A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Where Elders was merely incompetent, many other appointees surpassed Grant’s or Harding’s cabinet in their corruption or outright criminal behavior. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Henry Cisneros was forced to resign after a sexual harassment suit; associate attorney general Webster Hubbell was indicted in the Whitewater investigation; Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy was investigated for illicit connections to Arkansas-based Tyson Foods; and an independent prosecutor examined Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for illegal dealings with Indian tribes. Virtually all the investigations in some respect dealt with money, graft, and bribery, making a mockery of the Clinton campaign promise to appoint the “most ethical administration in history.” It was an ironic turn, given Clinton’s repeated claims that the Reagan era was a “decade of greed.” Only the investment banker Robert Rubin, who handled Treasury, seemed remotely suited to the task.

  At first, Clinton’s choices for these departments seemed to reflect only his lack of executive experience, but events soon unfolded that made the placement of key individuals look suspiciously like Nixon-esque attempts to stack the system at critical positions with people who would either bend or break the law on the Clintons’ behalf. Webster Hubbell and Vincent Foster, for example, who were law partners with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, were brought into the Justice Department, where they could effectively block or derail investigations into the administration. Attorney General Janet Reno had to defer to Associate Attorney General Hubble on many occasions. In a shocking break with tradition, Clinton, immediately upon taking office, fired all 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country, thereby nipping any federal investigations of him in the bud.

  FBI background checks on White House personnel were also curtailed, apparently for what they might reveal about the appointees. All this only reinforced the suspicion that a number of individuals of questionable character worked in the administration, but it also proved dangerous, facilitating the attendance at White House functions of criminals such as drug-runner Jorge Cabrera. Among the other guests at Clinton functions was Wang Jun, an arms dealer who supplied Los Angeles street gangs with automatic weapons; international fugitive Marc Rich; and a steady stream of foreigners whose visits were arranged by John Huang, an indicted Arkansas restaurateur. According to the foreign visitors, they were explicitly told that they could influence the government of the United States by Huang, who himself visited the White House more often than members of Clinton’s cabinet—always, he later testified, to arrange fund-raising with foreign nationals.

  Clinton’s disapproval numbers in public polls rose sharply, and surveys showed that people were increasingly convinced the government itself was getting out of hand. For the first time since before the New Deal, Americans started to become concerned about the dark side of programs deemed beneficial by the federal government.

  Sex, Lies, and Monicagate

  Whatever dissatisfaction the public had with government in general, nothing could hide the continued revelations about unethical and illegal activities by Clinton, his wife, or members of the cabinet. In particular, the Clintons’ involvement in the bankrupt Whitewater Development Company in Arkansas and its domino effect in bankrupting the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan forced a three-judge panel in 1994 to name an independent prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate the Clintons’ actions. No sooner had Fiske been appointed than the Clinton spin machine (the administration’s media managers) initiated a campaign that would typify the Clintons’ response to any charges. In 1994, a strategy of demonizing the messenger, which was first used on Fiske, would be finely honed for subsequent, and more effective, attacks on Fiske’s successor, Judge Kenneth Starr. Starr had an impeccable reputation, but he soon found himself under daily attack by Clinton associate James Carville, who announced he would start his own investigation of Starr!

  The special prosecutor’s job was to investigate conflict of interest charges against the Clintons related to the Whitewater Development Company in Arkansas and promoter James McDougal. McDougal also ran the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which had failed in 1989, but by 1993 evidence had surfaced that Madison funds had gone into Whitewater. Further evidence revealed that the Clintons received preferential treatment in the form of waived fees and had had their share of the down payment in the investments put up by McDougal or others. Billing records with Hillary’s name on them surfaced, indicating that she had done substantial work on Whitewater while at the Rose Law Firm, and thus knew exactly where the money had gone, even though she later told a Senate committee that while she had signed the sheets, she had not done the actual work.

  Yet the more one pulled on the Whitewater string, the more the fabric seemed to unravel. First there was “Travelgate,” in which Hillary dismissed the employees of the White House travel office (a nonpartisan group) in order to replace them with the travel firm of her friends (and high-powered Hollywood producers) Harry and Susan Thomason. Still, there had been no illegality. What turned a presidential preference into an ethical and legal violation was that Mrs. Clinton, to provide a public relations cover for firing so many loyal employees in such a callous fashion, ordered an FBI investigation of Billy Dale, head of the travel office. A midlevel civil servant who had done nothing but hold a job that Hillary had coveted for her friends, suddenly found himself having to secure lawyers to defend against charges of corruption. Dale was acquitted of all charges, but he was nearly bankrupted.

  There were too many improprieties in Travelgate to ignore, and the same three-judge panel that had appointed Starr empowered him to expand his probe into the travel office events. Then, in 1993, Vince Foster, a Rose Law Firm friend of Hillary’s who had worked with her at the White House, was found dead at Fort Marcy Park, an apparent suicide. Again, there were enough irregularities in the U.S. Park Police investigation (such as possible movement of the body) that the three-judge panel ordered Starr to add that to his list. By then, as Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos noted, “We had a team of lawyers, nicknamed the Masters of Disaster, whose sole job was to handle Whitewater and related inquiries.”35

  Despite the origins of this added tasking of Starr into separate, and apparently unrelated, cases by the three-judge panel, contemporary history textbooks continue to claim, “Starr moved aggressively to expand his inquiry…and seemed intent on securing an indictment against at least one of the Clintons.”36 Another textbook claimed, “Starr had been investigating the Whitewater matter for nearly four years without significant results,” somehow ignoring indictments and convictions against Webster Hubbell, Susan McDougal, and James McDougal.37 Starr was three for three before a young woman from Arkansas reacted to a story about Clinton that had appeared in The American Spectator magazine, one in which she was named as having been “procured” for Clinton by Arkansas state troopers. This forced the three-judge panel to put yet another investigation on Starr’s plate. While that scenario unfolded, however, dissatisfaction with Clinton’s policies—as opposed to allegations of corruption—led to another surprising change.

  The Contract with America

  Drawing upon the widespread unease with—and in some cases, outright fear about—the growing power and insulation of the federal government from the people who paid the taxes, the Republican Party under the leadership of Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia devised a radical strategy. For essentially sixty years (allowing for two brief interludes in 1946 to 1948 and 1954 to 1956), the Democrats had held the House of Representatives, employing Tip O’Neil’s maxim, “All politics is local.” Because of Democratic dominance of the House, bills introduced by Republicans to lower taxes, impose term limits, or enact a line-item veto were not even brought up for a vote. This tactic allowed House Democrats to stay off record, and to bring home the pork while decrying national budget deficits, or to claim to favor measures on which they never had to vote. Gingrich, sensing that the public was frustrated with the inability to change things in Washington, created a ten-point Contract with
America, which promised to bring to the House floor for a vote the following ten measures: (1) a balanced-budget law and a line-item veto to enforce it, (2) an anticrime package, (3) a welfare reform bill, (4) a family reinforcement act designed to increase adoptions and enforce child support laws, (5) an increased Pentagon budget and a prohibition on U.S. troops serving under United Nations control, (6) a product liability/legal reform bill and an end to unfunded federal mandates, (7) an increase in the senior-citizen Social Security tax limits, (8) a repeal of the “marriage tax” and a child tax credit, (9) a cut in capital gains taxes, and (10) a term limits bill. Overlaying all of these was an eleventh promise—reorganization of the House to ensure greater congressional accountability, which included opening committee meetings to the public, requiring that all laws that apply to the country also apply to Congress, cutting the number of committees and staff by one third, and requiring a three-fifths vote to pass any tax increase. The power of the Contract, however, was that Gingrich had managed to obtain the support of three hundred hopeful Republicans either in Congress or running for the House, demonstrating a virtual unanimity of purpose.

  By persuading so many Republicans to stand together on these ten issues, Gingrich effectively “nationalized” the local House races and made the 1994 election a national referendum on Bill Clinton’s presidency.38 When the votes were counted in October, the results stunned virtually all political pundits, especially the big-name analysts in the media. For the first time in forty years, the Republicans had captured both the House and Senate. Wresting the House from the Democrats, Republicans had defeated thirty-five incumbents, including Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House, befuddling newscasters trying to explain the political shift they had denied would happen. ABC anchor Peter Jennings likened the vote to a “temper tantrum” by the voters.

  For a temper tantrum, the voter response was surprisingly consistent and one-sided. In addition to the House and Senate gains, Republicans picked up eleven governorships. Although the media attempted to portray the election as a “reaction against incumbents,” it was telling that every single Republican incumbent—House, Senate, or statehouse—won reelection. Only Democrats were thrown out. In the wake of the debacle, still other Democrats in the House and at the local level switched parties in droves, with some five hundred joining the Republican Party nationally, the most prominent of whom was the newly elected U.S. senator from Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the first Native American senator.

  Clinton, already in political hot water, brought in one of his old political advisers, Dick Morris, to craft a new plan to keep his floundering presidency afloat. Morris concocted a strategy called triangulation.39 He reasoned that Clinton could portray the Republicans and his own party in Congress as obstructionists and claim to serve the greater good. This required a perceived move to the center. Morris urged Clinton to portray both Republicans and Democrats as squabbling children, who need his fatherly presence to serve the public. Consequently, in his first speech before the Republican-controlled Congress, Clinton said, “The era of big government is over” to wildly enthusiastic applause. But far from admitting defeat for his modernized New Deal-like programs, Clinton merely began a long series of deceptions designed to slow the Republican Revolution as much as possible, hoping Democrats would recapture the House and Senate in 1996.

  House Republicans moved with unusual rapidity. They made good on their contract, bringing up for a vote on the House floor nine of the ten items (only term limits failed to get to the floor, and even that was debated in committee—which had never happened before). Even more surprising, the House passed all nine, and the Senate brought to a floor vote six of them. The Supreme Court struck down term limits as unconstitutional before the Senate could act on it, and the line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional after Clinton had signed it into law.

  Among the legislation that passed both houses, a welfare reform bill dramatically curtailed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs, to the howls of protest from liberal groups, who prophesied that millions would be put on the streets. In fact, by the mid-1990s, welfare benefits at the state levels in New England had a generosity that rivaled that of socialist Sweden. Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island all had an after-tax value of welfare benefits (including food stamps, AFDC, public housing, Medicaid, and other subsidized services) that exceeded a $12-per-hour job. New York City’s rates had reached the astronomical level of $30,700 per year, or more than the starting salary of a computer scientist or secretary. Clinton promptly vetoed the bill, whereupon the House passed it a second time. Clinton vetoed it a second time, before Morris’s polling information told him that in fact the bill was quite popular. Finally, after at last signing welfare reform, Clinton claimed credit for it.

  In the end, Clinton signed three of the contract items—welfare reform, unfunded federal mandates, and a line-item veto—and Congress overrode his veto of the stockholder bill of rights. For the business-as-usual crowd in Washington, it was a stunning display of promises kept: 40 percent of the items that the GOP had promised only to bring to the floor for discussion actually became law.40 Clinton’s own polling and focus group data from Morris and Clinton’s pollster had confirmed he had to sign these pieces of legislation to maintain his triangulation.41

  House conservatives mistook their stunning, but narrow, election as an overwhelming mandate for change. Instead of taking small steps, then returning to the voters to ask their validation, Republicans advanced on a number of fronts, including launching investigations of Whitewater and conducting an emotional hearing on the Waco, Texas, disaster in April 1993. At Waco, a sect of the Seventh-Day Adventists church, the Branch Davidians under David Koresh, had holed up in a compound after agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) botched a raid based on scanty evidence and unsubstantiated claims of child abuse. Ignoring several opportunities to arrest Koresh outside the compound and avoid a firefight, the agents, bolstered by the Texas Rangers and National Guard troops, attacked, firing gas grenades inside the buildings. Fires broke out instantly, killing eighty-two men, women, and children. Questions as to how the fires started implicated both the Davidians and the government.

  Clinton claimed to have no knowledge of the operation, passing the buck to his attorney general, Janet Reno, who in turn did not take action against any of the FBI agents involved in improper and possibly illegal acts. Civil rights activists were outraged, and the GOP Congress, already concerned about the growing abuse of power by the IRS, BATF, and FBI, listened to witnesses from inside the compound describe attacks by a government tank that had smashed down the compound’s walls and sharpshooters who had peppered the Davidian complex. Democrats, desperate to protect Clinton and Reno from any political fallout, muddied the waters sufficiently so that no government agents were charged. But in 1997 an independent filmmaker produced Waco: The Rules of Engagement, which casts doubt on government explanations that the Davidians had set the fires.42

  Much of the support for congressional Republicans emanated from their curbing of federal power, especially in the law enforcement agencies. The 1992 shooting of Randy Weaver’s wife by FBI sharpshooters at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, combined with Waco and alarming reports of brutal behavior by agents of the EPA, led to a sense that the federal government was out of control and that individual agents had started to act, in the words of Democratic congressman John Conyers, like “jack-booted thugs.” Clinton was put on the defensive, and despite triangulation his poll numbers continued to fall. Then an explosion in Oklahoma City halted the congressional momentum while at the same time presenting Clinton with a golden opportunity to generate sympathy for the federal government.

  A disaffected and mentally unstable Gulf War veteran, Timothy McVeigh, and at least one accomplice, Terry Nichols, planned, positioned, and detonated a massive bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The blast killed 169 men, wome
n, and children—there was a day-care facility in the building—and constituted the worst terrorist attack up to that point in American history.

  President Clinton traveled to Oklahoma City and, according to one of his worst journalistic enemies, “handled the ceremony with consummate skill.”43 He also took the opportunity, in a national address, to blame conservative “talk radio” (meaning Limbaugh) for an “atmosphere of hate” that had produced, in his view, Tim McVeigh. The president used the disaster to shift public attention from the abusive actions of government to the crazed behavior of the bomber and the American militia movement, which had steadily gained members prior to April 1995. McVeigh later admitted responsibility for the bombing and placed himself fully in the antigovernment movement, claiming that he was seeking retribution for the devastation at Waco two years earlier.44 He had even attempted to time the explosion to coincide with the anniversary of the assault on the Branch Davidians. However, disturbing questions remain about the possibility of Middle Eastern terrorists in the bombing. Several sources, most recently Jayna Davis, have found links between the “third terrorist” (“John Doe #2”), Iraq, and possibly Al Qaeda.45

  In the wake of Oklahoma City, Clinton’s ratings rose from an anemic 42 percent to 51 percent, and he never really saw his popularity diminish again. But in his haste to lay the blame on antigovernment extremists, Clinton and the entire U.S. intelligence community missed several troubling clues that perhaps McVeigh and Nichols had not acted alone. Nichols, for example, was in the same part of the Philippines—and at the same time—as Al Qadea bomb maker Ramzi Yousef. Moreover, numerous witnesses testified that McVeigh and Nichols lacked sufficient bomb-making skills, but that their bomb was a near-perfect replica of the 1993 World Trade Center bomb devised by Yousef. Certainly their actions, in light of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and events overseas, were evidence that the United States was no longer safe from terrorism from any group inside our borders. McVeigh was sentenced to death in 1997. Four years later, when his appeals had run out, networks provided a grotesque minute-by-minute coverage of his final hours, further sensationalizing the most widely followed American execution since that of the Rosenbergs, and turning McVeigh’s lethal injection into a public spectacle.46