They refuse to turn the page.
The right-wing conspiracy, or whatever you call the conservative network out to bring down Bill Clinton, just won’t call it quits. Opinion polls say the American people are fed up with their twisted crusade, and even the Republican-dominated Senate has refused, by a wide margin, to cashier the president on lied-about-sex charges.
Still, the Clinton-haters will not give up.
Two weeks ago they opened yet another line of attack, this time using their favorite sounding board: The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Frustrated that reputable news outlets (including the Journal’s own news desk) had failed to trumpet an Arkansas woman’s 21-year-old “Clinton raped me” story, the newspaper’s editorial board dispatched one of its own to Arkansas to get the media ball rolling. On Feb. 19 the highly questionable story of Mrs. Juanita Broaddrick debuted on the Journal’s commentary page, whereupon other major media felt compelled to repeat it in their news columns.
Never mind that the woman had previously denied her rape allegation under oath. Never mind that she participated in a Clinton fundraiser three weeks after the assault supposedly took place. Never mind that Clinton-haters in Arkansas have, for two decades, been goading Mrs. Broaddrick to “go public.”
The haters will not let go. And so, reluctantly, must the rest of us return to the barricades.
So instead of writing about Mayor Richard Daley’s electoral mandate, or some other forward-looking topic, I offer today another example of hypocrisy and double-dealing by the Clinton-haters. Chances are you haven’t heard about this one.
It’s about Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), a private detective named Ernie Rizzo and a talk-radio host named Nancy Skinner.
Hyde, you may recall, was once involved in a savings-and-loan debacle that cost the government more money than Madison Guaranty, the Arkansas savings bank at the center of the initial Whitewater investigation. (Remember Whitewater?) In the early 1980s Hyde was a board member of Clyde Federal Savings and Loan Association, a west Cook County thrift whose bad loans ended up costing the federal deposit insurance program more than $67 million.
Throughout the scandal Hyde insisted he had little influence over loanmaking and later he flatly refused to pay his share of the $850,000 fine levied against Clyde directors for gross negligence.
This did not sit well with a public-interest researcher named Timothy Anderson, who had been tracing the involvement of Hyde and other members of the Illinois delegation in the savings-and-loan scandal. Anderson thought he smelled a rat. During the late 1980s and early 1990s he kept pestering federal regulators with requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act and kept bird-dogging the Hyde/Clyde case as it worked its way through federal district court.
Uncertain where Anderson was headed or why, a wary Henry Hyde hired Ernie Rizzo, a private eye, to find out what Anderson was up to and what kind of information he possessed. Rizzo approached Anderson by telling him he was a television producer working on an investigative story. Anderson wasn’t having much luck getting the Chicago media to look at the Hyde/Clyde connection, so he spilled his guts to Rizzo and handed over 388 pages of documentation. Rizzo reported his findings back to Hyde and Hyde’s lawyer.
Last year, when the Rizzo mission came to light, the congressman denied to Tribune reporters that he had hired a private eye, claiming a “mutual friend” did it as an unsolicited favor. Later he changed his story after the House Ethics Committee was asked to look into the episode.
None of this got much publicity late last year in the heat of the Kenneth Starr/Henry Hyde crusade to impeach Bill Clinton.
Then toward the end of January I got a call from Nancy Skinner, the WLS-AM talk-radio host. She had read a column I wrote last year about Hyde and Clyde and wanted to know how she could get more information. It turned out she had booked Ernie Rizzo for her Jan. 30 show. She was fascinated that the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee–the man who was out to impeach the president for lapses of honesty–had hired a private eye to investigate a private citizen, and that the shamus had misrepresented himself as a journalist to get the information Hyde wanted.
Nancy Skinner had all sorts of questions for Ernie Rizzo. But she never got to ask them.
The night before Rizzo was to appear on the show, the law offices of Edward R. Vrdolyak (Yes, that Eddie Vrdolyak, the ex-alderman turned GOP mouthpiece) faxed notices to Skinner’s home and office saying that “under the advice of counsel, Ernie Rizzo will not be participating in your radio show” since to do so “may violate the confidentiality between Rizzo and his client.”
“It was my own little midnight knock on the door,” Skinner later said. “How can the congressman ask us to `cleanse’ the office of the presidency when he won’t allow the sun to shine on his own shadows?”
It beats me, Nancy.
But I sure wish the Clinton-haters would give it up so we could all move on to other things.
