Clinton’s global reputation - 15 April 1994

Two or three weeks ago, one of our weekly news magazines, the one indeed that invented the form in the 1920s had has always a cover picture, it was a photograph of President Clinton and of the young man who has become is right-hand aide for briefing, for learning what's on the president's mind and I must say is the ablest and the glibbest at expressing convincingly what he thinks the president is saying to the inquiring press, Mr Stephanopoulos. What was impressive about the photograph was the apparent mood of the two men, the way it captured dramatically a forlorn moment in the Presidency of Mr Clinton.

The President in profile was looking very glumly into the far left-hand corner of his desk. Mr Stephanopoulos, a slim dark figure with a lean profile and tousled hair, was looking the same way very still and very grim. "Deep Trouble" was the caption; trouble when it happens to a President is always these days deep. Of course the cover piece was on Whitewater and you would have guessed, I did guess, that the paper had found something new and awful to disclose.

Well, in the main story there was nothing new, nothing damning just more wandering speculation that the picture itself, which seemed to capture with cruel accuracy the mood of a president in gloom if not in despair was a photograph taken months and months ago before anybody had ever heard of the land deal in Arkansas, long before, therefore, any of the media had even the chance of dubbing Whitewatergate in the hope, and I'm afraid it is a hope in many media quarters, in the hope of conveying that it's a scandal as damaging to the presidency as Watergate, which brought down a president or Irangate, which remarkably managed to bypass him.

I'm told that the photograph was not taken at a sad moment of Mr Clinton's presidency, it was early days and it caught simply a thoughtful pause in what might have well been an animated and happy conversation. That picture and what it dramatically conveyed was a masterpiece of snide deception as a journalistic feat, it was what Americans call "dirty pool" and it recalled to me an equally effective bit of trickery, which I'm sure 98% of the readers who saw it found moving and relevant to a presidential tragedy and never knew it was not about that at all.

Now this was a photograph also of President Kennedy taken from behind, he had both arms outstretched, his hands splayed on his desk, he was looking down evidently in silence sorrow. By his side on the left stood with grimly folded arms his brother Robert. This has become almost the official photograph symbolising the dreadful moment on a Saturday night when President Kennedy waited for a response from Mr Khrushchev and was pondering whether to invade or attack Cuba and take the risk of having Khrushchev unleash the Cuban missiles, which he had installed there with miraculous secrecy. In other words as we were all to discover on the blessed Sunday, we were, as never since, of the very verge of nuclear war.

The photograph I've described the two lean figures were printed with the sombre darkness of Rembrandt's silhouettes seen against the light. Well that had been taken long before the president was looking down at a newspaper and had just finished reading the column of an old famous and rather pompous columnist. To the two brothers, the column was so wrong-headed or cockeyed or something that they thought it hilarious. Bobby Kennedy with the folded arms was taking a breather in the middle of the hilarity; the President was bowed over certainly over his desk not with grief but with laughter. I've seen that picture reproduced everywhere in history books, in articles commemorating the dreadful Cuban missile crisis, I doubt the truth will ever expunge it from the page and certainly not from the memory of people who were here at the time.

Similarly, having learned the true story of the Clinton and Stephanopoulos in despair before I saw it, I winced when a friend pointed to it on a news stand and said, "I guess that's right, they really do seem to be in" – wait for it – "deep trouble". This picture and the other are only the most conspicuous examples of the way an irresponsible press can create a mischief that plants an emotion in the viewer that can never be blotted out.

First of all, let's briefly – and I believe it can be told briefly – say what are the substantial charges about Whitewater? So far, there is nothing I believe nothing illegal unless perhaps having an investment counsellor counsel you on the purchase of stocks, that is what he's hired for. And there is a question about whether or not Mrs Clinton took the flyer on the cattle futures on her own, which would have been extremely rash or on the advice of an expert? If you can find criminality in that, the entire investment banking industry around the world is under indictment.

It has been charged by the media that the Clintons made more money from the deal or the land deal than they said and that they therefore have a nest of unpaid taxes. Well, they've gone over their records, they found it was so and they owed the internal Revenue Service a few thousand dollars in back taxes and they've paid them.

Did any of the funds from the land deal ever get into the Clinton campaign fund? Now, if so, that could be serious, though to be blunt about it if every senator and congressman had used during his election bid monies that were quietly slipped in from companies and other improper sources they'd have to build special new jails in every state. But now there is a graver charge on this point, that Whitewater the whole land deal was no more than a front for laundering or transferring money into his presidential campaign fund. Though as I've hinted this is an actual practice much more common than most voters know, it seriously violates existing campaign funding laws. If that were proved, it could be a criminal charge.

Then there have been allegations about Mr Clinton's sexual behaviour while he was governor of Arkansas and allegations are bound chiefly from state troopers the road police who drove the governor around to official and perhaps unofficial appointments, but while the troopers identified many women, none of them has come forward. And when you considered that the incentive to bribe a woman to testify falsely must be very lively, it does so far lead us to give the president, the ex-governor the benefit of the doubt.

Then there is Mr Jim Leach, nobody in Congress has a finer record for liberal Republicanism or for being a moderate and judicious man. Suddenly, he acted way out of character by more or less setting up his own investigation into Whitewater, claiming at the start that he would reveal such wonders, such horrors blockbuster revelations was how he phrased it, so far he's failed. And during the Easter congressional recess he was back in his hometown in Iowa where in practice during holidays Senators and Congressmen are supposed to be tracking down local issues and constituents' grievances on the way back to Washington to plead for them.

Mr Leach ran into a 17-year-old girl who referred to Whitewater with routine boredom and said, "Mr Leach is that the way your going to represent me in Congress?" It gave Mr Leach a pause and it has suggested to the Republican leadership that unless there are weighty charges against the president proven pretty soon, they may find that Whitewater washes back on them and that they will be accused of fiddling while Rome burns and North Korea precedes in his workman like way of making nuclear bombs and South Africa drifts into civil war and Bosnia is still an active horror and which people are beginning to say about the president: look he wants to go on about the health bill and day-care and poverty and crime and all the other dreadful issues for which you, the Republican opposition, ought to be offering if not help at least alternative policies.

What is true I think about Whitewater is that the enormous media fuss about it, which so far massively outweighs any proven illegality or wrong-doing has become a fixed drag like a speed deterrent on a car, a fixed drag on the execution of presidential policy. Worst you could say it has semi-paralysed the president's initiative in both domestic and foreign affairs by leaving him no time to be, well to be president. In that sense, only the punitive almost brutal leaders, editorials we're reading from abroad not least from Britain are correct in accusing this administration this presidency of being hesitant, indecisive without a visible strong reaction towards the awful pressure of problems around the world, of having no perceptible foreign policy, of being as one paper put it a lawyer without a brief. But why there is so little decisiveness out of the state department is because there is no strong leadership from the White House.

And I believe where the foreign criticism is wrong is in deducing that it is Mr Clinton's political character to be dithering and wayward. I do believe if he was allowed to have the tons of documents having to do with Whitewater lifted from is mind and his time, then we should know once for all if Mr Clinton is on foreign policy a weak president.

Much I think in the coming weeks will depend on the Senate Republican leader Mr Dole to decide either to keep the fires burning under Whitewater or to join the old Senator Goldwater and now the leading conservative intellectual Mr William F Buckley and say get off his back let him govern, this is not an issue on which to try and bring down a president. That backing from Mr Buckley was some consolation to the White House, until the word came in of the aerial blunder over Iraq and the propagation all around the world of that cruellest of military euphemisms, friendly fire. Sometimes it does seem that it is in Mr Clinton's stars not in himself that he is an underling.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.