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Dubya Raided Harvard's Endowment Fund
plus The Toobin Book: Not Perfect, But a Very Good Start
by Tamara Baker

Jan. 10, 2000 -- ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- The Bush family of Kennebunkport, Maine seems to have a talent for coming out ahead in sleazy financial schemes, even when everyone else around them loses money.

Neil Bush's Silverado venture is the most notable of these schemes; it cost the Federal Government $3 BILLION (nearly 100 times the cost of Madison Guaranty, the Arkansas S&L failure that concerned the GOP so, so very much) to clean up -- and nearly took out the state of Colorado back in the 1980s.

This was happening even as his daddy, George Herbert Walker Bush (named in honor of his grandfather, one of the biggest opium traders in China in the 19th Century) was first Vice President and then President of these United States.

But Neil's brother George W. (for "Walker", yet another honoring of the illustrious dope dealer in the family tree), or "Dubya", hasn't exactly been a slouch at the sleazy-money department, either.

Check out a snippet from an Austin American-Statesman article, wherein we find out about a financial report that uncovered how George "Dubya" Bush, the guy who is the GOP front-runner for President, pulled one heckuva ranny on his old alma mater, Harvard:

In a little-known episode, the report found that Harvard University, where Bush earned a business degree, came to the rescue of Bush's oil exploration company, Harken Energy Corp. Harvard's endowment managers, who included at least one director with ties to the Bush family, invested about $20 million in the then-struggling company a month after Bush came on its board. The investment turned sour in 1990, with a loss of millions of dollars, but Bush sold most of his shares two months earlier.

Joe Wrinn, spokesman for the university, denied that personal ties had any bearing on the stock purchase. "Harvard would never be so irresponsible as to make multimillion investments based on a personal connection," he said. "Harvard would like every investment to come out ahead, but they don't."

Despite the failure of Harken Energy, the raiding of Harvard's endowment fund helped steady Bush's financial picture and produced capital for his stake later in the Texas Rangers baseball team, the report said.

Why would an institution such as Harvard give its endowment funds to bad-risk oil wildcatters running what look, to the outside observer, like the most shady scams imaginable?

Why did Harvard let George Walker "Dubya" Bush take twenty million dollars -- money that was supposed to support Harvard and help students --to prop up his shaky business venture?

And again: Where Is The Outrage, Bill Bennett?

Where are all the media pundits, conservative and otherwise?

You know, the same ones who pilloried the Clintons over Whitewater, a much smaller investment in which the only "crime" the Clintons committed was to lose a ton of their OWN money, and not other people's ca-ching?

Then again, these same pundits had barely a bad word for Neil "Silverado" Bush.

And none of these pundits cared to examine the Bush family's role using their own history of business dealings and projecting it, Gingrich-style, onto the Clintons' failed Whitewater investment.

The Bush clan created "the Whitewater oppo" as an attempt to stave off George Herbert Walker Bush's certain defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in 1992, yet nary a word was said about this by Big Media. That journalistic task was left to Gene Lyons (whose book Fools for Scandal is the best tome yet written on Whitewater) and Mollie Dickenson (whose articles for Salon and The Consortium stand with Lyons' work as the best actual reporting done on Whitewater.)

Speaking of good writing:

Jeffrey Toobin, who works for ABC News and The Washington Post, has come out with a book on the 1998 CoupGate called Vast Conspiracy. It zoomed up to the #4 spot at amazon.com last week on the heels on unintentional publicity from Drudge, who yammered without proof over a week ago that the tome might get Toobin sued by some of the conspirators mentioned therein -- then yesterday ran a story claiming that lawyers for one Lucianne Goldberg are demanding that the book be pulled from the market.

Yeah, right, Drudge: any lawsuit would give the book even more pub, while risking even greater exposure of the crimes of the various conspirators. I only wish the "elves" would actually be that stupid.

While the book is not perfect (Toobin doesn't follow up on the full implications of the Conway-Moody link between Kenny Starr's OIC, Linda Tripp and the Paula Jones legal team, for example), it is, as Gene Lyons says in his 01/05/00 review of the book for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the first CoupGate book to hit the shelves that wasn't written by either one of the conspirators or by a certified Clinton-hater. Ergo, it's the first book that actually makes a stab at showing just how reprehensible - how, in fact, evil - was the conduct of the right-wing conspirators.

Here are some telling passages:

Toward the end of the century it was extremists of the political right who tried to use the legal system to undo elections--in particular the two that put Bill Clinton in the White House.... The Clinton years abounded in purported scandals that offered much in the way of colorful names -- Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, to name only the best known--but little in the way of actual criminal offenses. The futility of the endless searches for criminals in the White House only spurred the zeal of the pursuers.

Meanwhile, Toobin, while he's a bit gentler than I would prefer to see (he doesn't want to burn ALL his bridges to Beltway society), does not paint a very flattering portrait of Lead Media Elf Michael Isikoff:

He had done good work over a dozen years [before CoupGate], covering a mix of subjects, mostly crime stories of one kind or another. He had never covered much national politics or dealt with the tangled motives of the sources in that unique setting. Cop stories - with clear good guys and bad - were his metier.

And later we find this:

... the business of leaking illustrates the difference of covering crime (which Isikoff had done for most of his career) and covering politics (which he found himself doing in the treacherous waters of the Jones case). In crime, leaks generally come only from law enforcement, and a reporter must asses on his own whether the charges have merit. (After all, it's difficult to call, say, the Gambino crime family for its side of the story.)

In other words, Toobin is trying to be nice to Isikoff, by depicting him as a naive and zealous lad easily manipulated by the OIC.

Isikoff is apparently not happy about this characterization -- his buddy (and perhaps fellow elf?) Mickey Kaus wrote a scathing denunciation of the Toobin book over at Slate -- but even Spikey should realize that there are only two ways to see his actions of the last few years: as those either of an unwitting fool or a cooperative tool. Isikoff himself, in his own book Uncovering Clinton, tried to characterize himself as naive (even as he patted himself on the back for being so clever) as he labored mightily to distance himself from the conspirators, to the point where he dumped heavily on Tripp and Goldberg and Coulter. (The latter two ladies succinctly rebutted his lame CYA attempts in articles that firmly implicated Spikey as a fellow conspirator.)

All in all, Isikoff seems to have less integrity than David Brock, the man whose "Troopergate" article kicked off CoupGate. In 1998, Brock publicly repudiated that article because, as he said, he could no longer stand by the accuracy of the troopers' statements, statements they were paid to make.

Here's Toobin on how David Brock got hosed by Arkansas Clinton foe Cliff Jackson and his paid testifiers, the troopers:

Brock started his reporting by meeting Jackson and two of the troopers--[Ronnie] Anderson and [Roger] Perry--in a hotel near the Little Rock airport. As it turned out, this was a gathering of some historical importance--the first interviews for an article that would lead to the impeachment of a president. Fortunately, this first meeting was tape-recorded, and the audio record illustrated the nature of Brock's inquiry and the demeanor of his principle subjects.

"Okay, yeah," the tape began with Brock's voice. "We can go from your categories. Why don't we talk about the sleaze department first, the state of their marriage. What are we talking about--an open marriage?"

What followed was nearly three hours of the most vile gossip that can be imagined. The transcript of this noxious session stripped the "character issue" bare of its pretensions. The interview included the troopers' pointless rambling ("Chelsea is allergic to cats. I don't know why they got their cat in the first place") and their random conclusions ("She wouldn't divorce him if that sumbitch did it right in front of her. She wants the power"), but it consisted mostly of the troopers' recounting what they believed were Bill and Hillary's sexual antics. At first Anderson contributed a good deal to the conversation, including passing along rumors of an affair between Hillary and her law partner, Vince Foster. "It was just one of the known deals out there that every time Bill left, Vince would come over to the [governor's] mansion," he said. But by far the lead role went to Roger Perry, who, among other things, recounted how he heard Hillary scream at Bill one night, "I need to be fucked more than twice a year!" At another point, Perry said, "Bill Clinton was infatuated with the black women. He loved black women." Amid the giggling and cackling, Jackson limited himself to gentle admonitions to the troopers. "Stay on your topic of talking about sleaze," he said at one point. At another he asked, "Is this good stuff, David?" Later on, Jackson inquired, "Is this enough to give you a flavor?" Brock answered, "Give me a couple more"---and everyone laughed.

Toobin describes the deals promised to the troopers. Hang onto your hats for the Toy Surprise at the very end:

[Cliff] Jackson assembled the same troopers as in the "three Bubbas" meeting--that is, all but [Danny] Ferguson. This time, Jackson had another contract for the troopers to read, but not to sign. "In return for authorization to release the stories that had been provided regarding President Clinton," Anderson recalled, "the troopers were promised jobs for seven years at an annual salary of $100,000. The only limitation mentioned was that we would have accept these jobs in a state other than Arkansas." Acting mysteriously, Jackson wouldn't say who would provide the jobs, only that they came from his Republican connections. The troopers were skeptical. How did Cliff know these offers were real?

If the troopers didn't believe him, Jackson replied, they could speak to "a high-ranking official in the Republican Party." Jackson had spoken to the guy himself.

Who's that? the troopers challenged.

"Bob Dole," he said.

Yes, THAT Bob Dole. The man who was even at that early date the obvious front-runner for the 1996 Republican Presidential nomination.

Ex-Senator Dole could give the Bush family competition in the dirty-tricks department, if Cliff Jackson can be believed (which, as can be seen from the above material, is not exactly a sure thing).

Toobin continues:

None of the troopers followed up on Jackson's offer to contact Dole, but Perry and Patterson did sign the contract. Anderson declined. Jackson subsequently denied that he had offered the troopers a precise salary for seven years or that he brokered a meeting with Dole, but Anderson's version can be partly corroborated in an unusual way.

In the fall of 1993--as Brock and Rempel [a Los Angeles Times reporter] prepared their stories--Trooper Danny Ferguson grew nervous bout the project, and he reached out to the president to discuss it. In a clear lapse of judgement, Clinton spoke twice to his former bodyguard, and the president took handwritten notes of the conversations with Ferguson. Clinton's scrawl shows that Ferguson and Anderson were saying much the same thing. "Troopers being talked to by lawyer--offered big $," Clinton wrote. "He says GOP in on--now talking about 100G/7years--job and whatever get from book....[H]e and R. Andersen known it's wrong, they don't know anything, all rumors not good for their families or mine."

Now, why would it be a "lapse of judgement" for Clinton even to talk to Ferguson?

Because, as Toobin later reveals, the Los Angeles Times initially refused to publish the troopers' allegations. But when they learned that Clinton had personally talked with one of the troopers, they used that as an excuse for printing the allegation. This demonstrates clearly why it is ridiculous to expect Clinton to make any comment on these or any other allegations, or attempt to talk to anyone being investigated. The "Clinton Rules" under which the media operates mandate that any type of contact or comment on his part will be used to justify further attacks on the President.

There's more -- much, much more, far too much to mention here.

You should go and order the book -- and, while you're at it, make sure to put an advance order in at amazon.com for a copy of Gene Lyons and Joe Conason's imminent book, The Hunting of the President.

Gene and Joe, not being a part of the Beltway scene, are under no obligation, real or imagined, to be "nice" to any of the elves. For instance, they, unlike Toobin, do not swallow the not-so-polite fiction that the White House was behind the release of the Henry Hyde adultery story: as Lyons mentions in his review, the story had been making the rounds for months before anyone bit on it.

Rest assured that if Toobin's well-publicized book already has the conspirators jumpy, the Lyons and Conason book will cause them to lose control of their bowel movements.

Who knows? Perhaps it might finally lead to a repeal of the "Clinton Rules", just in time for the 2000 elections.

Copyright © 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN No. 1523-1690