But over in the West Wing, White House chief of staff Mack McLarty and senior adviser Bruce Lindsey were besieged by reporters chasing new allegations on an old and ugly subject–Clinton’s alleged infidelities. The story broke in the January issue of The American Spectator, a free-swinging conservative monthly, and it went national that afternoon on CNN. Lindsey and McLarty slipped into the party to confer With Clinton and then cranked out a carefully worded statement that did nothing to contain the furor. “It never stops,” a White House aide complained later. “I spend my time chasing scurrilous rumors by a bunch of effing thugs … [and the press acts as if] the burden of proof is on the president to prove that these noncredible ass—-s are lying.”
The new charges came from two disgruntled Arkansas state troopers, Roger Perry and Larry Patterson, who had been members of Clinton’s security detail in Little Rock. Perry and Patterson told inter-viewers that they had repeatedly helped Governor Clinton conceal his amorous misadventures from the public and his wife, and another trooper said Clinton continued to see at least one of his reputed mistresses even after he was elected president. They said that some of linton’s allies had tried to squelch the story–and worse, that Clinton himself had tried to buy their silence by offering them federal jobs. In addition to Gennifer Flowers, the nightclub singer whose kiss-and-tell story almost destroyed the Clinton campaign in early 1992, the troopers identified six women in Little Rock as Clinton’s romantic partners. They said Clinton sometimes used his morning jogs to conceal trysts, that Hillary frequently used foul language and that the Clintons on at least one occasion seemed to have had a violent quarrel in the governor’s mansion. Before the 1992 campaign, Patterson said, he had twice watched Clinton having oral sex with a woman in a state car.
It was a tabloid writer’s dream. Amplified by the national news media, the story effectively destroyed the administration’s attempts to tout the achievements of Clinton’s first year in office. It also eclipsed polls showing that Clinton’s job-approval rating has rebounded to a respectable 58 percent. The White House seemed frozen in surly defensiveness, and at midweek, Hillary Rodham Clinton unleashed a bitter counterattack. “For me, it’s pretty sad that we’re still subjected to these kinds of attacks for political and financial gain from people, and it is sad that–especially here in the Christmas season–people for their own purposes would be attacking my family,” she said. “I find it not an accident that every time [Clinton] is on the verge of fulfilling his commitment to the American people … out comes yet another round of these outrageous, terrible stories.”
As he had during the campaign, when he never actually denied having affairs, Clinton remained mute on the subject of his alleged philandering. Since the White House maintained an equally dogged silence, that left reporters in Little Rock to chase down the six women, whose names were widely known. At the weekend, not one of the six would confirm the troopers’ stories, and one of them denied any kind of romantic involvement with Clinton either before the 1992 election or afterward. “There was no sex involved,” she told the New York Daily News. “The rumors are a lie.”
The more troubling question was whether Clinton or his aides had ever offered Perry or other members of the Little Rock security team federal jobs in exchange for their silence. If proven, such an offer would clearly be improper and might be a violation of state or federal law. Clinton and Bruce Lindsey emphatically denied it. “The allegations on abuse of the state or the federal positions I have–it’s not true,” Clinton said. “We have not done anything wrong.”
That seemed to cover it–especially after a third trooper, Danny Ferguson, swore in an affidavit that Clinton had never explicitly connected the offer of a federal job to a request for silence. This denial seemed curiously legalistic. In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Ferguson said Clinton asked if he was interested in a federal job. He also said Clinton discussed a possible job for Perry. Pressed by the Times reporters to state whether Clinton had expressly said jobs would be offered if the troopers kept silent, Ferguson responded only that Clinton “didn’t say those words.”
There are questions of credibility on both sides. Perry and Patterson seem to feel that Clinton abandoned them, and both have had difficulties in their careers and private lives. Among other problems, Perry and Patterson were involved in a 1990 accident while riding in Patterson’s state car, and both admitted they had been drinking. Perry was injured in the wreck and sued for $500,000; the insurance company declined to pay. Patterson was suspended from duty for five days for unauthorized use of a state vehicle and for driving after drinking, Patterson was transferred off the governor’s security staff earlier this year for health reasons. Perry was transferred to narcotics work last week.
They are now being represented by Cliff Jackson, a Little Rock lawyer who is one of Clinton’s bitterest enemies. During the 1992 campaign, Jackson compiled a dossier on Clinton’s attempts to evade the draft during the Vietnam War and distributed it to the news media. Clinton staffers regard Jackson as the troopers’ Svengali, but Jackson insists he has “no personal vendetta against Bill Clinton.”
White House officials say they are confident the sex stories will eventually fade away–but they are far less sanguine about another potential scandal, the so-called Whitewater case. Whitewater Development Corp. was an Arkansas real-estate venture organized by one of Clinton’s political allies in Little Rock, James McDougal. Bill and Hillary Clinton were partners with McDougal and his wife in Whitewater, which had dealings with a savings and loan that McDougal ran. That S&L, Madison Guaranty, failed in 1989, and McDougal was subsequently tried and acquitted on charges relating to the thrift’s collapse. The Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency that oversees savings and loan failures, has referred the Madison Guaranty case to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. NEWSWEEK has learned that the name Clinton appeared in one of the RTC’s criminal referrals, though this does not necessarily mean the Clintons are targets of an investigation.
It gets murkier. A file on the Clintons’ participation in Whitewater was removed from the office of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster after Foster’s mysterious suicide last July. This file may contain evidence pertinent to the Madison Guaranty investigation. After some delay, the White House announced last week that the file would be turned over to the justice Department–though it’s still not clear what officials are going to do with it. Meanwhile, the Madison case has become a cause celebre for Republicans. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, who was among the first in Congress to recognize the seriousness of the S&L crisis, is now pushing the reluctant chairman of the House Banking Committee, Rep. Henry Gonzalez of Texas, to investigate the Madison mess. Leach has also called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to examine every aspect of the case, including Foster’s suicide. No one can say at this point where any of this may lead–but given the seriousness of the unanswered questions, the Clintons may yet remember the Christmas sex scandal with a certain nostalgia.
In 1978, Bill Clinton and his wife joined Jim land Susan McDougal in a plan to develop land on the White River in Arkansas. The Clintons say McDougal handled the details and lost them $69,000–though no one can agree on why the company failed or how much it’s worth. In late 1992, when the Clintons sold out, Whitewater hadn’t filed taxes in three years.
Both Hillary and late deputy White House counsel Vince Foster were partners in the Rose law firm when it was retained by Madison. But it is Foster’s handling of the Clintons’ exit from Whitewater–and his suicide–that could make his Whitewater files valuable to the Feds. Clinton has ordered his lawyer to turn them over.
Jim McDougal left politics in 1981 to buy an anemic, smalltown savings and loan called Madison Guaranty, but he never turned his back on his political pals. As he turned Madison into an exemplar of a freewheeling S&L, his friend and former boss Bill Clinton counted on McDougal to use his connections to raise funds for Clinton’s campaigns. In 1984, McDougal gave Clinton money to help cover a $50,000 campaign debt. The Justice Department wants to know whether that money was partly diverted from depositor funds. Suspicious, too, is the apparent shell game McDougal played with accounts he controlled, shifting funds into Whitewater from corporations formed with Arkansas bigwigs, including current Gov. Jim Guy Tucker.
