Taking the Hunt to the Hunters
Joe Conason and Gene Lyons discuss their new book, The Hunting of the President, with the editors
Part three of three

Joe Conason & Gene Lyons

Feb. 24, 2000 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- In parts one and two of our interview with the authors of The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton -- Joe Conason (columnist for the New York Observer and Salon) and Gene Lyons (author of Fools for Scandal and free-lance journalist whose columns regularly appear in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) -- the book's origins and the reasons Clinton was politically targeted far earlier than most people are aware were discussed at some length.  The final installment of our interview follows.

Joe Conason: I think that happens to everybody.

Gene Lyons: I think that one of the things that differentiates our book from Toobin's -- that we try to deal with in great and convincing detail -- is that Clinton jumped into a big trapped that was set for him. It was lit with strobe lights and practically had a warning siren on it going "Trap! Trap! Trap!" For a lot of people who understand his gifts, that, I think, is always the thing that's just the most bewildering. How could he have been so stupid when they had set this huge trap for him? Toobin's book largely deals with what happened after he jumped into the trap. Our book mostly deals with the construction of the trap. I think Toobin and the country as a whole haven't come to terms with how essentially fraudulent both jaws of the trap were.

Conason: Meaning the Jones case --

Lyons: -- and the Office of Independent Counsel and their so-called Whitewater investigation. We attempt to show how that trap was constructed out of a combination of bad journalism, bad faith --

Conason: -- at the end, and I think Jeff does address this in his book. There was a crossing of a line by the Independent Counsel and his staff that should not have been crossed in order that the could get their hands on the Jones case -- so that they could finally have something to attempt to successfully prosecute Clinton with. Everything else had failed.

Lyons: Moreover, they crossed that line long before they got into Monica Lewinsky.

Editors: How do you characterize this? Do you characterize this as basically an attempt at the only bloodless coup in this country's history?

Conason: I wouldn't say that. Our book is not a study of American history, but there have been attempts before to overthrow the Constitution going back to the presidency of John Adams. Certainly there was an attempt against Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, when certain interests that were then flying under the banner of something called the Liberty League attempted to mount some kind of a military coup against him using a former Marine general named Smedley Butler. That's all history that's sort of hidden, so it's not the first time. But it is, certainly in recent years, the most blatant, well-funded and legally cloaked effort to destroy a presidency that we've seen.

Lyons: And another aspect of it that we spent a great deal of time on is the complicity of the established press.

Editors: I guess you've read the draft of Mac MacArthur's Corrobillusion. He spends a lot of time on the press.

Conason: They need a lot of time spent on them, because without them none of this would have been possible.

Editors: What's the matter with Steven Brill? You think that's all he'd be doing!

Conason: Well, again, Steve, whom I've known for a long time, has for most of his life been very tied into establishment journalism and to the major media, and he, I think very courageously, stepped out in 1998 and said this cannot pass -- and took an unbelievable amount of heat for that. He was attempting to launch a magazine. Now, there may have been some calculation in doing that, but I think he also must have known the price he would pay. And he still hasn't recovered from that.

Editors: What are we going to do about the fact that Tim Russert, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, John McLaughlin, Tony Snow, Brit Hume, the entire New York Times establishment -- including David Broder -- are still doing the same thing?

Lyons: I do think the scandals were ratings- and ambition-driven from the beginning, and then people committed themselves to a version of the truth -- and they just couldn't go backwards. One of the things we discuss at the end of our book, and one of the things that, if I were a media executive, would be thinking about, is that the Washington press corps, taken collectively, was 95% in favor of defenestrating, getting rid of, Clinton, driving him from office in disgrace over sex lies -- and yet the people of this country rejected that view by almost three to one! I would be concerned were I running the New York Times. If we in the press are no longer believed, isn't that it in the long run not only an abdication of responsibility but apt to lead to the erosion of our own power?

Conason: Actually, The Times hasn't been exactly all in one place about this. Certainly there are reporters at the Times -- and I have to assume editors as well -- who realize that there was something very wrong with this picture and who started to look at the elements of the conspiracy against Clinton. There were some very important stories that were published in the Times, principally by Jill Abramson, Don Van Natta, about the conspiratorial elements behind the Jones case and their relations with the Office of Independent Counsel. Those stories made a big difference and they did get into the Times, and they were given good play. They had a big impact. So I would not say that the Times is monolithically anti-Clinton. In fact, at various points, even the editorial board seems to have realized that there were serious problems with Ken Starr. So The Times has sort of wavered back and forth on this issue. The Washington Post has been somewhat worse as we've gone along here.

Editors: That's Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn.

Conason: I don't know that Ben Bradlee has much to do with it. Unfortunately, I think it's much more in the present management of the newspaper. There have been some amazing things that have gone on there. For example, when the Shaheen report was completed but not released, the Washington Post ran an amazing editorial saying that, based on the one paragraph that the OIC put out exonerating --

Lyons: --themselves --

Conason: -- Scaife and themselves, that the rest of us owed them an apology. Ordinarily, a newspaper would say, "Well, what about the other 164 pages of this report? What did it really say? What did they really find?" Instead, the Washington Post was content to accept Starr's tendentious interpretation of one paragraph. That's where, no matter what your feelings might be about Bill Clinton, if you're a news organization, you're supposed to be trying to find out the news and report it. In that case and, I'm afraid, in others, they have really abdicated that role. I think Gene is right, the people have rejected that point of view over and over again, and I think in the current presidential election, there's some hangover of this in the press's treatment of Al Gore and probably Hillary Clinton as well, where they see an opportunity to revenge themselves for the embarrassment that they've suffered in the last couple of years. I think again that their point of view is going to be rejected. I have a lot of faith in the public.

Editors: I do too, but what can they do?

Lyons: Every time I read some sections of our book, I get mad all over again. I'm giving a talk this afternoon at Hendrix College, this small liberal arts college where I'm teaching this term -- about media accountability in the age of celebrity, which is just an excuse for me to go in and talk about the issues in our book. But let me get back to Toobin -- in defining his book, he more or less says that everything Ken Starr and his people did up until the Lewinsky thing was straight investigation. He says they investigated crimes, not people, and they did so honorably; they just lost their minds over sex. Now, I think that readers of our book will come to understand that everything that the Starr people did that most Americans found objectionable started when Ken Starr took the office in 1994. They were investigation people, not crimes. They prosecuted offenses that would never be prosecuted in the outside world. They hid exculpatory evidence and intimidated witnesses into hiding exculpatory evidence. They asked parents to testify against their children and children to testify against their parents. And they leaked false allegations involving nonexistent evidence to their press allies for the apparent purpose of generating political pressure.

Conason: They manipulated the Tucker prosecution so they could get rid of a judge that they didn't like.

Lyons: And all these stories are told in our book. That's one of the reasons why Starr and company lost 3 out of 4 jury trials. And he couldn't convict anybody of anything in Arkansas now, because people gradually caught on, partly because of the well-known small size of Arkansas. Just about everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who, and gradually he became persona non grata. However, there are several critical moments in which we show what happened at the trial, the evidence, the actual testimony -- and that what you read in the newspapers, what you saw on TV, had no connection at all to reality, not even the connection implied in an ordinary lie. And why is this? Because the OIC very cleverly manipulated the media to tell its story. It did so by utilizing, if I may say so, the very illegality of the leaks they were dishing out. If you wanted to get any of the "candy" from the OIC, you had to give the party line, down the line -- tell the story they wanted told. And you had to attack anyone who told a different story, such as anyone who told the story of the Arkansas Project. The party line was that it couldn't be real, because the OIC didn't want it to be real. And what we show is that the skeptics' worst suspicions are true: that this was a legalistic attempt from the start, and that the Jones case was designed, to get Bill Clinton under oath about his private sex life. That's the only point it ever had.

Editors: Do you think that Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled ethically?

Lyons: If you remember, it was Susan Webber Wright who A: said that this case shouldn't be held and was reversed by the Eighth Circuit and the Supreme Court, and B: it was Susan Webber right who dismissed the case, and I believe that if someone would have made a complaint, had filed a formal grievance about the consistent violations of the gag order by the Jones lawyers, she might have found them in criminal contempt, but she can't go out and do it on her own. Someone's gotta make the complaint. I think that she did do as honorable a job as she could have.

Conason: I think if anything [Clinton attorney Bob] Bennett was too timid in his dealings with the court.

Editors: I agree.

Conason: If you read Toobin's book, one of the things that he says that's most disturbing -- and that nobody seems to talk about -- is about the strategy of the case that can only be coming to him from the lawyers on the President's side -- because clearly neither the President nor the First Lady told him these things.

Editors: Are you planning any follow-up book?

Lyons: I've been talking to Julie Hiatt Steele about doing a book, because her story follows on from where our book ends and would demonstrate in the most conclusive possible terms, I think, that the Independent Counsel's office was never interested in the truth in the Kathy Willey matter. Her story is very poignant in a way and she's not like a lot of people here. Here most of them have the support of the community. She's sort of all by herself over there. They just moved in and broke her life to pieces, and did things that are stunning, which you wouldn't think could be done to an American citizen, that left her broke and jobless, and without anyone wanting to really tell her story. Then after having failed to break her legally, they put out a story that she wasn't really that important anyway. But that's because they were interested in what they could browbeat people into saying. And that's what I meant earlier when I was talking about the investigation here -- the same kind of tactics were used. It was decided, "Who do we need to get and who do we need to break in order to get them."