by government doctors whose task was to make sure that they weren’t using contraceptives or aborting pregnancies. A woman identified as pregnant was watched until she delivered her baby. I could not imagine a more humiliating experience: lines of women undressing as they waited for medical bureaucrats to examine them under the watchful eyes of police. When I defend my prochoice position in the debate over abortion in our country, I frequently refer to Romania, where pregnancy could be monitored on behalf of the state, and to China, where it could be forcibly terminated. One reason I continue to oppose efforts to criminalize abortion is that I do not believe any government should have the power to dictate, through law or police action, a woman’s most personal decisions. In Romania as elsewhere, many children were born unwanted or into families that could not afford to care for them. They became wards of the state, warehoused in orphanages. Often sick or malnourished, they were treated with blood transfusions, which Ceausescu promoted as government policy. When the Romanian blood supply became tainted with the AIDS virus, the country had a pediatric AIDS catastrophe. At an orphanage in Bucharest, my staffers and I witnessed children, some covered with tumors, others visibly perishing, as AIDS ravaged their small frames. While some of my staff retreated to a corner of the building, sobbing, I steeled myself against tears, knowing that if I lost my composure, it would only confirm the hopeless situation borne by these children and by the adults who cared for them.

The new Romanian government worked tirelessly with the help of foreign assistance to improve the children’s care and to permit more adoptions by families outside the country.

Yet the adoption system was plagued with corruption. Charges that children were being sold to the highest bidder resulted in a ban on international adoption in 2001 after the European Union criticized Romania’s practices. Work is still needed to clean up the corruption and modernize the child welfare system, but since my visit, Romania, which has made impressive progress against heavy odds, has become a member-elect of both NATO and the European Union.

Poland had already made impressive economic and political progress by 1996. President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke excellent English and had traveled throughout the United States before entering politics as a member of the Polish Communist Party. Taking office in 1995 at the age of 41, he represented a generational contrast to Poland’s first democratically elected President, Lech Walesa, the heroic leader of the Solidarity labor union strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdarisk in 1980. Solidarity was instrumental in toppling communism in Poland, and Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, had been President during the first visit Bill and I made to Warsaw in 1994. At the state dinner he hosted for us with his wife, Danuta, a lively argument broke out between the Walesas, who defended the fast pace of economic changes, and a representative of farmers, who argued for slower change and greater economic protection. Many of Poland’s hard economic decisions, inevitable in a shift from a state-run economy to a free market, were made on Walesa’s watch. His party lost the next election in 1995, and he was replaced by Kwasniewski, who successfully broadened his party’s post-Communist base to include young people.

Jolanta Kwasniewska, the new president’s wife, joined me in Krakow, where Gothic towers and gray spires grace one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval cities. She and I are mothers of only daughters, and that made for animated discussions about the perils and pleasures of raising them. Together we visited two intellectuals the Communists had labeled “dissidents”―Jerzy Turowicz and Czeslaw Milosz. Turowicz had published a Catholic weekly for fifty years despite constant pressure from the Communist Polish authorities to shut it down. Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 for a body of work that included The Seizure of power and The Captive Mind, had advocated for free thought and free speech throughout the Communist era. These two extraordinary men, whose courage and conviction sustained like-minded dissidents around the world for decades, seemed almost wistful for the moral clarity of their fight against communism.