Those darn FBI files. At least one other voice thinks they are key:
Wesley Pruden Washington Times
The insurance policy in those FBI files maybe the White House strategy for keeping Republican lips buttoned up is working. Maybe we ought not to judge nervous and timid Republicans so harshly for playing frightened pussycats.
George Stephanopoulos, the conservatives' favorite liberal, first put the strategy on the table.
"The White House is being a bit disingenuous," he said the other day on Sam and Cokie's Sunday-morning talk show. "When a real damaging charge comes out, someone speaking on background tries to answer it, which is another form of leak.
ÿÿÿÿÿ"There's a different long-term strategy [at the White House], which I think could be far more explosive. White House allies are already starting to whisper about what I'll call the Ellen Romesch strategy."
ÿÿÿÿÿMemories are short in Washington, where most correspondents and commentators think the world was created at 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon. But some of us remember Ellen Romesch. She was one of JFK's girlfriends, back in the days when everybody talked about the fun and games the pols play when the lights go dim at the end of the day, but nobody wrote about it.
ÿÿÿÿÿMiss Romesch was a yummy dish fit for a president. This is how we talked then, and the president from Hot Springs, being more small-d democratic than lace-curtain Irish presidents from Boston, has burnished his feminist credentials by broadening the field to include interns. Miss Romesch was also an East German spy. Just when a few brave Republicans were screwing up the courage to make something out of it, on the grounds that a president really shouldn't be taking off his clothes with a femme fatale from the Evil Empire, Bobby Kennedy, JFK's attorney general, sent J. Edgar Hoover to Capitol Hill with a not-so-friendly word to the wise. "Don't investigate this," he told the Republicans. "Because if you do, we're going to open up everybody's closets." J. Edgar Hoover, as every Republican knew, held the key to a lot of closets and was familiar with what was in all of them.
ÿÿÿÿÿMr. Stephanopoulos' remarks, whether intended or not, might have been a similarly effective sedative for Republicans who are tempted to state the obvious, that the president has a duty to say what he was doing in the Oval Office pantry with a young woman with a motor mouth and a wagging tongue. Doubts about the president's decency grow, and the Republicans on the Hill sleep on while puzzlement turns to anger in the outer precincts.
ÿÿÿÿÿThe corollary of the Stephanopoulos warning, if warning is what it was, is left unsaid. Nobody has to say it. Everyone on the Hill remembers those 600 raw FBI files, with enough unevaluated smarmy gossip, squalid innuendo, hyperheated hearsay, rank rumor and torrid tales to sink 535 careers. "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption," in the memorable formula of Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel of Huey Long. "He goes from the stink of the didy to the stench of the shroud."
ÿÿÿÿÿSince it's hard to keep the Clinton scandals straight, a little remedial history is in order: Craig Livingstone, a Georgetown bartender who parlayed his credentials as a campaign dirty-tricks artist to a job as director of White House security, was hired at the White House because Hillary thought he could perform useful tasks.
ÿÿÿÿÿWhat a wee world. He worked under George Stephanopoulous, who said of him at the time: "Livingstone does a terrific job ... and he knows how to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done."
ÿÿÿÿÿYou can think of Craig Livingstone and Tony Marceca, who took the files back to the White House, as Bill and Hillary's insurance men. These files may have been all the insurance the Clintons need now.
ÿÿÿÿÿTony Marceca's job was to rifle them for "derogatory information" and submit it to Craig Livingstone, who then ... well, no one is sure exactly what he did with it. Perhaps the first lady knows. Probably she won't say. And since neither Clinton ever tells a straight story, or even the same story twice, we're entitled to guess what she did with the stink and stench.
ÿÿÿÿÿ"The president said he would never resign," Mr. Stephanopoulos recalled, "and I think some around him are willing to take everybody down with him."
ÿÿÿÿÿTo believe that Bill Clinton, in addition to being philanderer, liar, deceiver and thief, is blackmailer as well requires the belief that Bill and Hillary, imbued with the patriot's dream that pelf and power trump selflessness and sacrifice, will save themselves by any means necessary. There are hard and saddened men (and women) in Washington this morning who believe exactly that. A lot of them are Republicans, cowering in the corner. |
