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

Joe Conason & Gene Lyons

Feb. 22, 2000 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- The editors recently had the opportunity to talk at length with Joe Conason, columnist for the New York Observer and Salon, and free-lance journalist Gene Lyons, the author of Fools for Scandal whose columns regularly appear in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  The subject -- their new book, The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.

You can order the book at barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com or borders.com

Editors: How did the idea for book come about, and how did the two of you begin working together?

Gene Lyons: Joe phoned me, I think, in 1996 during the Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal trial. He was going to go on Crossfire and didn't know a whole lot about it. I said, "Look, the best thing I can do is fax the local newspaper coverage of the trial to you, which is very different from what you're probably reading in the national press, both because it was more detailed and, particularly early in the trial, it was perceived as going badly for the prosecution." The stories reflected that. And actually, it did go very badly for the prosecution. They pulled it out brilliantly in the end, but that was, I think, the first time we talked, and we started discussing our mutual amazement at what was going on. I asked Joe, "Well, you're in New York, you know Washington better than I do. Has it always been this way? Can people just print flamboyant absurdities day after day? You correct them, and it's as if the correction never happened! I feel like I'm living in a Kafka novel here!" You kept seeing charges made, but then you'd read about the actual events, and it became quite clear that any objective reading of facts would render the charges moot, but you couldn't get an objective reading of the facts. So we started talking on that wavelength about our mutual incomprehension of what was going on.

Joe Conason: I started to write about this stuff in 1996. I'd written a few columns about Whitewater -- but not very much -- and I got into it in 1996 when I did a piece with Murray Waas in The Nation about Ken Starr.

Editors: I can remember that story.

Conason: It was about his conflicts of interest. Around the same time, I did a piece in The Observer about some problems with [James Stewart's book] Blood Sport. Gene and I started talking around that time, around 1996. Gene, of course, had been working on the topic of Whitewater and those scandals generally for much longer than that.

Lyons: I started back in '94 because of what I was hearing from some very well-respected colleagues I had in the press. They kept saying, "That's wrong and this is backwards and they didn't look at this."

Conason: In the Arkansas press.

Lyons: I'm talking about two guys in particular, Ernie Dumas and Max Brantley. Both of them had at different times been state editor of the Arkansas Gazette, a statewide paper that had folded in 1990. They kept saying that the press got the facts inside-out and upside-down, that Whitewater is just something on the order of a huge misunderstanding. When I began to learn from them about what had happened and then began to do my own reporting on Whitewater, I was just flabbergasted that the New York Times in particular had started this huge scandal in a story that was so ridden with errors that had it been produced on the sports page, the author would've been fired! I was also approached early on by three Little Rock attorneys who trusted me because of my previous book, "Widow's Web," who told me Starr's operation was nothing like they'd ever seen before: that the OIC was investigating people, not crimes, lied and went back on their word, and used every possible pressure tactic to bully witnesses into saying things that not only weren't true but were almost absurd in view of the available evidence. The more I checked into it, the more persuaded I became of the basic illegitimacy of the whole operation.

Conason: Gene and I were part of a small -- very small -- fraternity of skeptics of Whitewater, of which Gene was kind of the founder and which I joined a couple years later. There were a few others -- Garry Wills, Tony Lewis -- it was a distinguished but small company.

Lyons: (laughing) I like the company!

Conason: We got to know each other that way, and we talked pretty regularly after that. There then came a point at which we began to realize simultaneously that there was a real bad situation here, one that was broader than just some mistakes in the press, and a realization that what came to be known as the "Right Wing Conspiracy" actually existed. We were thinking of that before Mrs. Clinton gave it a name on TV -- long before that -- and we felt there needed to be a broader examination of that. Without going into all the details, we eventually agreed that there was a book here and would like to do it together.

Editors: Does it take a different or expanded view from Gene's book Fools for Scandal?

Conason: Fools is a terrific book, but this book is much broader because we go into great detail about how this whole situation began. Our book begins in 1989.

Lyons: We start further back in time and continue the story much further on.

Conason: With a much more sweeping perspective, This is a book about American politics over the last ten years. We examine who the players are -- particularly on the right -- and what their agenda was, at least in terms of the Clinton presidency: wanting to undermine and derail it. We detail the ways in which they did that, and the links between and among various forces in the Republican party and the religious right, on Capitol Hill, in the Federalist Society -- from Jerry Falwell all the way to the associates Newt Gingrich and beyond.

Editors: Did you examine the role of corporate America?

Lyons: Not a great deal.

Conason: They did not really play a direct part in getting Clinton -- except on the Health Care Plan.

Editors: I believe that the real push began right after Hillary became involved in the Health Care Plan.

Conason: But the truth is, Dick Scaife, whom you couldn't characterize as "Corporate America," started on this trail long before the Health Care Plan became the biggest issue. As early as '93, people like Scaife and Floyd Brown --

Gene Lyons: -- and Brown got into it in '92 --

Conason: -- were after Clinton.

Editors: What about Cliff Jackson, this guy down in Arkansas that Jeffrey Toobin keeps talking about in his book A Vast Conspiracy?

Conason: Same story.

Editors: Do you ascribe as big a role to him as does Toobin?

Lyons: Yes and no. There's a great deal that Jackson did that we talk about that has not come to light to this point, but in the sense that he was the founding father of the whole thing, I think that's kind of inaccurate.

Editors: Who would you say is the founding father, or is there one?

Conason: I would say there are several of them who were working simultaneously who came together. Certainly Scaife was in there very early. Peter Smith gets kind of short shrift in Jeff's book, but we think he's pretty important. He's involved early on. So is Richard Porter, Starr's law partner who turned out to one of the so-called "elves." These people were all active at least as early as Cliff Jackson was, going back to the presidential campaign of '92.

Lyons: With every kind of dirty trick that one could possibly imagine. There's hardly anything that Nixon's "plumbers" did that somebody on the right didn't try against Clinton. And worse.

Tomorrow: why was Clinton targeted for the "hunt"?