Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America
By Roger Morris
Holt, 526 pages, $27.50
At first blush, Roger Morris seems to be the ideal person to bring a measure of balance and good sense to the confused and contentious history of the current first couple. A Harvard-trained political scientist, he was a national security adviser to Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, resigning on principle after the invasion of Cambodia. His previous presidential biography, “Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician,” was nominated for the National Book Award and widely praised for Morris’ exhaustive research and remarkable sense of time and place, and the way they shaped his protagonist’s unusual character. The same cannot be said for his latest effort, “Partners in Power.” Morris doesn’t seem to like the Clintons much, and he has let his emotions run away with his pen. The result is a book that starts well, slowly turns bad and finishes so awfully that it fairly extinguishes the breath.
In November 1992, the nation awoke one morning after kicking George Bush out of the White House and realized it had elected the governor of Arkansas to the highest office in the land. The nation had only a vague idea who the governor of Arkansas was. It has yet to recover from the shock.
Now, Arkansas is not exactly an alien blot upon the fair face of Mr. Jefferson’s republican commonwealth, although it possesses some unique features–and provides Morris with some of his best chapters. In Arkansas, office holders and the politically well-connected engaged in the time-honored sports of goring each other’s oxen while battening at the public trough. In a sense, then, Arkansas was no different from any other American state in the last quarter of the 20th (or 19th) Century. Morris neglects to mention this far-from-trivial point. It is an omen of things to come.
True, it was not a commonplace event for the governor’s wife to be a hotshot lawyer with a high-profile local firm; that role was usually filled by the governor’s uncle or brother. That said, it still was not unusual for the governor’s wife’s law firm to be deeply and profitably entwined in the governor’s administration; it would have been unusual if it had not been.
Arkansas was a desperately poor state, dominated by a few extraordinarily wealthy families, most of them self-made. The wealthy families made it clear there were certain things the governor ought to do, certain things the governor shouldn’t do, and a whole lot of things the governor couldn’t do. There was a small, almost entirely white, middle class.
Arkansas was also the home of a large airport in a small town named Mena, a place that fascinates Roger Morris. Many stories have grown up around Mena, a few of them true, and Morris has swallowed them all. In fact, Mena was (and evidence suggests, still is) a guns-and-drugs transshipment point operated with the inexcusable connivance of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration–a subject that cries out for a book of its own. That book has yet to be written; when it comes to Mena, “Partners in Power” bears an eerie resemblance to a hysterical Jerry Falwell-sponsored video on the same subject. Morris, like Falwell, just can’t leave bad enough alone–and the real situation was bad enough. The local sheriff knew perfectly well what was going on at Mena. So did the local state trooper. So did the local Internal Revenue Service agent. They reported their findings to Little Rock. Gov. Clinton did nothing. Neither did anybody else.
Then, of course, there was Whitewater, a subject treated here at some length. Despite the longest Senate investigation in history, Whitewater is a tale of, at most, minor-league wrongdoing on the fringes of a national catastrophe called the savings-and-loan scandal. Whitewater is the story of a spectacularly collapsing, egregiously and possibly criminally mismanaged savings and loan that happened to have a prominent politician and his wife in the immediate vicinity. Not for the first time, the Clintons had chosen their Arkansas friends neither wisely nor well, although whether they had actually committed acts of wrongdoing is a question on which the jury is still out.
Morris, however, believes he has found the answer. One of his principal sources is David Hale, a convicted felon with a clear interest in reducing his sentence and a man who is also a confessed liar. The others are James McDougal and his ex-wife, Susan, a couple with their own clear interest in avoiding jail by proving that their partners in a penny-ante land deal, the Clintons, were in reality criminal masterminds. Nowhere does Morris point out these interesting facts; instead he prints, as facts, the Hale and McDougal allegations.
By adding a little essential context to his mix, Morris would not have exonerated the Clintons–far from it–but he might have done something to explain them. But by this point in the book, Morris is far too involved in going for the presidential throat to explain much of anything. Instead, and amazingly, he reverses the old excuse that, heck, everybody did it, and instead creates a world in which only the Clintons did. It is as though Arkansas were sui generis, a kind of Dogpatch inhabited by the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, with Clinton and his wife as the ringleader and his moll.
It was not ever thus. Morris’ early chapters on young Bill Clinton’s almost hyperbolically dysfunctional family and Hillary Rodham’s Goldwater-suburban girlhood are something of a twice-told tale, but the tale has never been told so comprehensively or so well. (Still, one does wonder about his printing almost the entire text of Rodham’s commencement address at Wellesley, a document of marginal interest. And Morris’ speculations about Clinton’s involvement in a CIA operation to monitor anti-war heresies in American students abroad are interesting but go nowhere.) Unfortunately, the wicket becomes more than a little sticky when he turns to the Little Rock years.
Morris is commendably thorough in his description of Clinton’s unfocused gubernatorial journey, while becoming somewhat unfocused himself on the subject of Mrs. Clinton’s legal career. Depending on your taste, it is possible that Morris tells more than you want to know about Clinton’s bimbo eruptions; he also begins to place too much trust in his sources (a problem that grows with each page), and he fails to remind the reader that the possession of a harem has long been one of the optional perks of high office. His accounts of Whitewater and Mrs. Clinton’s commodities trades are admirably complete as far as they go, but Morris has failed to shave himself with Occam’s razor.
He concludes that the Clintons were a pair of rascals. Perhaps so, but based on the evidence currently available it is equally possible that they were as dumb as smart people sometimes become when confronted with a get-rich-quick scheme. Moreover, it is possible that they were set up–a line of enquiry that Morris does not explore. But the wheels really begin to fall off his wagon when Morris turns to Clinton’s supposed fondness for cocaine and marijuana.
If you hang around Little Rock long enough, you hear a lot about Clinton and white powder. It is a matter of record that Clinton’s brother had a big problem with the stuff, as did one of Clinton’s other strange friends, a bond dealer named Dan Lasater. It is similarly a matter of record that Clinton was a visitor to Lasater’s coke-bedusted house and a passenger on his coke-bedusted airplane. In Little Rock, people will tell you that they were there when the governor was puffing and snorting, but there’s a catch: None of them will allow their names to be used.
Plowing ahead with reckless abandon, Morris reports their anonymous accusations as fact. Perhaps as many as a dozen reporters could do the same, but none of them have. There is a reason. When it comes to something as potentially devastating as this, to allow a bunch of people whose motives are unknown to stand behind a tree and shoot someone–whether prince or pauper–in the back is a gross violation of professional ethics. Morris does it anyway. It is as though talk radio were writing history.
Morris interleaves his Little Rock chapters with chapters loudly deploring the pernicious influence of corporate money on Capitol Hill and in the Washington press corps during the last quarter of the 20th Century, something that clearly upsets him. In one sense, this is all to the good; the money interest needs to be beaten up from time to time as a matter of principle. But, again, the Morris version lacks the sense of context that is the soul of good reporting; the influence of capital on the Capitol is an old American story. This section also lacks nuance, and it comes off as an intemperate screed in a book going rapidly out of control. The worst is yet to come.
Morris wraps up his tale with an account of the supposed penetration of the Mena guns-and-drugs operation into the highest reaches of the Clinton circle–an accusation that, if true, would be enough to destroy a presidency. Mena is a place of many rumors; rumors are not facts. Morris leans heavily on a book, “Compromised,” by Terry Reed and John Cummings, that has a number of large holes in it. Reed is an author with a personal agenda–to win a lawsuit–and a rather large cloud over his veracity. It is book that postulates, as they used to say, a conspiracy so vast. . . . No responsible reporter has ever been able to find such a conspiracy. Morris buys the whole package.
There is something about the Clintons–or maybe it is something about America, as it has come to be–that makes otherwise-reasonable people say and write the most astounding things. “Partners in Power,” so well begun, so increasingly strange as it runs its course, is a sad child of its times.
