Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

reason to question McDougal, whose investment track record had been impressive in the 1970s and who, I figured, couldn’t be expected to make a silk purse out of every sow’s ear. I kept paying whatever McDougal said we owed and tended to the more imminent demands in my life, including having a baby, participating in my husband’s elections every two years and trying to practice law. Once my accountant analyzed the Whitewater documents I had rounded up with Susan McDougal’s help over many months, I realized that the records were in disarray and that Whitewater was a fiasco. I decided that Bill and I had to get everything in order, then extract ourselves from McDougal’s mess. Given McDougal’s problems, that took years.

First, I wanted to take care of any conceivable obligation the corporation had to the IRS, to the Arkansas Department of Revenue and for local property taxes. Whitewater had never made money, but it was still obligated to submit corporate tax returns, which, I learned in 1989, McDougal had not done in recent years. He had failed to pay property taxes, despite assurances to us to the contrary. To file tax returns now, I needed the signature of an officer of the Whitewater Development Company, Inc., and only the McDougals held titles. I tried for a year to get power of attorney from McDougal so I could file the returns, pay the taxes and sell the property to cover the debt.

Meanwhile, McDougal’s life was falling apart. His wife, Susan, had left him in 1985

and later moved to California. The following year he suffered a debilitating stroke, which heightened the manic depression he’d apparently been fighting for some time. I was not eager to contact McDougal, so in 1990 I called Susan in California, explained what I wanted to do, and asked her if she, as corporate secretary, would sign. She agreed, and I overnighted her the forms, which she signed and returned to me. When McDougal found out, he screamed at Susan over the phone and called my office to threaten me. I had turned him into an enemy.

McDougal grew even more embittered after he was indicted and tried for eight federal felony counts for conspiracy, fraud, false statements and fiscal misdealing. He checked himself into a psychiatric hospital before his trial in 1990. He also asked Bill to be a character witness for him, but I talked Bill out of doing it. Bill is always willing to give anyone, especially old friends, the benefit of the doubt, but I just didn’t feel he could vouch for McDougal. Both of us realized we had no idea who he really was or what he’d been up to all these years. After the jury acquitted him, McDougal threatened me again, this time implying that he would pay me back for filing the Whitewater tax returns.

And so he did, with considerable help from Bill’s political adversaries. Sheffield Nelson, a self-made former CEO of the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company (Arkla) had switched to the Republican Party to run against Bill for Governor in 1990. Used to getting what he wanted, Nelson became deeply vengeful and antagonistic over his defeat. As soon as Bill announced his run for the Presidency in 1991, Nelson let the Bush White House know he would be willing to offer whatever help he could to defeat Bill. To that end, he persuaded McDougal to voice any complaints he could about Bill and me, no matter how outlandish.

The result was the first “Whitewater” story, an article that appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times in March 1992, in the middle of the Democratic primaries.

Jim McDougal was quoted throughout the piece, liberally planting false information about our partnership. The writer made much of our “complicated relationship” with McDougal and erroneously implied that he had made us money in the Whitewater deal and received favors in return. While the article’s headline trumpeted that “Clintons Joined S&L Operator in Ozark Real Estate Venture,” we had made our investment with the McDougals four years before Jim bought the S&L. The Clinton campaign immediately hired Jim Lyons, a respected corporate attorney from Denver, who, in turn, retained a firm of forensic accountants to assemble and explain the records of the Whitewater investment.

The Lyons report, which cost $25,000 and took a mere three weeks to complete, proved that Bill and I were equally liable with the McDougals for the original loan that we took out to purchase the Whitewater land and that we had lost tens of thousands of dollars on the investment-the final figure was more than $46,000. Ten years and tens of millions of dollars later, the independent counsel’s final Whitewater report released in 2002 supported Lyons’s findings, as did a separate investigation commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation. After the campaign released the Lyons report in March 1992, the press dropped the story. Some Republicans and their allies did not give up so easily. In August 1992, a low-level RTC investigator, L. Jean Lewis, filed a criminal referral concerning Madison that attempted to implicate Bill and me. Chuck Banks, the Republican U.S. Attorney in Little Rock who had been nominated by President Bush to be a federal judge, came under pressure from the Bush Justice Department to take action on this referral and issue grand jury subpoenas that would inevitably become public and signify that we were somehow involved in a criminal investigation. Banks refused, expressing surprise that the RTC had not sent him this information three years earlier when he had been investigating Jim McDougal. Banks said that this referral gave him no basis to suspect us of criminal conduct or to investigate us, and that he was afraid any last-minute investigative activity by him would leak and prejudice the presidential election. Somewhat surprisingly, the final Whitewater report actually documents the involvement of the Bush Administration in trying to create an “October Surprise” just weeks before the election.

Not only was Attorney General William Barr involved, but White House