THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

Written and Compiled by Black Max

1992

• General Colin Powell is quoted in Richard Haass's 1994 book Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World as saying,

  Gulf War

  "The Gulf War was a limited-objective war. If it had not been, we would be ruling Baghdad today -- an unpardonable expense in terms of money, lives lost and ruined regional relationships.... Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do." (Richard Haass/Buzzflash)
• The Bush Administration launches a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China.

  Bush's foreign policies

  During the investigation, it is discovered that Paul Wolfowitz, as Undersecretary for Policy under Dick Cheney, has promoted the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the US on arms re-sales, cancels the proposed deal. Douglas Feith writes in Commentary magazine, "It is in the interest of US and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby." (Counterpunch/Daily Kos)
• The first

  George W. Bush and Harken Oil

  of Harken's oil wells in Bahrain comes up dry. George W. Bush takes a leave of absence from the firm to work on his father's election campaign, saying, "I don't want to involve this company in any kind of allegations of conflicts or whatever may arise." (Bushwatch)
• Enron's Kenneth Lay touts George Bush as "the energy president," crediting him with the passage of the Energy Act of 1992

  Oil profiteering and the "oiligarchy"

  that mandated the deregulation of energy at the wholesale level, obliged utilities to carry privately marketed electricity like Enron's on their wires, gave Enron the opportunity to manipulate the California energy market to such disastrous effect for the state and for tremendous profits for the corporation, and made Enron's skyrocketing growth during the 1990s possible. Lay, now a major Bush campaign donor, is named co-chair of the Bush re-election committee, and chairman of that summer's Republican National Convention. Enron itself contributes $250,000 to Bush's campaign. After the loss to Bill Clinton, Enron and Lay will work with the outgoing president to obtain a ruling from the Commodity Futures Trading Committee (CFTC) that defined energy derivative contracts and interest rate swaps, two prime trading vehicles, that would exempt them from CFTC oversight. The CFTC's five-member commission has two seats temporarily vacant, so chairwoman Wendy Gramm, wife of Texas Republican Phil Gramm, who has his own close ties to Enron, cut short the usual year-long examination of Enron's request, and rams the decision through the commission before incoming president Clinton can name two more commission members. On January 14, 2003, the CFTC will vote 2-1 to grant Enron's request. Gramm resigns from the CFTC a week later, and by February 2001 will be named to Enron's board of directors. Between 1993 and 2001 Gramm will make over a million dollars from her directorship. Phillips writes, "In a nutshell -- a fat, rich nutshell -- the CFTC ruling allowed Enron to set up its own, unfettered in-house derivatives exchange without being regulated like a Wall Street firm or complying with the requirements of the New York Mercantile Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade. This side of Enron's business quickly expanded, rising 30% in 1993 and ballooning by the decade's end." (Kevin Phillips)
• Dick Cheney, Reagan's Secretary of Defense, assigns Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root the task of conducting a major classified survey detailing how private corporations such as itself could provide logistics for US military forces scattered around the world.

  Halliburton

  The company, now renamed Kellogg, Brown & Root, lands a contract this same year from the US Army to provide logistical support for troops in Somalia, Zaire, Haiti, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia. Cheney will become Halliburton's CEO in 1995, and the company's contracts with the US Army soared, despite a 2002 statement from the company that Cheney had "steadfastly refused" to market Halliburton and KBR services to the US Army during his five-year tenure as CEO. Cheney's former Defense Department chief of staff, David Gribbin, will follow him to Halliburton, where, as an executive vice-president, he handles the Army contracts as well as Ex-Im loans and OPIC lobbying. When Cheney and Gribbin leave the company in 2000, Gribbin is replaced by Joseph Lopez, who had served as Cheney's military aide to the Pentagon. By 2000, Halliburton's oil-related work will fall to around 70% of its business, but its military-connected business ventures steadily expand. Under Cheney, Halliburton will expand its oil development interests in Algeria, Russia, Angola, Mexico, and Bangladesh. One of those contracts, to develop the Siberial oil fields owned by Russia's Tyumen Oil Company, later becomes a significant source of controversy. Under the new Bush administration, KBR will become the recipient of an unusual number of foreign military contracts, including one from Russia to eliminate liquid-fueled ICBMs and their silos, and a British contract to support a fleet of large new tank transporters. (Kevin Phillips)
• GOP consultant Karen Hughes becomes the executive director for the Texas Republican Party.

  GOP campaign strategies

  She was recruited in part to lead the opposition of popular Democratic governor Ann Richards, who had won handily in 1990 over the GOP's misogynist candidate Clayton Williams. Hughes is brought in specifically to win over the women's vote for the GOP. With fellow consultant Karl Rove, the new strategy is quite successful -- by 2004, the Texas GOP will dominate state politics, and a Texas Republican is president. (Laura Flanders)
• One of Clinton's most implacable foes in Arkansas is former state supreme court "Justice" Jim Johnson.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  A courtly public figure, Johnson is a virulent and unapologetic white supremacist who views Clinton as an upstart "n*gger-lover" unfit to represent his America. Clinton represents everything he hates about what some call the "New South," with its integrated schools, civil rights for blacks, and equal treatment for women. In his political campaigns, he routinely refuses to shake the hands of black voters, and decries integration as a Communist plot, "worse than rape or murder."
• Clinton earns Johnson's ire in 1966, when, appalled by the possibility of "Justice Jim" winning the governorship, rushes back home from his collegiate studies at Georgetown to work for Johnson's Democratic opponent, Frank Holt. Clinton travels the state with the Holt campaign and is shocked at what he finds. "Now we are campaigning in the heart of cotton country, south and east Arkansas, where Negroes are still n*ggers," he writes to a girlfriend. "And I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw restrooms and waiting rooms still marked in Colored and White. It made me sick to my stomach." Clinton is horrified when Johnson ekes out a narrow primary victory against Holt; like most moderate Democrats, he shifts his allegiance to Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who is attacked by the Johnson campaign as an advocate of "race mixing," a "prissy sissy" who engages in drunken sex with black men. (Rockefeller's drinking is well documented; the rest is fabrication.) Johnson wins the endorsement of Arkansas's Ku Klux Klan, appearing at a Klan rally with a flaming cross. "The Klan has come out for Lurleen Wallace [in Alabama], Lester Maddox [in Georgia], and Jim Johnson," announces a Klan leader, "and we're electing them one by one." Rockefeller, with support from moderate Democrats and black voters, defeats Johnson; the Arkansas Gazette hails Arkansas voters for rejecting "the vacuous demagoguery that Mr. Johnson brought in his campaign, with all the name-calling, innuendo, distortions, and appeals to fear. They have spurned the smear literature and character vilification."
• In 1968, Johnson runs again, this time against Democratic opponent William Fulbright, the US senator who is Clinton's political mentor. Johnson runs as an ally of populist, white supremacist George Wallace, who is running for president as a third-party candidate. Predictably, Johnson attacks Fulbright, calling him "the pinup boy for Hanoi" over his opposition to the Vietnam War. Johnson meets Clinton for the first time during the campaign, when Clinton confronts Johnson after a particularly hateful campaign rant, telling him, "You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas." Years later, Johnson would return the favor, voicing his regret that Arkansas had produced "a president of the United States who is a queer-mongering, whore-hopping adulterer; a baby-killing, draft-dodging, dope-tolerating, lying, two-faced treasonist activist." Fulbright defeats Johnson in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, marking the end of Johnson's pursuit of public office. Johnson is outraged that Arkansas's Democratic Party has purged itself of the majority of its white supremacists (most of which fled to the Republican-led religious right), and is now led by moderate civil rights advocates like Fulbright, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, and Clinton, who is considered the Arkansas Democrat's biggest rising star. Because Clinton beat one Republican after another for the governorship between 1978 and 1990, he becomes the particular focus of Johnson's and his cohorts' resentment. Johnson is infuriated when, in Clinton's final term, Clinton successfuly enacts an amendment that purges the state constitution of its last vestiges of statutory racism. Johnson's vindictive hatred of Clinton will result in his sponsorship of the Arkansas-based efforts to destroy Clinton's character and, ultimately, his presidency.
• One of Johnson's political proteges is Floyd Brown, the GOP consultant responsible for the 1988 Willie Horton ad that played on racial fears to help defeat Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Brown, who joined the ultraconservative Young Americans for Freedom in college and the chairman of Bob Dole's Midwestern presidential campaign in 1988, brings along fellow conservative activist David Bossie, who works as "chief investigator" for Brown's political organization, Citizens United.
• Brown comes to Arkansas intending to make a Willie Horton-type ad featuring Gennifer Flowers's taped allegations of their sexual liasons. Brown would set up a 1-900 number where callers could pay to hear excerpts from the tapes. In addition, Brown intends on writing a quickie paperback, to be titled Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton. He stops first at "White Haven," the antebellum mansion of Jim Johnson. Soon Brown is immersed in the stew of rumors, innuendos, and lies surrounding Clinton's personal and political life, guided by Johnson; he makes Sheffield Nelson's Little Rock law offices his informal headquarters. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

Early 1992

• Early 1992: Larry Nichols, a former Arkansas state employee fired for criminal misconduct and a longtime Clinton enemy, plans to derail the Clinton presidential campaign by releasing information about brother Roger Clinton's 1985 drug case.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Nichols and then-partner Larry Case, a flamboyant private investigator with a penchant for surreptitiously taping his conversations with others, obtained surveillance videos from friendly state troopers (parts of which had been broadcast on local television years before). Nichols and Case cultivated relationships with producers and reporters for the tabloids the Star and the National Enquirer, and the television shows Hard Copy and A Current Affair. The two men promise these shows video footage of Bill Clinton sitting next to a bowl of cocaine at a party thrown by Little Rock financier Dan Lasater, who himself had served time for drug possession. Case estimates the worth of the videotapes at a million dollars. The two spend time interviewing women who are willing, for a price, to accuse Clinton of sexual impropriety. These interviews are the source of the baseless rumors surrounding Hillary Clinton's supposed frigidity and the now-infamous "distinguishing characteristics" of Clinton's penis, in particular a strategically placed mole along with (to Nichols's and Case's amusement) stories of Clinton's supposed size deficiency. (None of these stories survive the most cursory investigation.) Clinton secretary Betsey Wright calls the entire fracas a "bimbo explosion," a term gleefully picked up by the media in later years.
• One of the most fruitful relationships is between Nichols and Case and Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel, who apparently has his own ideological axe to grind with Clinton. Wright says later of Rempel and other journalists, "I had never known that there were reporters whose full-time mission in life was destroying people." At the time, Rempel seems perfectly comfortable with abandoning the ethics of his profession to exchange tips with a private detective trying to dig up salacious information for personal profit, though Rempel later insists that he was "duped" by Case into sharing allegations against Clinton. Rempel later says, dishonestly, that nothing he was told by Case ever influenced the Los Angeles Times's coverage of Clinton. Rempel's own tips send Case off to try to exhort a woman, Michelle Purdom, in Oklahoma City to discuss her supposed affair with Clinton on film. Her story is improbable at best: according to her, Clinton and an entourage of troopers slipped out of Little Rock 40 or 50 times over a two-year period to meet for sex at a Oklahoma City hotel, and came back to Little Rock without anyone the wiser. (State law requires the governor to inform the lieutenant governor any time he leaves the state.) Purdom says that both the Times and the National Enquirer have urged her to go public with her tale, and says that the Enquuirer has offered her $75,000 for her story and twice that if she can corroborate her allegations.
• However, the source that tipped Rempel to Purdom says that another woman, not Purdom, is actually Clinton's paramour: a woman named Louwanda Faye Mason who now lives in southern California. Mason is said to have a nude photograph of Clinton clearly showing the "distinguishing characteristic," a photo Case desperately wants. Purdom tells Case a myriad of conflicting details, including the various names she might have used, and at times saying Clinton paid her up to $30,000 for sex and at others that theirs was an affair of the heart. Mason is far more straightforward when contacted: she says flatly that she has never laid eyes on Bill Clinton, and hints that Purdom's "problems" may have led her to concoct her elaborate fabrication. Several months later, Purdom's "problems" are revealed by Clinton campaign investigator Jack Palladino, who finds that shortly before she talked with Case, she had a brain tumor removed; the surgery caused her to have amnesia, "multiple personality disorder," and a willingness to tell fabulous lies. She tells Palladino that she, like Mason, has never met Clinton. The story of Purdom's debunking is printed in a July 1992 Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff, who will win his own notoriety in later years by collaborating with a number of unsavory Clinton-haters in publishing facts and fiction about Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Worse, from Case's viewpoint, is Isikoff's revelation that both Purdom and Mason have extensive criminal backgrounds, particularly a number of arrests for prostitution under different names.
• Case thinks he might have more success with another woman, known as "Denise," who claims to have a photocopy of a note from Clinton apologizing for "getting rough with her" during sex. At the behest of A Current Affair, Case interviews the woman, surreptitiously videotaping their conversation. The tabloid TV show decides not to air the tape, or pay Case, after seeing the tape. Case is furious, and threatens to take the tape directly to the FBI, not caring that handwriting experts declared the note as bogus. Authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons write, "Ordinary news standards, honored in some respects even by tabloid media, confused and upset Case and Nichols." The two are also disturbed by the Arkansas Republicans feeding them rumors. "God, those guys are sick," Case says of Clinton enemies Sheffield Nelson and Cliff Jackson. "They want to stick it to Clinton so bad they can't hardly see straight."
• Spurred by Rempel, and Purdom's mention of a potential ally in Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson, Case and Nichols decide they might have some success in "turning" one or more of the troopers acting as Clinton's bodyguards during his years as governor. Nichols believes that Patterson or another trooper placed a listening device in the bathroom of the governor's mansion, and, while Case believes the device, even if it exists (it did not), would prove useless, Rempel is keen to get the audio from the device. For his part, Case routinely embroiders and embellishes the rumors he gets from Rempel and feeds them to other reporters, leading in one instance to an inquiry by CNN's Art Harris about Clinton's "distinguishing characteristic." Rempel becomes annoyed when he finds out Case has been passing along embellished versions of his rumors to other reporters as fact, and Rempel begins to distrust the motives and methods of both Case and Nichols, whom he believes will not hesitate to manufacture evidence against Clinton if it will result in profit. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

January 1992

Gennifer Flowers alleges 12-year love affair with Clinton

• January 23: In the midst of the New Hampshire presidential primaries, a supermarket tabloid, The Star, breaks a story alleging that Democratic candidate Bill Clinton has had a lengthy affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Mainstream, "respectable" journalists wrestle with the ethics of reporting on such a salacious story from such a disreputable source. ABC's Nightline, hosted by the well-respected Ted Koppel, finds a way to break the story in the mainstream press: it broadcasts a report, not on the allegations themselves, but on the way the media is handling (or refusing to handle) the allegations. Clinton addresses the allegations indirectly during an interview on 60 Minutes; broadcast just after the Super Bowl, Clinton has a tremendously large audience, and he makes the most of it. With his wife sitting "demurely" alongside him, Clinton denies the Flowers allegations but admits he has not always conducted himself properly in his marriage. Many voters, while troubled by what Republicans are calling the "character issue," choose to let Clinton's bygones be bygones.
• The trap is simultaneously sprung by Flowers and longtime Clinton enemy Larry Nichols, a former state employee fired for his criminal involvement with Oliver North's pro-Contra activities. Both Flowers and Nichols "coincidentally" sell their stories to The Star, though Flowers has repeatedly told Clinton that she hates and fears the tabloids. Nichols receives $50,000 from the tabloid for his report, though he claims later, "I gave it back." Flowers admits to receiving $150,000 for her lurid tale of a 12-year love affair with Clinton. Nichols's libel lawsuit against Clinton has long since been dismissed with prejudice by an Arkansas court, but to bolster his tale, he has refiled it in federal court. The tabloid report prints the names and pictures of five women, including Flowers, whom Nichols has previously named as having had affairs with Clinton. One of the five, journalist Susie Whitacre, demands and eventually receives a retraction. Three of the others, including two former beauty queens, have no public reaction (though two had previously threatened to sue Nichols if he continued smearing their names). The fifth, Flowers, pretends to be coy with the Star reporters, saying that she fears the repercussions if she discusses the matter. In reality, Flowers is working closely with the Star reporters, and possibly with Nichols, to massage the report to gain maximum traction against Clinton. Nichols goes farther than merely alleging affairs; he resurrects long-disproven charges that Clinton created and then looted a slush fund of Arkansas tax dollars, spent state money to visit a beauty queen on "love trips" to New York City, and used state police cars to ferry him to and fro on his trysts. The article fails to mention Nichols's own legal entanglements, neither his connection to the pro-Contra organization nor his charges of theft, and little mention of the fact that his own criminal activities led to his firing. Nichols claims to have "shadowed" Clinton during the last few months while Clinton jogged around Little Rock, supposedly following him to Flowers's apartment.
• Clinton's response is to call Nichols's allegations "trash" and "an absolute...total lie." He mocks The Star's predilection for printing stories of space aliens and two-headed cows, and Hillary Clinton calls the allegations "the equivalent of a conversation with Elvis." A week after Nichols's story is published, Flowers's story is printed. Flowers reveals that she has secretly taped conversations between herself and Clinton, though claiming speciously that she did so only in efforts "to protect herself." "sex was wonderful with Bill," she gushes. "He introduced me to things I'd never done before, like oral sex.... In the beginning, he'd talk about leaving Hillary for me, and I wanted s much for that to happen, but that was my heart talking. My head told me he'd never leave." The tabloids react with the predictable feeding frenzy, but the more mainstream outlets treat the story with kid gloves. As noted above, ABC's Nightline gets the story on the air by spending a half-hour high-mindedly fretting about the propriety of airing such claims, while ensuring that every seamy allegation got its proper airplay. The counter-attack, an interview with 60 Minutes's Steve Kroft of both Clintons, is described as "almost flawless." Flowers is described as a "friendly acquaintance," and notes that in their first conversation about Nichols's allegations, Flowers notes that she and Clinton have not seen each other "for more than ten minutes in ten years." Clinton firmly dismisses Flowers's charges of a 12-year love affair as "absolutely false." Hillary says that her husband told her about all of his phone conversations with Flowers, and tells Kroft of "all sorts of wacky things [Flowers said] which he thought were attributable to the fact that she was terrified."
• The next day, Flowers and the Star editors hold what authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons call a "riotous" press conference in Manhattan, outside the Waldorf-Astoria where the Star is paying for Flowers to stay. Flowers, dabbing dramatically at her eyes, tells the mob of shouting, shoving reporters, "Yes, I was Bill Clinton's lover for twelve years. And for the past two years I have lied about the relationship. The truth is, I loved him. Now he tells me to deny it. Well, I'm sick of all the deceit, and I'm sick of all the lies." Wearing a tight red dress and having obviously bleached her dark hair, Flowers looks like a quintessential gold-digger. She plays snippets of her taped recordings of her conversations with Clinton, including coarse sexual remarks from herself and garbled, inaudible responses from Clinton, and says, falsely, that she had intended to keep the affair secret until she learned about the Star's feature on Nichols's lawsuit. Clinton responds by informing the press that 18 months ago, Flowers's lawyer had stated that anyone alleging any affair between the two would be sued for slander, and that she had publicly stated that she changed her mind for the money.
• Clinton's enemy Sheffield Nelson piles on, telling the press that his campaign had long known about the Flowers affair; he lies to the press, saying that his campaign had making any allegations about Clinton's sexual and drug escapades. Fellow GOP luminary Tommy Robinson, a Nelson opponent, says that Nelson himself "orchestrated" the Flowers story. Robinson, the state director of public safety during Clinton's first term as governor, says, "Bill Clinton had no affair with Gennifer Flowers. I would have known about it.... Sheffield's been spreading the rumors." Flowers's admission of a $50,000 offer from Arkansas Republicans to go public becomes public knowledge, along with her involvement with a GOP state senate campaign. Co-workers describe her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume, proclaiming her to be a graduate of a fashionable Dallas prep school and the recipient of a University of Arkansas nursing degree, proves to be false. Her brief gig on the Hee Haw television show ended with her abruptly disappearing with a man she'd met in a Las Vegas casino and a blatant lie about her being kidnapped. She had never been "Miss Teenage America." Even her twin sister Genevieve turns out to be a fabrication. Flowers's credibility is in shreds. (What may have been true is that Flowers and Clinton had had a brief fling fifteen years before, but friends remember her saying nothing about any such relationship after 1979. They are amazed at her allegations of a 12-year affair, and recall that, far from being interested in marriage, was carrying on other affairs with men in Dallas and Little Rock. A nude photo spread in Penthouse does little to bolster Flowers's credibility, especially in light of her comment about the men she'd seduced for fun and profit: "I usually throw them back. I don't want to keep them. Let the wives have them back."
• Even the tapes prove fraudulent. Though Star consultants prove the tapes genuine, a specialist hired by KCBS-TV examines the tapes and finds that they have been "selectively edited" and are misleading at best; it appears that some of Flowers's responses may have been dubbed in at a later date. Flowers has no documentary evidence of her affair, no valentine cards, letters, photograph, or hotel registry. Indeed, her later book on the subject, Passion and Betrayal, tells the lurid story of their affair without mentioning one single specific time and place of any such trysts between her and Clinton. One of her most famous claims is of numerous encounters with Clinton at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel between 1978 and 1980. Not only is the hotel a mere two blocks from the state's largest newspaper, and therefore an unlikely place for an assignation, the hotel wasn't even built until 1983. For now, the story of the affair seems dead.
• Interestingly enough, the day that the 60 Minutes interview airs, Larry Nichols publicly drops his lawsuit against Clinton and announces that "the feud is over." (No mention that the "feud" is entirely on Nichols's part.) He admits that he was wrong to have named the five women as sexual liasons of Clinton's, and says that he deplores the fact that so many people are trying to cash in on this story by selling their own baseless stories and allegations to the tabloids -- again, no mention of his own handsome profiteering off of his own farrago of lies. "In trying to destroy Clinton, I was only hurting myself," he says. "If the American people understand why I did this...and that [it] was wrong, then they'll see there's not a whole lot of difference between me and what the reporters are doing today." Nichols's mea culpa is as much a tissue of lies as his original allegations. The story's subtext is a want ad for even more women to come forward with the promise of a hefty payoff. And behind the scenes, Nichols's lawyer is unsuccessfully agitating the Clinton campaign for a $200,000 payoff. (Marvin Kalb, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

February 1992

• February: The Globe, a tabloid newspaper usually obsessed with juicy gossip about celebrities, runs a front-page article alleging Bill Clinton participated in "four-in-a-bed sex orgies with black hookers."

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  The story originates with Robert "say" McIntosh, an eccentric black restauranteur and activist known in Little Rock circles as the "sweet Potato Pie King" and "The Black Santa." McIntosh has already appeared in the Larry Nichols story printed in the Star a month earlier, claiming that he was the Clinton campaign's "Mr. Fixit," hired to head off scandals. (The Clinton campaign has never associated itself with McIntosh.) McIntosh's involvement in politics before now has mostly been as a colleague of flamboyant Arkansas sheriff and former Democrat-turned-Republican Tommy Robinson in a number of Robinson's more ludicrous publicity stunts -- one memorable photo op featured McIntosh, dressed as Satan, tied to a 12-foot wooden cross in front of the Sheriff's Department, which Robinson sawed down with a chain saw. McIntosh lards his handbills for his barbecue restaurant with polemics against racism and Clinton's sex life. According to the Globe story, McIntosh says that Clinton has "been with enough black women to cast a Tarzan movie," and has even fathered a black child with prostitute Bobbie Ann Williams. The photo of a smiling black boy adorns the story. McIntosh says the boy was fathered during one of Clinton's wild sex-and-drug orgies at the home of his mother, Virginia Kelley.
• Right-wing lawyer Cliff Jackson, an inverterate Clinton-hater, informs private detective Larry Case that Williams has filed a paternity suit against Clinton. He doesn't tell Case that the entire tale originated in the upper echelons of the national Republican Party.
• Republican banker Peter Smith, a top contributor to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC and close to Gingrich's personal political operation, despairs at the prospects of Clinton's victory and, with the election getting closer, decides to derail the Clinton candidacy by "exposing" Clinton's supposedly licentious sex life. He enlists Gingrich confidant Hugh Newton and top GOP consultant Eddie Mahe, along with other Gingrich operatives, to assist him in his goal. (One of Smith's cohorts, Bush White House aide Richard Porter, would play a key role in the later Paula Jones lawsuit as well as the Monica Lewinsky investigation.) Smith spends around $80,000 trolling for dirt, and seizes upon the story of Clinton's "black love child" as a potential winner. Unfortunately for Smith and the Republicans, the entire story proves to be a farrago of lies. The paternity suit never materializes, McIntosh never produces either Williams or her son, and the story goes nowhere. In 1998, when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reprints a Washington Times story listing Williams as one of Clinton's paramours, an angry woman appears in the offices of the newspaper with proof that the woman in the story is her sister, a prostitute who had fathered no children; the woman, the real Bobbie Ann Williams, shows that her sister used photographs of her to sell the story; Williams herself has several children, but has never met Clinton, much less had an affair with him or borne his child. The Democrat-Gazette prints a retraction; the Times never does. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

Ross Perot announces third-party candidacy for president

• February 20: Texas billionaire Ross Perot announces his candidacy for president on Larry King's CNN talk show.

  1992 presidential campaign

  Perot runs on a platform of balancing the federal budget and enacting electronic direct democracy via "electronic town halls," along with raising the gasoline tax and a harsh opposition to NAFTA. Perot's candidacy attracts tremendous attention, and for a time Perot is polling evenly with the two major party candidates. After Bill Clinton's powerful showing at the Democratic National Convention, and Perot' claim that Republican operatives attempted to disrupt his daughter's wedding, he withdraws from the race late in the summer. Nevertheless, he qualifies for the ballots on all 50 states, and on October 1, announces he is re-entering the race. His running mate is retired admiral James Stockdale. Perot will perform quite well in the three presidential debates. He will receive 19% of the popular vote, making him the most popular third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt. Common wisdom (unsupported by exit polls) indicate that much of his support will be drawn from Bush supporters. He will run again, much less successfully, as the candidate of the Reform Party in 1996. Many observers feel that Republicans who felt burned by Perot's 1992 candidacy will decide to "turn the tables" on Democrats in 2000 by advocating the third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader, who may have taken enough votes from Al Gore to swing the election towards George W. Bush. After his abortive 1996 run, Perot's Reform Party splits due to dissension in the ranks on whether or not the party is a platform for Perot or an independent party of its own, and Perot will withdraw from the political stage. (Wikipedia)

March 1992

• March: A huge scandal involving House members and the House bank, which comes to be known as "Rubbergate," engulfs nearly 350 members.

  Congressional corruption

  The bank routinely allows members to overdraw their accounts without penalty and, in some cases, without paying back the overdrafts. 22 House members are singled out by the Ethics Committee for pernicious overdrafting; 77 members will not run for re-election because of their connection to the scandal. Republican Donald Lukens will plead guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges; Democrats Carl Perkins and Carroll Hubbard plead guilty to multiple felonies. Others involved in the scandal include Democrat Harold Ford and Republican Tom DeLay (who blames his wife for his financial irregularities). It is widely believed that House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided to publicize the overdrafting because the majority of participants were Democrats; Gingrich himself was found to have written numerous overdrafts, but paid no political or criminal price. (Wikipedia, Hilton and Testa)
• March 7: Clinton finishes a strong second to Paul Tsongas in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire.

  1992 presidential campaign

  Unbeknownst to anyone, this will be the highwater mark of Tsongas's campaign. The Gennifer Flowers allegations of a love affair with Clinton have been roundly debunked, but the story generates tremendous name recognition and sympathy for Clinton. Better, the nation encounters the strong, supportive Hillary Clinton for the first time. Dubbing himself the "Comeback Kid," Clinton, who has been less than honest about his sexual history even though the Flowers story has been disproven, moves to upend Tsongas in the upcoming primaries. Republicans are uneasy about the prospect of a Democratic opponent so willing to fight back against a smear campaign. Still, the Flowers story has had its impact on the mainstream press, which has shown a willingness to publicize tabloid smear allegations that it never would have printed in the past. Also, as authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons write, "[t]hrough the agency of a paid story in a supermarket tabloid, two rank amateurs [Flowers and Larry Nichols] with almost no credibility among journalists in their hometown were able to make national headlines, turn themselves into minor celebrities, and earn a substantial amount of cash in the bargain" gives impetus to other Clinton-haters to emulate their success. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

Whitewater allegations break in media

• March 8: The first "Whitewater" story appears in the New York Times, written by Jeff Gerth and based on interviews with real estate "tycoon" Jim McDougal.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  The story appears two days before the Democratic "super Tuesday" presidential primaries. McDougal falsely claims that the Clintons made handsome profits on Whitewater and that he received political favors in return. Both the Starr commission (the OIC, or Office of the Independent Counsel) and the RTC investigation will later confirm that McDougal's allegations are false.
• McDougal, an embittered former business partner of the Clintons, and Gerth are both contacted by longtime Clinton opponent Sheffield Nelson, who knows a good bit about the failed land deal known as Whitewater. The actual property consists of around 230 acres of wooded land, at the confluence of two of the best fishing streams in the Ozarks. In 1978, the Clintons and the McDougals had jointly put up $200,000 of borrowed money to buy the property, in hopes of future development. Had the risk paid off, both parties would have made around $45,000. Both parties ended up losing money -- the Clintons a bit less than $45,000, the McDougals a bit more, though McDougal's habit of commingling funds among his many real estate deals made the accounting a bit fuzzy. While the real estate itself was relatively trivial, the depth of McDougal's resentment towards the Clintons was not. He will later blame the Clintons for the entire range of his business and personal failures, including the bankruptcy of his real estate empire, his diagnosis with manic-depressive disorder, the failure of his marriage to Susan McDougal, and his criminal charges on four counts of federal bank fraud. McDougal, a colorful and untrustworthy local racouteur with connections to a number of Arkansas Democrats, fails to admit that he bilked the Clintons out of most of the money they put into Whitewater and then lost the money in bad business deals of his own. He managed to dodge conviction on the fraud charges, and, while originally blaming the charges on Republican prosecutors, later turns the blame onto the Clintons as they vault into national prominence. A near-destitute McDougal had petitioned Clinton's office for a job with the state, but Beverly Bassett Schaffer, a Clinton appointee who works as a commissioner for the state securities commission and who had urged the FBI to investigate McDougal in the first place, warns the personnel office that McDougal is unstable, a likely criminal, and not to be trusted with any position of trust. The rejection enrages McDougal. That rejection, combined with a personal grudge against a Democratic rival of Clinton's, Jim Guy Tucker, prompts McDougal to contact Nelson. Tucker had lost a bitter primary in the 1992 gubernatorial race to Clinton, and emerged angry and resentful. McDougal had entered into separate business dealings with Nelson, Tucker, and Clinton; only Nelson profited from the relationship.
• Worse, McDougal's business meltdown had not been triggered by Whitewater, but by his own failed attempt to oversee a major resort development in New Brunswick, Canada; his chief investors had been Nelson and Jerry Jones, the Arkansas oil and gas magnate who owned the Dallas Cowboys. McDougal had been caught by the US Treasury Department in swindling the Federal Home Loan Bank Board out of nearly $275,000 over the property. As for Tucker, he had joined McDougal in buying a tiny bank in Kingston, Arkansas; the deal ended in mutual financial loss and recrimination. Tucker learned in 1990 that McDougal had collected loan payments on a parcel the two had subdivided, but failed to pay off the bank loan, and sent worthless deeds with Tucker's forged signature to their customers. Tucker had been forced to pay restitution. When McDougal asked Tucker to serve as a character witness in his trial, Tucker refused; McDougal never forgave him for the slight. McDougal may have contacted Nelson originally in order to find a Republican lawyer willing to sue Tucker; when Tucker became lieutenant governor in 1990, putting him in line to succeed Bill Clinton when Clinton left office to run for president, McDougal saw the glimmerings of a much larger scheme taking shape.
• Of course, Gerth's Whitewater article mentions none of this complicated and sordid history. Gerth insists that he contacted Nelson merely to obtain McDougal's phone number. However, McDougal, in his posthumously published memoir, Arkansas Mischief, writes that Nelson proudly took the credit for pointing Gerth towards Whitewater. "It was Nelson who passed the information along to Jeff Gerth," he writes. "Nelson was gleeful. He wanted me to talk to Gerth, the New York Times reporter who had written a long investigative article about [Republican financiers Witt and Jack Stephens's] extensive connections in Arkansas a few years earlier." Gerth's 1978 story about predatory natural gas pricing had successfully knocked the Stephens's nephew out of a tight Senate race. Several years later, Stephens, Inc. had retaliated by helping Times reporter Wendell Rawls, Jr. with a story about Nelson's shady dealings with another Arkansas natural gas corporation, which indirectly helped destroy Nelson's political career. Gerth drove to Arkadelphia to meet with McDougal after conferring with Nelson; McDougal gave Gerth a snowdrift of documents that allegedly showed the Clintons had taken improper tax deferrals and failed to pay their fair share of Whitewater expenses. (The documents are largely forged or manipulated; there never was any shred of evidence that the Clintons had done anything improper.) While Gerth obtains plenty of information about Tucker as well, he passes that information along to local reporters; the Times, he says, is only interested in Bill Clinton.
• The Gerth article, a tissue of fact, half-truths, misinformation, and outright lies, is originally praised as containing "80 to 90 percent" of what the public ever knew about Whitewater, according to the American Journalism Review. But even the headline is misleading: "Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real Estate Venture." In 1978, McDougal had had no involvement in either the banking or thrift businesses. He was then a political science teacher at Ouachita Baptist University and an amateur real estate investor. He didn't obtain a controlling share of Madison Guaranty until 1983, by which time the Whitewater deal was virtually defunct. (Still, McDougal is outraged that Gerth would reveal his own criminal conduct, having contacted Gerth in order to smear both Clinton and Tucker. After being contacted by a lawyer for Clinton, McDougal says that he knows of no illegal or unethical conduct on Clinton's part; he will later claim, falsely, that Clinton threatened him with a lawsuit. Nelson will counter McDougal's retraction with taped conversations where McDougal makes numerous allegations against Clinton.)
• If Gerth can be believed -- and he cannot -- the story runs thus: the Clintons entered into a sweetheart deal with a crooked financier (McDougal) at no risk to themselves. When McDougal got into trouble, the governor dumped the sitting securities commissioner and appointed a politcal ally, Bassett Schaffer, who granted special favors to Madison Guaranty until federal regulators put an end to the financial shenanigans. Bassett Schaffer then suffered apparent amnesia, failing to recall any complicity in events. Unfortunately for Gerth, Bassett Schaffer is able to disprove almost every aspect of his tale with exhaustive financial documentation. First, the Clintons and McDougal were equally at risk in the deal. Second, the FHLBB accepted Madison's debt-restructuring plan in September 1984, six months before Bassett Schaffer's appointment to the commission. Federal regulators did not find Madison insolvent during the years covered in Gerth's article, 1984-1986. And Clinton did not fire Bassett Schaffer's Republican predecessor -- he resigned to enter private legal practice. (Her predecessor dubs Gerth's article "unmitigated horsesh*t.")
• Most damning for Gerth, Arkansas has no authority to close state-regulated S&Ls without federal concurrence, a key accusation of Gerth's that he asserts proves Bassett Schaffer's complicity in the Clintons' supposed wrongdoing. In July 1986, Bassett Schaffer had been one of a number of commissioners to remove Jim and Susan McDougal from control of their S&L after auditors discovered a myriad of financial abuses. And in December 1987, she had all but begged regulators to shut down Madison and two other Arkansas S&Ls; regulators finally did so in February 1989. Her supervisor, Walter Faulk, says, "I never saw her take any action that was out of the ordinary.... To my knowledge, there is nothing that she or the governor of Arkansas did or could have done that would have delayed the action on this institution." (Gerth later claims that much of his original story, envisioned as a three-part article, was heavily edited, and that Washington bureau chief Howell Raines, who actively dislikes Clinton, was largely responsible for the tone of the article. Gerth will later claim that he never said Raines affected the article.)
• Bassett Schaffer is outraged at Gerth's article, and briefly considers a libel suit against the Times. She writes to Gerth, "I provided you with a detailed account in writing of the facts. This information was ignored and, instead, you based your story on the word of a mentally ill man [McDougal] I have never met and documents which you admitted to me on the telephone on February 26, 1992, were incomplete." Gerth refuses to reply, though he claims he tries to meet with her on several occasions and she brushes him off. Because the story appears on the front page of the Times, its contents will be repeated as fact by other reporters for years to come. (H.R. Clinton, Marvin Kalb, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

"Defense Planning Guidance" article lays out GOP foreign policy for next twenty years; primarily authored by Paul Wolfowitz, with input from Dick Cheney and other hawks

• March 8: The Defense Planning Guidance Draft, an article detailing the US's global military, social, and economic strategies in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, is leaked to the New York Times.

  Neoconservatives

  The article has not yet been "sanitized" for public consumption and causes a controversy with its blunt, rough-shod approach to global foreign policy. The document portrays the US, in the words of Eric Alterman and Mark Green, as "a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power." It argues that the US must maintain its role as sole superpower by maintaining "the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." As one British newspaper puts it, "America's friends are potential enemies. They must be in a state of dependence and seek solutions to their problems in Washington." The primary authors are Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, who hold relatively low posts at the time, but under Bush Jr. become Deputy Defense Secretary and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, respectively (Cheney was Bush Sr.'s first Secretary of Defense; Wolfowitz and Libby are longtime political and ideological allies of Cheney).
• The document, intended to be a central strategy plan for US foreign policy, advocates the discarding of collective military and/or security arrangements under the supervision of the United Nation, and suggests that the US "should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted." It postulates regional wars against Iraq and North Korea, and sets criteria for pre-emptively exercising power which include "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil...." It goes on to state, "While the U.S. cannot become the world's 'policeman,' by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations. Various types of U.S. interests may be involved in such instances: access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking." It also calls for "punishing" or "threatening punishment" against regional aggressors before they act. The document advocates "snuffing out" regional problems before they start, including targeting India for "hegemonic aspiration," Russia if its embryonic democracy fails, Southeast Asia for "fundamental values, governance and policies decidedly at variance with our own," and even in allied Europe if need be. The DPG also says that the US needs a rival to give a reason for a new military buildup. Any country with a stockpile of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and a government not closely allied with the US could be considered for military intervention.
• After dubious Pentagon officials leak the document to the New York Times, which publishes an article on the DPG, a horrified Senator Joseph Biden says the DPG leads the way to "literally a Pax Americana." President Bush immediately disassociates himself from the document, begging the press corps, "Please do not put too much emphasis on leaked reports, particularly ones that I haven't seen." The White House strongly indicates its displeasure to Defense Secretary Cheney. Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee later says, "It is my opinion that [Bush Jr.'s] plan for preemptive strikes was formed back at the end of the first Bush administration with that 1992 report." In response to the controversy, in May 1992 Cheney and his staff produces an updated version of the document that stresses the US will work with the United Nations and its allies; however the ideas in the original document resurface in a January 1993 "Regional Defense Strategy" document from Wolfowitz that recycles the material from the original DPG. One former Cheney staffer later says, "It wasn't an epiphany, it wasn't a sudden eureka moment; it was an evolution, but it was one that was primed by what he had done and seen in the period during the end of the cold war." During the 2000 presidential campaign, the DPG will reappear in even bolder form, revised and updated by some of the original authors along with Weekly Standard neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan, two of the founders of the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century, and future Bush II officials Wolfowitz, Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Dov Zakheim, and Elliot Abrams. The new document calls for nothing less than the creation of a worldwide American empire, with military bases and forces all over the globe. "A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today," the document asserts, "but it is necessary if the US is to build on the success of this past century and ensure our security and greatness in the next." One of the new DPG's authors, Douglas Kagan, tells reporter Jay Bookman, "You saw the movie High Noon? We're Gary Cooper."
• In the Bush Jr. presidency, Cheney's original staff will be reassembled and given near-carte blanche to formulate the new administration's foreign policy. Within two weeks of the second Bush administration taking office, Cheney will begin pushing for the US to overthrow the Hussein regime and establish Iraq as a US-controlled "democracy," a jumping-off point for the US to establish control over the entire Middle East oil producing region. But it is entirely possible that none of these neocon's dreams of empire could be implemented without the attacks of September 11, 2001. PNAC's current head Gary Schmitt will observe, "Without 9/11, Bush might have been off wandering in the desert, in terms of foreign policy." (CCR, The New Republic, New York Times/American Assembler, Eric Alterman and Mark Green)
• March 9: L. Jean Lewis, an investigator for the Resolution Trust Company (the temporary agency created during the Bush administration to bail out the depositors of failed S&L institutions and liquidate the assets of those institutions seized by the government) and a longtime Clinton hater,

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  reads Jeff Gerth's Whitewater article in the Times and immediately reorders her list of Arkansas S&Ls to be investigated. Jim McDougal's relatively small and unimportant Madison Guaranty is near the bottom of the list. Lewis immediately abandons her work investigating two other failed S&Ls that lost over $1.6 billion in depositors' money to focus on Madison. Though Lewis's supervisors inform two senior RTC officials in Washington that the Whitewater deal did not fall under their investigative rubric, and that no mention of either of the Clintons is in their criminal referral files, Lewis and her immediate supervisor, Richard Iolio, move Madison Guaranty, which handled the Whitewater deal, to the top of their list for investigation.
• Lewis finds a rat's nest of badly organized and missing documents for Madison, similar to the experience which had so horrified Hillary Clinton when she was forced to take over management of the Whitewater Development Corporation in 1988. McDougal is, at best, a shoddy record-keeper. Because of McDougal's possibly criminal mismanagement of his various companies' finances, Madison is in deep debt, and because of ruinously high interest rates forced on the company by the Federal Reserve, its income is highly restricted. Madison, like so many other S&Ls, was encouraged by the Reagan Treasury Department to make up its losses by speculating in real estate ventures. McDougal's own failures and the bottoming out of the real estate market put Madison in desperate financial straits. McDougal, juggling assets and debts from one organization after another, had abused the trust and the investments of the Clintons, their fellow Democratic politician Jim Guy Tucker, and dozens of other investors.
• Lewis, though, wants to find dirt on the Clintons, not on McDougal. Finding evidence of McDougal's financial misdoings, and her reading of Jeff Gerth's allegations that state commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer had done favors for McDougal, Lewis leaps to a conclusion far beyond anything in Gerth's article. Lewis decides that virtually everyone in Arkansas who has done business with Madison Guaranty, including the Clintons, is part of an enormous overarching conspiracy to defraud the government, and this surmise is the basis of her criminal referrals. According to her theory, every transaction that benefited McDougal must also have benefited his partners as well. Lewis begins to investigate Madison to the exclusion of almost every other S&L on her list.
• In August, the FBI agents assigned to investigate financial crime are growing impatient with Lewis. She has not issued any criminal referrals, or done much work, on any of the other cases on her list. She tells an FBI agent that she has the responsibility to history to pursue the Madison case and, by inference, the Clintons. The FBI seeks permission to pursue the bigger cases without the assistance of Lewis's office. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• Late March: The Clinton campaign releases the results of an internal investigation which finds no evidence of improper conduct on the Clintons' part concerning Whitewater.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  The investigation also finds that the Clintons lost around $65,000 on the deal, and that, because of a failure on Jim McDougal's part to provide them with the proper documentation, the Clintons had improperly deducted $2000 from their income tax. The Clintons immediately pay off the improper deduction. (Though the investigation is widely and understandably seen as self-serving, as it turns out, everything the investigation found is verified by later investigations.) The feeling in the Clinton campaign is that it has answered the Whitewater allegations and that the whole thing is a dead issue. As Joe Conason and Gene Lyons write, "How much scandal could there be in a gravel-road real estate development in which the Clintons had ultimately lost money?" (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

April 1992

• April:

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  GOP consultant Floyd Brown, trolling Arkansas for dirt on Bill Clinton with his group Citizens United and its adjunct group the Presidential Victory Committee, receives an anonymous letter from Texas concerning a woman named Susann Coleman. The letter, which is also released to many news organizations, tells of Coleman's suicide in 1977. Coleman, according to the letter, was eight months pregnant with Clinton's love child. "she spoke of her husband and how he'd been destroyed by her infidelity," the letter reads. "she spoke of her love for Bill Clinton.... She condemned herself for being an obstruction to Bill Clinton's high ambitions. She died for them."
• Brown's "chief investigator," David Bossie, determines to find out more about Coleman. With Jim Johnson's help, they find that Coleman had been a student of Clinton's when he taught at the University of Arkansas Law School, but find no evidence of intimacy, much less of any alleged pregnancy. The husband and family refuse to talk. In May, Bossie finds Coleman's mother at an army hospital in Georgia, attending her second husband, who had suffered a stroke. According to authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, Bossie "tailed her to the hospital, eluded hospital security, and burst into the sickroom firing questions." The distraught woman says little to Bossie except "Clinton is not the father of Susann's baby." Coleman's sister, Lorna Lindsey, is angry at being called and harassed by Bossie, and tells him that she won't speak to him or anyone else from his organization. Brown calls her and, angered himself, throws a wild allegation that Lindsey's silence is because "one of your cousins, who was a police officer at the time, took care of it?" He threatens her: "I won't stop this investigation," and says that his lawyers will "meet with Clinton and tell him to get out of his race." Bossie finally files a report saying that he could find "no proof to support this letters [sic] allegations.... [T]his case is closed." But Lindsey had recorded her second conversation with Brown and turned it over to the Clinton campaign, which gave it to CBS correspondent Eric Engberg, who in mid-July runs a report condemning the activities of Brown's Presidential Victory Committee. Engberg calls the Coleman affair "an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation," reminds viewers of the Willie Horton ad, and airs a segment of his interview with a friend of the family who accuses Bossie of peering in the windows of her home while she was out. She tells of his hospital intrusion, and Engberg plays excerpts from Brown's ugly conversation with Lindsey. Engberg notes that the Bush campaign, though it has branded Brown's tactics as "despicable," has not filed a complaint with the FCC. The Bush campaign may have decided to back off on the entire question of Clinton's infidelity due to powerful allegations of its candidate's own sexual impropriety.
• Brown, though, has no intentions of backing off, and churns out Slick Willie in mid-September: according to authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, "an unwieldy farrago of fact, exaggeration, and sheer invention" that paints Clinton with "dodging the truth, raising taxes, coddling blacks, chasing women, corrupting state agencies, flip-flopping on abortion, awarding special privileges to gays, promoting secularism (and witchcraft!), wrecking the school system, flirting with socialism, and, in its stirring final chapter, blaspheming the Lord with his campaign slogan of a 'New Covenant' between citizens and government." The book gives a "special thanks" to "Judge Jim Johnson." The appendixes include carefully edited excerprts from the Gennifer Flowers tapes. It even contains a chapter about Susann Coleman, which contains no fact but a great deal of innuendo: "These questions [surrounding Coleman's death and her supposed pregnancy with Clinton's love child] remain unanswered, but Bill Clinton's hirelings are working day and night to keep them a mystery." The book is "loaded with blanks, not silver bullets," but, at the then-steep price of $8.95 a copy, would generate a respectable income. In preparation for publication, Johnson steers Brown to inveterate Clinton-hater Larry Nichols. Nichols brings his colleague Larry Case with him to their first meeting, Case ready to pitch Brown for the sale of the videotapes he has of Roger Clinton's cocaine prosecution, along with an audiotape of a prostitute talking about her sexual encounter with Clinton, "all for sale."
• Brown flies Case and Nichols to Washington in August, entertaining them at a "titty bar" that excites Case even months later, then moving to Brown's Fairfax, Virginia office where Case unloads a raft of documents and tapes. The other person at the meeting is Deborah Stone, the sole editor and publisher of Annapolis-Washington Book Publishers, the firm set up specifically to publish Slick Willie. Stone herself is a blunt-spoken conservative, a veteran of the Dartmouth Review staff who, in 1986, used axes and sledgehammers to destroy an anti-apartheid protest shanty built on campus, and a spokeswoman for an anti-abortion group. The surprise guest is Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund, an intense devotee of Ayn Rand who functions as the Journal's unofficial emissary to the Christian right, and the ghostwriter of one of Rush Limbaugh's books. Stone knows Fund from her work at the conservative Regnery Publishing, and Fund has advised her on Slick Willie. (He later claims to have attended the meeting strictly for journalistic purposes.) Case, as is his wont, secretly tapes the meeting.
• Fund is excited at the prospect of Case's videos, believing Case's lie that no one in the media has seen them before (numerous news organizations have already viewed and rejected Case's material). Fund is particularly interested in one tape that Case says shows Clinton accepting a bribe, but repeated run-throughs of the tape shows nothing out of the ordinary. Case finally admits that he isn't even sure which tape shows the alleged bribe. For another hour, Nichols bores his audience with rambling, disassociative accusations against Clinton, his grievances against the governor's office, Gennifer Flowers and other supposed Clinton paramours, even his accusation that Clinton is somehow involved in the murder of a Little Rock swimming pool manufacturer (the man's wife was later arrested for the crime). The listeners sit up when Nichols mentions a videotape of Clinton entering Gennifer Flowers's apartment, but, though Stone is particularly interested in securing the tape, it, like so many others, never materializes. William Rempel, the Los Angeles Times reporter interested in finding out dirt on Clinton, calls Fund's appearance at the meeting beyond unethical: "Borderline ain't the word," he tells Case. "It's right over the edge. It's in free fall."
• Brown finally makes a cash offer to Case for his information about the so-called affairs between Clinton and his list of paramours. Unaware that Case has already tried and failed to sell his material to a number of tabloid news outlets, Brown ponies up $10,000 for access to the videotapes and the prostitutes Case has on a string. While in the Little Rock airport waiting to fly to Phoenix to interview an associate of Case's who, the private detective claims, has evidence supporting the "bimbo stories," Case suddenly accuses Bossie and Stone of trying to steal his luggage and demands the $10,000 immediately, instead of the agreed-upon next day. Stone tries to mollify Case, offering him $1000 if he would just get on the plane, but Case refuses to budge. Case says that he then shoves Bossie aside to get to his bags, but Bossie views it as assault and swears out a warrant for his arrest. Case tells the police that Stone and Bossie tried to steal documents and material worth, in his estimation, $1.5 million, and threatened to kill him. He then contacts various media outlets accusing Stone and Bossie of "scandalous" research tactics against Clinton.
• Brown, who learns that Case has passed off forged documents to him, accuses Case in his book of being a double agent for the Clintons. Meanwhile, Case is bragging about how he'd "slapped the sh*t out of Bossie" and planned on turning a profit by "exposing" Citizens United. While Brown and Bossie are repulsed by the mercenary, double-talking Brown, Case and Nichols are planning on what to do after Clinton is elected president and, in their view, uses his office to take revenge on his tormentors. They discuss turning on their former benefactors to save their own skins and turn a profit. Case asks Nichols if he can bring "the Republicans in now.... You think you could roll [Arkansas Republican Party chairman] Bob Leslie?" Nichols says "I know I could," tells Case that virtually every Republican in Arkansas is in his back pocket, and Case replies, "Well, we could sure time them into it, from here on up to Washington if we really wanted to. The way I look at it, Larry, if you're gonna be blamed for it, get paid for it. Sh*t, it's to the point now where, you know, I'm open. I'm open for business. You and me both." (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• April 14: Ex-president George H.W. Bush arrives in Kuwait for a three-day visit, accompanied by members of his family, former Secretary of State James Baker, former Chief of Staff John Sununu, and former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady.

  Islamist terrorism

  The event is uneventful. In late April, Kuwait informs the government that its authorities foiled an assassination attempt against Bush. Kuwaiti law enforcement officials arrest 17 people suspected in the plot to kill Bush, which would have used a Toyota Landcruiser stuffed with explosives. The Kuwaitis recover the Landcruiser, which contains between 80 and 90 kilograms of plastic explosives connected to a detonator. The Kuwaitis also recover ten cube-shaped plastic explosive devices with detonators from the Landcruiser. Some of the suspects reportedly later confess that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS ) was behind the assassination attempt. In April 1993, CIA bomb technicians confirm that the two detonaters are quite similar to detonators used in different Middle Eastern bombings in 1990 and 1991. Two of the convicted bombers tell FBI investigators in May 1993 that they had taken part in the assassination plot at the direction of the IIS.
• In late June of 1993, CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice officials report their findings to Clinton administration officials, declaring their belief that the assassination plot was highly likely to have originated within the echelons of Iraq's government. On June 26, Clinton will order a cruise missile attack against the IIS office complex in Baghdad in retaliation for the assassination attempt. The next day, the US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, will address an emergency session of the UN Security Council and provide evidence to support the US attack on the IIS facility. (History News Network, Seattle Post Intelligencer)

May 1992

• May: Larry Nichols files yet another lawsuit against Clinton, this one demanding his resignation as governor for allegedly reneging on his promise not to run for president and thusly not finishing his term as governor.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  The new lawsuit revives old, disproven allegations that state troopers had ferried Clinton around to his various sexual trysts. In 1998, Nichols will reveal that he had known about the tapes that Gennifer Flowers had made of her conversations with Clinton long before they were revealed to the public, but refuses to admit that he helped her cut the deal with The Star or that he helped edit the tapes to place Clinton in a damning light. "I had done what I needed to do," he cynically admits. "I knew Clinton was running for president, so all I had to do was keep the court case alive, then the media would come in and take it." Nichols was right in one aspect: as Clinton's presidential aspirations flourish, Republican operatives would begin trolling Arkansas for any allegations of sexual misconduct on Clinton's part, offering large sums of money for the wildest and most unsubstantiated tales. Nichols himself partners with rogue private investigator Larry Case, who most recently had approached the Clinton gubernatorial campaign in 1990 with unfounded allegations that his GOP opponent, Sheffield Nelson, had consorted with prostitutes. Clinton's aides had listened to Case's story but refused to use the material. Case told friends that the campaign had promised him the directorship of the state Alcohol Beverage Control Commission, and that he had been betrayed. Case believes that raw files in state police headquarters will prove that Clinton had indeed used state troopers as his own private limousine service to ferry him to and from his sexual assignations. Like Nichols, the prospect of six-figure sums in return for their inventiveness proves very tempting. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

June 1992

• June: Missouri governor John Ashcroft, a right-wing zealot who makes tremendous political hay out of his extremist Christian views and his insistence on his absolute political and moral integrity, renders a decision that makes millions for several of his closest campaign cronies and fundraisers, and raises serious questions about the decision's legal and ethical probity.

  Republican corruption

  The city of Branson, which had become a mecca for country music fans, is experiencing severe traffic problems. To resolve the situation, Ashcroft takes the unprecedented step of declaring the area an "economic emergency." The decision opens the way for the quick construction of an 18-mile, $140 million dollar bypass, the Ozark Mountain Highroad (Highway 465). The bypass enriches a number of Ashcroft contributors, but none more so than Silver Dollar City amusement center Peter Herschend. 465 skirts Branson and brings visitors directly by Silver Dollar City, giving visitors far better access to Herschend's playground. The road also crosses three stretches of Herschend property, one of which was sold to the state for a whopping $2.2 million. Locals call the road "Pete's Pike."
• Jim Thomas, who runs two Branson music houses, says bluntly, "They were trying to steal our market. Declaring Branson an economic emergency was an oxymoron. There was traffic, but we were at our peak for business." Herschend is a longtime Ashcroft campaign donor, and Peter's son Chris will work on Ashcroft's campaign staff in 1994. According to Herschend, the road grew out of conversations he held with Ashcroft and highway officials in 1991 and 1992. And when Ashcroft declared the "economic emergency" at a public meeting in Branson in June 1992 -- just months before he was to leave office -- he was introduced by Herschend. The highway will take years longer to complete than necessary, and ultimately will do little to alleviate traffic congestion in Branson. Environmental concerns were ignored. When the press asked Herschend about the project 18 months later, he replied that when he was lobbying Ashcroft for the road he didn't know the bypass was going to run through his property. But the press found two maps drawn up before the official announcement that showed the proposed road passing through or near Herschend's land. The 117 acres the state purchased from Herschend for $2.2 million was to be used for building an interchange that would handle traffic to Herschend's Silver Dollar City. After 1994, Herschend, his family, and his business donated $33,000 to Ashcroft and about $40,000 to other Republicans. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes that Ashcroft's designation of the highway as an "economic emergency" had "no meaning under law" and "raises serious questions of public policy." It added that the "apparent connections between contributions to politicians and the priority given this highway at least raises doubts about safeguarding the public interest." (The Nation/Dan Moldea)
• June 1: Bush announces the creation of a "no-fly zone" over southern Iraq, an operation designed to break Baghdad's repressive control over the Shi'ite Muslim-dominated region and to signal to Iraqi dissidents that the US continues to seek the fall of Saddam Hussein.

  Gulf War

  The area encompasses a third of Iraq, the area south of the 32nd parallel. As part of "Operation Southern Watch," US fighters will shoot down any Iraqi aircraft which attempt to fly within the zone. Bush also says that he is "concerned" over Iraqi government forces' harsh and repressive actions against Shi'ite dissidents, but refuses to say what, if any, action the US will take to assist the dissidents. Democratic presidential opponent Bill Clinton says he supports Bush's actions, but criticizes the administration for not supporting the southern Shi'ites and northern Kurds more directly. Bush officials hasten to clarify that the "no-fly zone" is not a "security zone" employed to give the Shi'ites blanket protection from the Iraqi military, as was implemented during the Gulf War for the Kurds. Bush says he has no intention of bringing about the dismemberment of Iraq into smaller countries: "The United States continues to support Iraq's territorial unity and bears no ill will towards its people," he says. "We continue to look forward to working with a new leadership in Baghdad, one that does not brutally suppress its own people and violate the most basic norms of humanity." (Los Angeles Times/MIT)

• June 4: The FBI is purported to be investigating the connections between George W. Bush and James Bath.

  George W. Bush

  Bath was Salem bin Laden's official representative in the US, and is intimately connected with bin Laden's financial successor, Khaled bin Mahfouz, who is now known to be a prime source of Al-Qaeda funding. Bath, and by inference bin Mahfouz, are accused of funneling money to the Reagan and Bush administrations in order to influence American foreign policy. Allegations of the bin Laden family's attempt to influence President Bush through his son are made, but before proof can be collected, the investigation is quietly throttled. (CCR, Project Censored)
• June 16: UNSCOM reports that progress is being made in revealing and destroying Iraqi weapons, though Iraqi officials are attempting to interfere with the process.

  Gulf War

  Three weeks later, Iraqi officials successfully hide archives believed to contain information about banned weapons from inspectors; in December 2002, a UN Special Commission reports that Iraq's attempts to interfere with the inspections are increasing. (UN/Electric Venom)
• June 26 - 27: The US attacks the Iraqi government's intelligence building in Baghdad

  Gulf War

  with cruise missiles after an abortive attempt to assassinate former president Bush during his April 14-16 visit to Kuwait (see the April item for further details). (FactMonster)

July 1992

• July: Congressman Henry Gonzalez tells the House of Representatives, "The Bush administration deliberately, not inadvertently, helped to arm Iraq by allowing US technology to be shipped to Iraqi military and to Iraqi defense factories...

  Gulf War

  Throughout the course of the Bush administration, US and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship US technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons." (Iran Chamber Society)
• July 9: Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton names Tennessee senator Al Gore as his running mate.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Clinton wins the nomination after an abrasive primary season marked by New York governor Mario Cuomo's will-he won't-he candidacy. Clinton will face heated criticism from Republicans during the presidential campaign, including relentless but unproven allegations of his womanizing (some of which turn out to be true), and false allegations of shady business deals, including a failed land deal called Whitewater. At the time, many feel that Gore's inclusion on the ticket, a fellow Southerner, is a mistake; Gore turns out to be an energetic campaigner and powerful debater who will trash Vice President Dan Quayle in their only meeting. The relentless anti-Clinton campaign, borne during the 1992 campaign, will escalate over the next eight years of Clinton's presidency, and result in a failed impeachment attempt.
• An interesting sidelight to the campaign is the abortive attempt of Lenora Fulani, a presidential candidate for the fringe New Alliance Party, to smear Clinton by allying herself with one Sally Miller Perdue, a former Arkansas beauty queen who would appear with Fulani and tell her tale of sexual escapades with the Democratic candidate. The NAP is a small, bizarre, quasi-Marxist group whose members are largely made up of the psychiatric patients of the group's leaders; though Perdue appears on Sally Jesse Raphael's talk show, no major media outlets pick up on her baseless tales. Even the National Enquirer mocks Fulani and Perdue's story with the headline, "Weird Cult Out to Destroy Clinton." (Wikipedia, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• July 24: Former president Ronald Reagan is questioned for one day after former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger is indicted in the ongoing Iran-Contra trial.

  Iran-Contra scandal

  Reagan's poor memory is evident during questioning; not only is he unable to recall facts and figures, it is difficult for him to name his Secretary of State. Unbeknownst to the public, Reagan is suffering from an extensive onset of Alzheimer's, a fact which his aides have taken great pains to conceal. (PBS, Federation of American Scientists)

August 1992

Ruby Ridge

• August: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, as part of an attempt to infiltrate the white supremacist group Aryan Nation in Idaho, is rebuffed by Nation sympathizer, neo-Nazi sympathizer, and avowed white separatist Randy Weaver.

  Domestic spying

  A "friend" of Weaver's, Gus Magisano, who in reality is a BATF agent, tried and failed to get Weaver to help him plot to rob several banks, and to hoard machine guns for the upcoming battle against the government, none of which interests Weaver. Magisano then asked to buy two shotguns from Weaver, and asked him to saw them off for him; Weaver asked where to cut, and Magisano indicated a spot a quarter-inch beneath the legal limit. Once Weaver completed the sawing, Magisano informed him of his status as a federal agent, and told Weaver that he can either be arrested or become an informant against his friends in Aryan Nation. Weaver, who later claims that the shotguns were of legal length, refused. The BATF then filed charges against Weaver. "I don't understand it," recalls daughter Rachel. "We were just good people who didn't even have any intention of doing anything wrong. I totally don't understand why they even came to my dad to ask him to saw off shotguns. It makes no sense to me. It just blows my mind that they'd even care."
• Six months later, the Weavers appeared in court to answer the charges, where a judge informs them that if they lost the case, they'd lose their cabin. The family discussed the situation, and decided they were in a no-win situation; they would undoubtedly lose the case, and thereby lose everything they owned. So they decided to stop appearing in court. A family friend, Kevin Harris, moved in with them. Fearing surveillance, they hunker down in their remote mountain cabin, and the adults begin carrying weapons at all times. They found and ripped down a surveillance camera, heightening their apprehension. Weaver lets his friends know that he intends to stay on his mountain no matter what, though most of his friends consider his words mere bravado.
• In fact, US marshals have been staking out the cabin for weeks. When Weaver refuses to respond to a final judicial summons, FBI and BATF agents surround Weaver's home in Ruby Ridge. On August 21, a US marshal attempting to serve Weaver the summons is approached by Weaver's Labrador retriever; another marshal, in jungle camouflage, leaps from behind a bush and fatally shoots the dog. 14-year old Sammy Weaver screams, "You killed my dog, you son of a b*tch!" and fires two random, unaimed shots. Another hidden agent fires, nearly severing Sammy's arm. The boy screams, "Dad! I'm coming home! Dad!," turns to run, and is shot dead, machine-gunned in the back. Harris, who followed Sammy and the dog down the hill, returns fire; FBI agent William Degan is shot and killed, though it is not clear whether Harris fired the fatal shot or the agent died from "friendly fire." FBI assistant director Larry Potts lies to Special Agent Eugene Glenn, in charge of the agents on the scene, telling Glenn that "shoot-to-kill" authorizations had been granted, when in actuality, none had. That night, Vicki writes in her diary that Sammy and the dog, Striker, had been killed while chasing "the servants of the New World Order" down Farnsworth Road.
• Within 24 hours, a small army of 400 troops surround the cabin and the nearby countryside, with agents and officials from the FBI, the BATF, the Highway Patrol, US marshals, state and local and city police, the US Border Patrol, and the Forestry Service. Tanks and armored personnel carriers are deployed. The FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team takes charge, cordoning off an area of twenty square miles at a cost of a million dollars a day. More federal troops are flown in by helicopter. A new road for the tanks is cut. The Idaho governor declares martial law, calling the Weaver cabin "an extreme emergency and disaster area." Local reporters observe FBI agents loading jet fuel inside two canisters and load the canisters on board a helicopter, which then flew over the cabin, apparently to firebomb the place. FBI officials note that the reporters had observed the canisters, and order the helicopter to land without dropping the bombs. Except for some sirens in the valley, the occupation of the area is so stealthy that the Weavers have no idea what's been arrayed against them. Some neighbors see the goings-on and wave placards reading "Death to the New World Order!" and such at the advancing troops.
• Early the next morning, Randy walks to the toolshed to visit the body of his slain son. An FBI sniper yells, "Freeze, Weaver!" and shoots him in the arm. Randy's wife Vicky, standing in the open cabin door with baby Elisheba in her arms, screams, "You b*stards!" Another sniper shoots Vicki in the face, blowing part of her head across the cabin and embedding skull fragments in Kevin Harris's body (Harris is also wounded by sniper fire, and later develops gangrene). Vicki drops dead, the baby still in her arms, at the feet of her daughter Rachel. Randy manages to get back inside, where he closes and blocks the doors, and curtains the windows. "[W]e were afraid [Elisheba]'d been shot, too, but she was okay. It was just Mom's blood," recalls Rachel. "I remember feeding Elisheba a whole box of sweets so she wouldn't cry, poor girl. I remember having to crawl through Mom's blood every time I needed to go to the kitchen to get food. I don't think of it as this day or that day. I just remember it as one long, terrible day." Meanwhile, the military sets up camp down the mountain, with soldiers staking down a sign reading "Camp Vicki." Agents crawl underneath the house; APCs roll through the yard. A friend of Weaver's, ex-policeman Jack McLamb, later says that the FBI targeted Vicki because she "was the strongest member of the family. This is what you learn in military training. Take out the head. This was a family. But they were treating them just as a military target. I get tears in my eyes thinking about it."
• As days go by without further incident, the agents use a number of tactics to try to flush Randy, Harris, Rachel, and the remaining Weaver children, including yelling through bullhorns, "Vicki! Vicki! Tell Randy to pick up the phone! Vicki! We're having blueberry pancakes for breakfast. What are you having for breakfast?" A distraught Weaver would scream back, "You sons of b*tches, you shot her! You know she's dead!" FBI spokespersons tell the gathering media that Randy himself shot Sammy, that the marshals were pinned down by fire from the cabin but did not return fire themselves. They describe the Weaver's plywood cabin as "a mountain fortress" and "a bunker," and "a stronghold protected by a cache of fifteen weapons and ammunition capable of piercing armored personnel carriers." None of the statements are true. They tell the press that Randy's sawed-off shotguns are "the chosen weapons of drug dealers and terrorists." The media reacts predictably; one "leftist" talk show, Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, has a great deal of fun at the Weavers' expense, with Maher and guest Garry Marshall mocking the deaths (Marshall saying incorrectly that only a dog was shot), and only guest Nadine Strossen of the ACLU defending Weaver, saying that belonging to Aryan Nation is his right, and reminding the audience that the Weavers had not hurt anyone until the FBI shot Sammy Weaver.
• Protesters from around the country begin to gather on the scene to protest the FBI's heavy-handed tactics, eventually numbering over 2000. Third-party presidential candidate and conservative activist James "Bo" Gritz, a former Green Beret who had been Weaver's commanding officer in Vietnam, serves, along with McLamb, as a mediator between the FBI and Weaver. "We're trying to calm the girls down, get them to stop crying and to focus on something other than their mother lying underneath the kitchen table in a pool of blood," recalls McLamb. "This was unbelievable trauma. Every time they had to get food, there was her body." Gritz finally succeeds in winning Weaver's trust, mostly by preaching to the gathered soldiers and the congregation of protesters about the New World Order, the Bilderberg Group, and other presumed secret ruling societies -- "the government hated us for that," laughs McLamb later, "these guys are not supposed to know all about this, and Bo's giving dates and names and times. Randy and the girls knew what he was doing" -- and after ten days of siege, the Weavers come out. "It was so wonderful to see the door opening and those little girls come out and take off their weapons," recalls McLamb. "And they were the saddest days of my life that were spent on top of that mountain. When I realized that my fellow police officers and soldiers were capable of that. ...Well, I carried the little girls down to the military force, these big guys, face paint, they all looked like trees and bushes, and their tears were coming down and streaking their face paint. They were all crying. And that's why there are so many people today that are speaking out against this damnable New World Order." It is a fact that the US militia movement, which before the Weaver siege had been virtually negligible, experiences a massive upsurge in membership afterwards.
• Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris will be charged with murder, conspiracy, and assault. Harris is acquitted of all charges, and Weaver only of failing to appear on the original firearms charge. Weaver is sentenced to 16 months in prison, but the trial judge forcefully reprimands the FBI and BATF agents for their tactics. (Six days into the trial, another siege, against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, will end with 53 adults and 23 children burning to death after the FBI attacks the compound.) During the trial, FBI agent Greg Rampton, who had cooperated closely with the Texas GOP during the 1990 investigation of Democrat Jim Hightower, is found to have tampered with evidence at the scene -- Rampton placed a Ruger shell in Weaver's yard in an attempt to manufacture evidence against Weaver. Rampton was also forced to admit on the witness stand that he and other FBI agents had "recreated" the crime scene in photographs they had presented as evidence; agents had removed shell casings before cameras could record their placement, and later placed them in different positions more likely to prove Weaver's guilt and then shot photos. When this comes out towards the end of the trial, the FBI's case against Weaver, already shaky, collapses. (It was suspected, but never proven, that Rampton had manufactured evidence in the Hightower investigation, evidence used by Karl Rove and the Texas GOP to defeat Hightower in the race for agriculture commissioner and later to send three of Hightower's associates to jail. At the request of the Texas Department of Justice, Rampton transferred to Idaho.) Rampton will transfer again, this time to Denver, where he will assist the FBI's Project Megiddo, an effort to counter suspected Y2K domestic terrorism, and whose effect is more to curtail the civil rights of anti-government protesters than to actually do anything against domestic terrorism. After the trial, defense lawyer Gerry Spence tells the press, "A jury today has said that you can't kill somebody just because you wear badges, then cover those homicides by prosecuting the innocent. What are we going to do now about the deaths of Vicki Weaver, a mother who was killed with a baby in her arms, and Sammy Weaver, a boy who was shot in the back?"
• Weaver will later win $3.1 million in civil damages from the government. Rachel, Sara, and Elisheba Weaver will each receive $1 million in out-of-court settlements. A 1995 investigation by the Senate will be highly critical of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies. Weaver will move with the surviving members of his family to Montana, where he will buy a car lot. Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma is said to have been at least partially motivated by the incident at Ruby Ridge.
• As it turns out, Vicky Weaver, more so than Randy, was the ideological radical in the family. Vicki believed that the world was run by a secret clique of primarily Zionist international bankers who wanted to impose a genocidal New World Order and implant microchips in the world's populace. She was primarily behind the move to Idaho, where she homeschooled her older children and gave birth to baby Elisheba. Randy, less ideological, made friends with his neighbors in the local chapter of Aryan Nation, but was kicked out when he brought a six-pack of beer to a gathering. Weaver, now remarried, has come to terms with the tragedy to an extent. "I can joke about Ruby Ridge now and keep going," he says, though he says he and his daughters all suffer from post-traumatic stress, even baby Elisheba: "Elisheba remembered that sh*t until she was two and a half. 'Blood! Mama fall down! Mama needs help!' She made everyone in the room start crying. She still says, 'I wish Mama hadn't died. Well. Hell, yeah." Weaver still takes issue with the idea that he himself is a white supremacist, saying that he never espoused such beliefs, and that the media falsely labeled him as such in order to turn public opinion against him. As a side note, there is no such place as "Ruby Ridge." The Weavers lived in a nameless area between Caribou Ridge and Ruby Creek. The name is probably a media invention. (Wikipedia, Court TV Crime Library, Moore and Slater, Mark Crispin Miller, Jon Ronson)
• August: Arkansas lawyer Cliff Jackson, a political and personal rival of Clinton's with extreme right-wing and religious views, calls private investigator Larry Case with a juicy tip.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Jackson is regarded with trepidation by reporters who have dealt with him previously, finding that Jackson is not above massaging the facts (particularly about Clinton's so-called draft evasion) to suit his own ends. (Jackson himself obtained a suspect medical deferment to avoid service.) Jackson says he has access to a "spicy" photograph of Clinton that he is sure will doom the Clinton candidacy. Jackson wants Case to sell the photograph to a media source for at least two million dollars, to be split between Jackson, Case, and the owner of the photograph. Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel, a devout Clinton hater, tells Case that Jackson is an absolutely reliable source, but the National Enquirer, contacted by Case, is leery. No one ever sees the photograph, and Rempel later says of Jackson, "[H]e regretted making the call to Case and said it made his skin crawl to be involved even that much." Considering Jackson's present and future involvement in scurrilous and illicit attempts to smear Clinton, his moral objections to dealing with Case are hard to fathom. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• August 14: Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney says Bush was right not to "get bogged down" in Iraq, and right not to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

  Iran-Contra scandal

  In 2001 and beyond, Cheney, as Vice President, will urge the overthrow of Hussein and the long-term occupation of Iraq. "[T]he question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" he says. "And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." Going to Baghdad, Cheney says, would require a much different approach militarily than fighting in the open desert outside the capital, a type of warfare that US troops are not familiar with or comfortable in engaging. "All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques," he says. "Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq." (Seattle Post Intelligencer, Mother Jones)
• August 26: Another no-fly zone, which Iraqi planes are not allowed to enter,

  Gulf War

  is set up in southern Iraq, south of latitude 32 degrees north. (BBC)
• August 31: RTC investigator L. Jean Lewis issues a criminal referral on Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty with the FBI and the US attorney's office, naming not only Jim and Susan McDougal, but every single political contributor present at a 1985 Clinton gubernatorial rally held at Madison.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  She lists the Clintons as "possible witnesses," along with fellow Democrats Jim Guy Tucker and former US senator William Fulbright, another McDougal investor. Everyone named in her referral is a Democrat, though McDougal is quite bipartisan in his choice of investors and clients. Normally, such referrals take months to process, but within days Lewis begins pestering the FBI and the US attorney's office with demands for immediate action. She even accuses FBI agent Stephen Irons of trying to turn her into a local pariah by not immediately moving on the referral.
• The Clintons find out about the referral sometime in late September or early October, when a supporter in Kansas City informs Clinton's secretary Betsey Wright that she had overheard a female RTC staffer boasting about sending a referral up to the FBI that would implicate the Clintons in criminal behavior. (Lewis had been transferred from her Tulsa office to Kansas City when the Tulsa office closed.) Wright does not know it at the time, but people in the White House, the Justice Department, and the Bush campaign are already taking a direct interest in Lewis's machinations. Attorney General William Barr later testifies that he was told about the referral by White House cabinet secretary Edith Holiday on September 17. Holiday is currently the chief liason between the White House and the Bush re-election campaign. Barr is informed three weeks later that the FBI has no record of such a referral; Barr testifies that when he informs Holiday of this, she seems surprised, leading Barr to wonder if "she had better information" than he. Holiday herself will testify under oath that she recalls no conversations with Barr concerning Madison Guaranty.
• Lewis is outraged when she learns Irons intends to take no action on the referral until after the election due to its potential impact on the election. She informs him that her bosses in Washington expect immediate action on the referral. At the same time, Lewis speaks with representatives of the US attorney's office, who question both her motivations and her referral's substance. US attorney Fletcher Jackson says that McDougal's previous trial and acquittal will make Lewis look "vindictive." Jackson believes that McDougal and McDougal alone is potentially guilty of any crimes related to Madison, and that the Clintons, along with Tucker, Fulbright, and his other investors are victims, not accomplices.
• At the end of September, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray calls the office of RTC chief executive Albert Casey about the Madison referral. Casey promises to look into the matter, but then hears from Gray again, who tells Casey to forget about the entire matter. (Gray will later testify that he recalls no such conversations with Casey.) Gray is working with both the White House and the Bush campaign, and, like other campaign officials, says he does not speak about the Clintons with any government officials.
• On October 7, the Little Rock FBI office sends a lengthy telex to the Washington headquarters expressing its skepticism about Lewis's referral, specifically challenging Lewis's conclusion that McDougal's financial misdeeds were for the benefit of the Clintons and other investors. The telex says that no evidence exists of the Clintons' involvement in any financial fraud, that Lewis's allegations of wrongdoing by the Clintons is "improbable," and they would not authorize an investigation. Spurred by Barr, the FBI responds on October 8 with a letter insisting that the Little Rock field office review Lewis's referral and report back by October 18, three weeks before the presidential election.
• US attorney Charles Banks, a former Republican officeholder who once sued Governor Clinton over what he considered the politically motivated firing of a Republican labor commissioner and whose appointment (by Bush) to a federal judgeship is pending in the Senate, feels that he has to pursue the referral, but is determined not to be used for political reasons. He distrusts Lewis and feels that charging McDougal would be a tremendous waste of time and money. He also sees no evidence in Lewis's referral of any criminal wrongdoing by either the Clintons or Tucker. He writes a long letter to agent-in-charge Don Pettus summarizing his misgivings over the case and reiterating his refusal to participate in any charges laid prior to the election, knowing that such charges, though very likely specious, could influence the election. Banks realizes that by writing and sending such a letter, he is probably terminating any further political career he may desire. On October 16, the Little Rock FBI sends its report to Washington, finding "absolutely no factual basis to suggest any criminal activity" on the parts of the Clintons or anyone else besides McDougal. The FBI agents also reiterate their complaints that Lewis has focused on Madison Guaranty and failed to investigate other, far more criminal, actions by much larger S&Ls.
• The Bush campaign denies it, but evidence later surfaces that campaign officials indeed sought derogatory information against Clinton from government agencies, particularly from his passport files, a violation of the law and of Clinton's rights to privacy. The campaign has long attacked Clinton's patriotism over his anti-war activities during the Vietnam era, and a White House aide had asked a political appointee in the State Department to verify the rumor that Clinton had once tried to renounce his US citizenship (he had not). The allegations result in the appointment of an independent counsel, former Republican US attorney Joseph diGenova. DiGenova is the choice of extreme right-wing judge David Sentelle, a protege of Jesse Helms. DiGenova will conclude his investigation without filing a single indictment.
• Authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons speculate that part of the sudden lack of interest on the part of Gray and the Bush campaign may be because to bring up the issue of failed S&Ls might backfire, since the president's son, Neil Bush, was the director of Silverado, a corrupt Colorado institution whose spectacular failure cost taxpayers a billion dollars. Apparently, the campaign decides to set aside its concerns with Clinton's investments and focus instead on his draft dodging. Thus, the Bush campaign's burgeoning plans for an "October Surprise" -- indictment, or the possibility of indictment, of Clinton for fraud just before the election -- are scotched. Lewis's own efforts to use the criminal justice system to pursue her own agenda are also at a dead end. For now. (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)

Fall 1992

• Fall:

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Failed banker and real estate developer Jim McDougal, now deeply in the throes of mental illness, gives an interview to the New York Times alleging criminal actions about the Clintons and the Whitewater real estate deal. The allegations have no basis in fact and are quickly dismissed by most observers, but conservative opponents of Clinton take note. (Susan McDougal)
• Fall: The State Department finds evidence that Bush officials have illegally searched presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport file and then leaked to the press a false criminal referral suggesting that Clinton had tampered with his file, ostensibly to remove an incriminating document.

  GOP campaign strategies

  The search is later determined to be part of an effort to claim, falsely, that Clinton once attempted to renounce his US citizenship as part of his activities to protest the Vietnam War. Despite clear evidence that Clinton's privacy rights had been trampled in an attempt to fix the outcome of a national election, Republican investigator Joseph diGenova clears the Bush campaign of all wrongdoing, and even chastises the State Department's inspector general for raising the suspicions in the first place. This is the source of the unfounded rumor that Bill Clinton tried to renouce his citizenship in order to avoid the Vietnam draft. (Consortium News)

September 1992

• September 1: Known terrorist Ramzi Yousef enters the country. He is the mastermind behind the 1993 WTC bombings.

  Islamist terrorism

  Oddly enough, though Yousef passes freely through airport security, Yousef's traveling companion, Ahmad Ajaj, is arrested upon arrival at Kennedy Airport and found to have in his possession an array of fake identification, numerous bomb-making manuals and treatises, video tapes about weaponry, and an advanced guide to surveillance training. Ajaj is charged with nothing more than passport fraud, and is sentenced to six months in prison. He calls Yousef frequently from prison, but what few calls that were recorded were not translated until years later. It is possible that Ajaj was a mole for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and may have informed that agency about the WTC bombings beforehand. It is certain that Ajaj participated in the planning of the attack from his cell. He is released from jail 3 days after the WTC bombings, but is later recaptured and sentenced to over 100 years in prison for his role in the attack. One of the manuals seized from Ajaj is horrendously mistranslated for his trial: the title page is translated to read "The Basic Rule," when it really translates as "The Base." In Arabic, this phrase is "al-Qaeda." (FBI translator Sibel Edmonds will later testify that many of the FBI's Arabic translators are incompetent.) A proper translation would have shown a strong connection between the terrorist group and the 1993 WTC bombings. (CCR)
• September 25: Lena Guerrero resigns as the head of the Texas Railroad Commission, a position she was appointed to and was running for election to retain.

  GOP campaign strategies

  Guerrero was a rising star in Texas Democratic politics, widely seen as the successor to Ann Richards; Richards landed a spot for her to speak at the summer's Democratic National Convention, where she gave a rousing speech that cemented her position as an up-and-coming politician with national aspirations. Unfortunately for Guerrero, she claimed on her resume that she was a graduate of the University of Texas, when in fact she never graduated. Worse, she falsely claimed to be a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and failed classes on Texas government and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. GOP strategist Karl Rove learns of Guerrero's false claims, obtains her college transcripts, and waits for the proper moment to release the information. As Election Day neared, Rove alerts the press to Guerrero's false claims: "Karl had Lena's transcript," says an Austin political consultant. "But he held it until the right moment. The perfect moment. Then he screwed her." Guerrero badly botches her response to the news, first denying the story, then claiming that she just recently learned she was four hours short of a college degree. (This after a commencement speech at Texas A&M University where she said, "I remember well my own commencement." No one believed Guerrero's claims that she didn't realize she wasn't a college graduate, and didn't realize she wasn't a member of Phi Beta Kappa, especially after Rove papers the media with Guerrero's own statements and press releases.
• After Guerrero releases her transcripts, showing she was far more than four hours short of her degree, her credibility is completely in tatters. Guerrero loses the election in a landslide, but Rove was not only targeting Guerrero, he was targeting her mentor, Ann Richards, as a means to defeat her in the upcoming gubernatorial elections. Rove is less successful in his attacks on other Richards appointees, particularly Jane Hickie, who directed the state's office in Washington. Hickie is a scrupulously honest, meticulously organized record-keeper who counters Rove's allegations of ethical lapses and misuse of taxpayer dollars by disproving Rove's allegations with a blizzard of records and paperwork showing how she had actually saved the state money, but the point was never to bring down Hickie -- it was to raise public questions about the ethics and competence of an Ann Richards colleague. (The attack against Hickie parallels a similar set of ethics and malfeasance charges brought against a Rove candidate, freshman senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a year earlier. The charges had far more credibility and evidence to support them than Rove's attacks on Hickie, so Rove counterattacked by impugning the integrity of District Attorney Ronnie Earle, lying under oath that he had received leaked information about the charges from a Dallas Morning News reporter, and successfully got the judge in the case to dismiss critical evidence due to supposed political influence. The case against Hutchinson was dismissed, and she took her place in the US Senate.) (James Moore and Wayne Slater)
• September 25: Campaigning for reelection, George Bush tells an audience that

  GOP campaign strategies

  his opponent, Bill Clinton, believes that a "Washington elite" should run the country's economy. (Paul Waldman)

October 1992

• October: Another sexual allegation that fizzles before the election is potentially far more damaging to Clinton, if it can be proven to be true.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  Sheffield Nelson and GOP businessman Peter Yoakum attempt to convince a woman named Juanita Broaddrick to come forward with her story that in 1978, while he was campaigning for governor, Clinton raped her. Yoakum sends a letter telling a tantalizing story: in 1990, Nelson had visited Broaddrick at her home where he interviewed, and recorded, Broaddrick and her husband, David, discussing the alleged rape. According to the letter, Broaddrick claims that in 1978, Clinton visited her in her hotel room during a Nursing Home Association conference ostensibly to discuss business, and while alone with Broaddrick, raped her. The letter says that Broaddrick now wishes to come forward to set her husband's mind at ease and convince him of her truthfulness. Yoakum also says that he has tapes of Broaddrick's husband recounting stories of Clinton giving him "a couple of big favors" in return for his silence.
• The story is shaky at best. Not only is the timing suspect, but the details don't support the allegations. Broaddrick never worked at a nursing home; her employer, Brownwood Manor, is a home for severely mentally disabled individuals. Though Broaddrick had been appointed to the state's Nursing Home Advisory Board, there is no record that she or her husband had ever sought or received any special favors from the governor's office. Indeed, the couple was involved in a long and ugly dispute with the state over reimbursement of Medicaid payments, which a lawsuit resolved in their favor in 1994. The supposed tape of David Broaddrick claiming the favors never materializes. Worse, Broaddrick's credibility is questionable. In 1990, Clinton had visited Brownwood Manor to campaign for votes: the two sisters who managed the facility for the Broaddricks have held a long and very public grudge against Clinton ever since he commuted their father's murderer's death sentence in 1980. Clinton scheduled the appearance at Brownwood partially as a peacemaking overture to the sisters, and partially in an effort to win the county from Nelson. His appearance was one of numerous appearances in Crawford County; his visit to Brownwood, on October 20, 1990, was his last stop. Broaddrick later claims that she was unaware of Clinton's visit to her facility, but reporter Ken Richardson remembers it differently: he recalls Broaddrick asking him to cover the visit, and offering him photos of Clinton taken at a political rally earlier that day. She says that Clinton "barged into" her office at Brownwood during the appearance; records show that Broaddrick wasn't even at the facility during the event.
• Though Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel is interested in Broaddrick's story, the story is far from solid. Its origins in the national Republican Party makes it dubious on its face, as does Broaddrick's unwillingness to speak publicly about the allegations. "We got the tip in October," Rempel recalls. "It was the consensus of reporters and editors that even if the facts turned out to be well documented, reliably corroborated, and served up on a silver platter, there was no way we could report such a sensational allegation on the eve of [an] election. Furthermore, we had no way of assessing the validity of the story, even on a gut level, without talking to the alleged victim. Without her cooperation, there was no way to even begin an investigation." Former Spectator reporter David Brock is put off when, in 1995, his attempts to research the story run aground when Yoakum refuses to cooperate unless he is cut in on a book deal. Yoakum also says he has destroyed the tapes of Nelson's conversations with Broaddrick; Brock learns that a private investigator claims to have access to copies of the tapes, but that the tapes fail to support the allegations and are worthless. Brock finds that even Nelson, Clinton's old enemy, now doubts that the rape ever happened. Yet Yoakum's original letter, with Broaddrick's name deleted, still circulates on right-wing Web sites to this day, and even appears on ABC News's own Web site. Broaddrick, who vacillates between accusing Clinton of raping her and swearing in court depositions that nothing ever happened between her and Clinton, will, in 1998, accepts a grant of immunity from independent counsel Kenneth Starr and tell a lurid version of her story to ABC. The only witnesses who can validate her story are her husband and the two Brownwood Manor sisters with their grudge against Clinton. An FBI investigation labels the story "inconclusive." (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• October 9:

  GOP campaign strategies

  George Bush reacts to his accusation that Bill Clinton committed treason by participating in anti-Vietnam protests during his days at Oxford University by saying, "You let the liberal elite do their number today, trying to call me Joe McCarthy. I'm standing with American principle." This and other pronoucements are part of Bush's strategy to paint Clinton and his campaign as an extension of a so-called "liberal elite" that, by definition, is anti-American. (Paul Waldman)
• Late October: A young New Zealand journalist, Andrew Cooper, who is covering the US presidential campaign independently, meets an elderly Arkansan named Everett Ham, who introduces him to the seamy underworld of Arkansas's anti-Clinton underground.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  He lets Cooper stay on his houseboat on the outskirts of Little Rock in return for odd jobs, and clearly intends to make Cooper his protege. "I'm going to give you a lesson in southern history and culture," he tells Cooper one day. "I'm going to teach you how politics in this country and this state really work. You're in North Little Rock. This is n*ggertown. We don't have conflicts with our n*ggers here. We keep them in their place." Cooper is appalled but intrigued, and broke, so he chooses to stay; he has, by strange fortune, landed in the center of lawyer Cliff Jackson's anti-Clinton group, the Alliance for the Rebirth of an Independent America. Ham's houseboat is plastered with Bush/Quayle posters, news clippings, and bumper stickers. Ham himself is a former advisor to Republican governor Winthrop Rockefeller, and a former chair of the state Republican Party. He proudly displays photos of himself with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and other prominent Republicans. Cooper is amazed to find that Ham's houseboat is a beehive of activity. Jackson and dozens of local Republicans and other Clinton-haters meet night and day aboard Ham's boat, plotting Clinton's downfall. Seeming to exist on little more than vodka, Ham spends hours a day phoning right-wing talk shows excoriating Clinton. Cooper later recalls, "They were in it for the hate. They considered Clinton a traitor to his country. Everett was infuriated that 'n*ggers, feminists, Jews, f*ggots, and the liberal New York press,' as he put it, could force people like himself from power. Everett gravely assured me that they had the means at their disposal to bring about the utter destruction of Bill Clinton, and whether it happened before or after the election was of little concern for them. Their thinking was clearly long-term." (Joe Conason and Gene Lyons)
• October - November: The GOP tries to make an issue of Clinton's involvement in the "Whitewater" real estate deal; the attempt involves Attorney General William Barr and White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, among others.

  Whitewater / Lewinsky and related "scandals"

  The issue fails to catch on, mostly because no proof of wrongdoing is ever found, and the Clintons actually lost over $40,000 in the deal. Whitewater will dog Clinton's entire presidency, as the GOP will revive it as part of its effort to undermine the Clinton presidency. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich's political machine attempts to dig up dirt on Clinton's sexual past, and finds a ludicrous tale that Clinton fathered a "love child" with a black prostitute (see above). The tale is later proven completely false. (CNN, H.R. Clinton, Joe Conason)
• October - November: The Bush campaign has more success in attacking Bill Clinton's status as a so-called "draft dodger."

  GOP campaign strategies

  Clinton has always admitted that he sought student deferments to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, a war he deeply opposed, though he did give up his student deferment and enter the draft. Joe Conason later writes, "They defined Clinton's Vietnam dissent and his reluctance to serve as a test of character that demonstrated his unfitness for the presidency. It was fine to be a fortunate son like George W. Bush or [Bush's vice-president] Dan Quayle, to whom an 'honorable' method of evading Vietnam's perils was awarded like a graduation gift. [Both Quayle and the younger Bush avoided service by joining the National Guard; Quayle spent the Vietnam years playing golf and allegedly using vast quantities of cocaine, while the younger Bush deserted his Guard post before completing his term of service.] It was unacceptable, however, to be a self-made young man from a lower-middle-class family like clinton, who didn't want to fight in a war he believed was terribly wrong." "I have a different concept of public service and service to the country," Bush tells conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who managed to dodge Vietnam service himself by using a cyst on his buttocks as an excuse to receive a medical deferment. The Bush campaign digs through State Department files on Clinton and finds information about a 1969 trip Clinton made to Moscow while a student at Oxford, and uses it to smear Clinton's patriotism. "It is absolutely germane to the voting public to know precisely why Bill Clinton traveled to the heart of enemy territory at the height of the war," says campaign spokeswoman and Lee Atwater protege Mary Matalin. (An assistant secretary of state will be forced to resign over his allowing the Bush campaign to illegally peruse Clinton's files.) GOP operatives start false rumors that Clinton renounced his American citizenship while overseas. While the efforts to smear and defame Clinton are ultimately fruitless during the campaign, partially because of the Clinton campaign's energetic counterattacks, they will be endlessly recycled during the eight-year efforts to besmirch Clinton during his presidency. (Joe Conason)

November 1992

Bush sends troops to Somalia

• November:

  Bush's foreign policies

  The US sends troops to Somalia under the auspices of "Operation Rescue Hope," an attempt at both peacekeeping and humanitarian aid. Somalia, a country essentially in anarchy, has a large Muslim population and is well known as a hotbed of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism. Osama bin Laden is well-connected to elements of the Somalian terrorist movement. (ABC News)
• November: East Timorese rebellion leader Xanana Gusmao is arrested in the town of Dili and charged with subversion.

  East Timor rebellion

  He is convicted the next year and sentenced to life in prison, but wins his freedom in 1999 after the Indonesian occupation of East Timor begins to collapse. Gusmao will later be elected president of East Timor. (Xanana Gusmao, BBC/East Timor Timeline)

Bill Clinton elected President

• November 5: Bill Clinton wins the US presidential election, defeating George Bush's attempt to win a second term.

  Clinton Administration

  Clinton wins in large part because of the independent candidacy of H. Ross Perot, a libertarian billionaire who draws perhaps 20% of potential Bush voters to him. Thusly, Clinton is one of a relatively small number of American presidents who win office without securing a majority of the votes cast. One of the final blows to Bush's hopes for re-election was the October 1992 filing of charges against Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger by Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. The indictment revealed that Weinberger's notes confirmed that, far from being "out of the loop" as he had so often claimed, Bush was intimately involved in the arms-for-hostages deals. After the election, Bush will use his final days in office to pardon Weinberger and others; most Americans see Bush's pardons as an attempt to protect himself from further charges from Iran-Contra. CNN's William Schneider says, "Not only did he pardon his political allies, he pardoned them for illegal activities in which he himself may have been implicated." Iraqgate, too, took its toll. Clinton's vice-presidential candidate Al Gore said in September 1992, "George Bush wants the American people to see him as the hero who put out a raging fire. But new evidence now shows that he is the one who set the fire." In October, Gore accused Bush of "presiding over a cover-up significantly larger than Watergate," and Clinton promised that, if elected, he would appoint a special prosecutor, a promise he will fail to keep. Bush injured himself in his re-election bid by coming across as a privileged rich politician who is out of touch with the concerns of the average American; an infamous incident at a grocery store, where Bush is apparently amazed at a grocery checkout scanner, makes him seem as if he is too privileged to set foot in an ordinary grocery. (Bush takes issue with the characterization, though it is largely true; Bush and his family have lived lives of stunning wealth and privilege foreign to most Americans.) A seemingly minor incident during one of the presidential debates, where Bush ostentatiously checks his watch during one of Clinton's responses, also makes it seem to many voters that Bush cared little for issues that the voters cared about; Bush's defense that he was merely trying to point out that Clinton was exceeding his allocated time made little impact with voters. (CNN, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Kevin Phillips)
• November: For all of their dislike of Clinton, hard-line conservatives celebrate the election loss of George Bush.

  George H.W. Bush

  "Oh,yeah, man, it was fabulous," recalls Tom DeLay, the extremist Texas congressman, who'd feared another "four years of misery" fighting the urge to cross his party's too-liberal leader. At the Heritage Foundation, a group of right-wingers called the Third Generation conduct a "bizarre rite involving a plastic head of the deposed Bush on a platter." The plan is similar to the one from 1976: withdraw all but the most surface support from a too-moderate Republican president, in that case Gerald Ford, in favor of a more purely conservative successor, in that case Ronald Reagan, wait four years, and install the new, more conservative president. Conservatives immediately begin working towards Clinton's eventual political demise, and work tirelessly through the media to deny Clinton the usual "honeymoon period" traditionally enjoyed by incoming presidents. (Christian Science Monitor)

December 1992

• December: A bomb explodes in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, killing two tourists.

  Islamist terrorism

  US soldiers had just left the hotel en route to Somalia. This is probably the first operation of the newly formed Al-Qaeda terrorist network. (CCR)

BCCI report released

• December:

  BCCI scandal

  Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown release their report on "the BCCI Affair" as the conclusion of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations's investigation into the criminal activities of the bank, and its connections to Iran-Contra and other political scandals.
• The summary of the report reads, in part: "BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers. ...BCCI systematically bribed world leaders and political figures throughout the world. ...BCCI developed a strategy to infiltrate the U.S. banking system, which it successfully implemented, despite regulatory barriers that were designed to keep it out.
• "...Equally important to BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans, beginning with Bert Lance, and continuing with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, well-connected former federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators. Wittingly or not, these individuals provided essential assistance to BCCI through lending their names and their reputations to BCCI at critical moments. Thus, it was not merely BCCI's deceptions that permitted it to infiltrate the United States and its banking system. Also essential were BCCI's use of political influence peddling and the revolving door in Washington. ...The Justice Department mishandled its investigation and prosecution of BCCI, and its relationships with other government agencies concerning BCCI. ...The CIA developed important information on BCCI, and inadvertently failed to provide it to those who could use it. The CIA and former CIA officials had a far wider range of contacts and links to BCCI and BCCI shareholders, officers, and customers, than has been acknowledged by the CIA. ...BCCI's and its shareholders' cadre of professional help in Washington D.C. included, at various times, a former Secretary of Defense (Clark Clifford), former Senators and Congressmen (John Culver, Mike Barnes), former federal prosecutors (Larry Wechsler, Raymond Banoun, and Larry Barcella, a former State Department Official (William Rogers), a former White House aide (Ed Rogers), a current Presidential campaign deputy director (James Lake), and former Federal Reserve Attorneys (Baldwin Tuttle, Jerry Hawke, and Michael Bradfield). In addition, BCCI solicited the help of Henry Kissinger, who chose not to do business with BCCI but made a referral of BCCI to his own lawyers. ...BCCI'S public relations firm smeared people who were telling the truth as part of its work for BCCI."
• The PR firm is Hill and Knowlton, which has deep connections to the Republican party, and was a key element in massaging information about Iraq and the Gulf War for American consumption. But BCCI's involvement in American politics spans both Democrat and Republican parties. The report, and its many recommendations, causes a major stir inside the Beltway, but is largely ignored by the American media. (American Buddha [the site contains the entire text of the report])
• December:

  GOP campaign strategies

  The Clinton transition team refuses to accept evidence offered by Iran about the 1980 "October Surprise." A task force headed by conservative Democratic representative Lee Hamilton has already ignored or hidden evidence provided to it that proves the GOP cut a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 elections. (Consortium News)
• December:

  Clinton Administration

  The Clinton transition team hires Linda Tripp as an administrative assistant. Tripp worked for the Bush administration in the Defense Department. Tripp will eventually work in the Office of Legal Counsel, sometimes working with Vince Foster, and later will become an integral part of the conspiracy to bring down the Clinton presidency. (Executive Intelligence Review)
• December 11: The White House informs Iran-Contra special investigator Lawrence Walsh that

  Iran-Contra scandal

  Bush has kept diaries relevant to Iran-Contra, which have never been produced to investigators. Walsh requests that the diaries be turned over; Bush refuses to produce the diaries until December 22, well after his election loss to Bill Clinton. (Bushwatch, Federation of American Scientists, AlterNet)

Bush pardons a number of convicted Iran-Contra figures

• December 24: As evidence of Bush's own criminal wrongdoing begins to bubble to the surface,

  Iran-Contra scandal

  Bush issues blanket pardons for Casper Weinberger, Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, Walter McFarlane, Alan Fiers, Elliot Abrams and Clair George. The pardons stop any possibility of Bush being called to testify in any of their trials. Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh strongly denounces the pardons, but the pardons essentially end both the Iran-contra and BCCI/BNL investigations. Walsh, who was in possession of evidence proving Bush's involvement, later says that it was "hard to find an adjective strong enough to characterize a president who has such contempt for honesty." (Democrat John Kerry presides over the Senate investigation into BCCI.) Bush, who consistently denies any knowledge of the Iran arms deals even after evidence shows that he attended many meetings on the subject, had written in his diary, "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there. ...This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."
• As for Weinberger, he lied without penalty to both Congress and federal investigators about whether he had kept notes on key meetings about Iran-Contra -- notes Weinberger never turned over as required by law. Weinberger, formerly Reagan's secretary of defense until 1987, was replaced by House hardliner Dick Cheney, and Cheney, as he did in Congress, immediately began his own successful attempts to stymie the Iran-Contra investigation. On November 24, 1992, an attorney for Walsh complained that Cheney had given Weinberger improper access to government files to aid in his defense, violating Defense Department regulations. "Cheney was passing them information that pertained to our prosecution," the attorney later recalls. "He was working on behalf of Weinberger's defense." At the same time, on NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney called Weinberger's indictment "a travesty." (Federation of American Scientists, AlterNet, US/Iraq Relations Timeline, Consortium News, Bush-Kerry Timeline, David Corn, Washington Post/Paul Waldman, Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein)

"It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
-- Ted Koppel, June 1992 (US/Iraq Relations Timeline)

1992-2001

Iraqi National Congress organized by Ahmad Chalabi and US public relations firm

• 1992-2001: Following Bush's executive order of mid-1991 ordering the deposal of Saddam Hussein, the Rendon Group, a public relations firm with extensive experience working in Iraq for the CIA and the Pentagon, organizes the Iraqi National Congress as an eventual replacement for the Hussein regime.

  Iraq war and occupation

  The head of the firm, John Rendon, gives the INC its name, coordinates its strategy sessions, lines up meetings with powerful GOP officials, and channels $12 million in covert CIA funds to the new group. In October 1992, Rendon names Ahmed Chalabi as the head of the INC. (Chalabi left Jordan in 1989 in the trunk of a car after a bank he ran collapsed; he was subsequently charged in absentia with embezzlement and sentenced to 22 years in prison.) Internal dissension all but destroys the group and ruins Chalabi's reputation with US intelligence. After Clinton's election, the US ceases supporting the INC and helps form its own opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA). Both groups are severely damaged when Hussein's internal police captures and executes many members of both groups. Chalabi, dubbed by many a "limousine insurgent" who draws "more support on the Potomac than the Euphrates," according to one Middle East expert, continues to be trusted and wooed by Pentagon and other neoconservatives, some of whom privately dub him the "George Washington of Iraq." In 1997, Chalabi's fortunes improve when many of his Washington supporters form the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocates the overthrow of Hussein and Chalabi taking his place as Iraq's leader. "Were it not for Rendon," a State Department official later reflected, "the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map." Nine days after the 9/11 attacks, the PNAC sends a letter to President G.W. Bush advocating not only the destruction of al-Qaeda, but the overthrow of Hussein as well as measures to be taken against the governments of Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. (In These Times, Asia Times)

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