C. Boyden Gray and Elise Passamani write:
In the wake of FBI Director James Comey’s decision to
reopen the Hillary Clinton email probe, there has been an explosion of Clinton
and media criticism alleging that the investigation could influence the outcome
of the election.
And at a rally in Florida on Saturday, Secretary Clinton
emphatically charged that Comey’s action was “unprecedented.”
Contrary to her claim, she herself contributed to an even
bigger influence on an election: the October surprise four days before Election
Day in 1992 that helped then-Gov. Bill Clinton defeat then-President George
H.W. Bush.
This event was the last-minute indictment of Caspar Weinberger,
which the Clintons and the press turned into an indictment of Bush.
The
prosecutor himself later claimed credit for having affected the outcome of the
election.
As the 1992 race drew to a close, the polls tightened
dramatically, and, in spite of the presence of third-party spoiler Ross Perot,
it looked as though Bush would pull it off and win reelection.
Then things started to get strange.
Out of the blue, Bill
Clinton spent a full day early in the last week of the campaign aggressively
accusing George Bush of being a liar.
This marked a dramatic shift in the tone
of his campaigning.
The
New York
Times took note and
described how a stump speech Clinton gave in Louisville, Ky., “marked the
climax of a day devoted to the Clinton campaign’s most concentrated effort to
date to turn against Mr. Bush the issue of trust that the Republicans had used against
Mr. Clinton.”
In Louisville, Clinton said, “Every time Bush talks about
trust, it makes chills run up and down my spine.”
He also added, “The very idea
that the word ‘trust’ could come out of Mr. Bush’s mouth, after what he’s done
to this country and the way he’s trampled on the truth, is a travesty of the
American political system.”
At a different rally, in Houston, Clinton told his
supporters, “There’s just no such thing as truth when it comes to him.”
And
Clinton claimed on NBC’s
Today show,
“he has gotten away with the most flagrant distortions of the truth in this
campaign that I have ever seen.”
These attacks seemingly came out of nowhere.
For evidence, Clinton quoted editorials from the
New York Times,
Sacramento Bee,
Portland
Oregonian, and
Minneapolis
Star-Tribune that argued
that Bush couldn’t be trusted.
Essentially, the
New York Times reported that Bill Clinton reported
that the
New York Times reported that Bush was a liar.
That
evening on
Larry King Live,
King asked Clinton directly, “Are you calling the president a liar?” to which
Clinton replied, “I’m reading what these newspapers said.”
Per his own
admission, Clinton and the newspapers were working in tandem.
Given that Bush was known for his sterling character and
Clinton was known as “Slick Willie,” it was a bold move for Clinton to do this.
The media tried to give a rational explanation for Clinton’s accusations.
They
claimed that his feelings had been hurt by mean Bush political ads.
The
Times explained, “Mr. Clinton, aides said,
was driven to attack by radio advertisements the Bush campaign has in recent
days spread across battleground states in the South and the Midwest.”
Newsweek identified one
specific television ad that they claimed spurred Clinton’s accusations,
writing:
What spooked them [the Clinton campaign] was the sheer,
scorched-earth ferocity of Bush’s assault. Its epiphany was the president’s
closing attack ad, picturing Arkansas as a wasteland while a narrator did a
savage recital of Clinton’s record there; the closing shot showed a buzzard
perched on a barren tree.
They added that “for a day or two it rattled Clinton,
knocking him off his own message and onto the president’s strongest ground.”
But in criticizing the ad, the
Newsweek reporters observed it was “only too
obviously overstated, and focus groups laughed [it] off.”
But if the ad was a
flop, why would it have influenced Clinton’s campaign strategy?
It defies logic
to suggest that Clinton was driven to attack Bush’s character by an ineffective
political ad.
So the question remains: what prompted
Bill Clinton to call
George H.W. Bush a liar?
The answer to this question arrived two days later—the
Friday before the Tuesday election—when Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor
for the Iran-Contra affair, indicted Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
for the second time in four months.
The Iran-Contra affair had plagued Ronald
Reagan for much of his presidency, but the prosecutor failed to discover any
evidence of criminality on the part of the White House.
The reindictment included notes from Weinberger’s diary
that fleetingly mentioned George Bush’s attendance at a meeting and appeared to
contradict something Bush had previously said, but not in a way that had any
legal significance.
And Walsh himself writes in his memoir, “the story of the
meeting was not new.”
Apart from the Clinton-media hype, the whole reindictment
was flaky to begin with.
It involved just one of five counts from the original
June 1992 indictment, four counts of which were still pending.
The count in
question was beyond the statute of limitations, as the judge later ruled.
Walsh
claimed he was under some unidentified court schedule, but he should have
requested an extension, which would have been difficult if not impossible for a
judge to deny under the circumstances.
Nevertheless, the media and the Clintons seized upon the
indictment to bludgeon Bush.
The Associated Press claimed that the indictment
“contradicted President Bush’s claim he never knew that arms were being traded
for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair or that two Cabinet members were opposed
to the deal.”
In the
New York
Times, Anthony Lewis pummeled Bush, asking, “How does George Bush live
with the knowledge of his disregard for truth in politics?”
The indictment
monopolized the news the weekend before Election Day, and Bush’s upward trend
in the polls came to an abrupt end.
As president, Bush had considerable successes in the
realm of foreign policy, but he stood accused of a criminal foreign-policy act.
Thus, the press reaction wasn’t just any condemnation of Bush.
It was a
condemnation of Bush in his wheelhouse.
Moreover, in spite of Bush’s being a
decorated World War II veteran, the press had long used his admirable personal
qualities to depict him as a “wimp.”
Now they were stripping him of these
attributes altogether.
The same day the indictment fell, the Clinton campaign
emailed its supporters a press release by George Stephanopoulos (Clinton’s
communications director) claiming that the indictment was a “smoking gun
showing that George Bush lied to the American people about his role in the
arms-for-hostages affair.”
But the press release was dated the day
before the indictment was filed.
Also, the
two-and-a-half-page, single-spaced release quoted material from twelve
different sources: transcripts and articles and a book ranging in date of
publication from March 1987 to October 1992.
It is difficult to think that they
would have been able to pull together such disparate materials, including a
quotation from page 244 of Bush’s book
Looking
Forward, in a matter of hours.
Obviously, the Clintons knew ahead of time
what the special prosecutor was going to do.
On the evening of the indictment, Bush appeared on
Larry King Live, and one of
the calls King took was actually from Stephanopoulos, who hammered Bush over
Weinberger’s diary notes.
After a couple minutes of volleying back and forth,
Bush commented about Stephanopoulos, “It’s wonderful how his call gets in,”
which elicited cheers from the studio audience.
This incident, coupled with
King’s weak defense for having taken the call—“We don’t have a private number,
we really don’t, I don’t control the calls”—offers further evidence of
collaboration between the Clintons and the press.
In his memoirs, Walsh feigns cluelessness about the
indictment and its impact.
In addition to acknowledging that the Bush reference
contained nothing new, he claims of the Weinberger diary notes, “I did not
think the quotation would be newsworthy, despite its reference to President
Bush.”
Walsh reacts to Stephanopoulos’s attack on Bush on
Larry King Live, stating,
“Although I was not a Bush partisan, I did not want him hurt unfairly.”
He then
muses:
As I sat with my wife watching the president falter on
national television, incredibly I found myself thinking of Tolstoy’s classic
narration of the events leading up to the battle of Borodino, which emphasized
the role of happenstance in massive operations and a turning point of history.
Was it possible that, after six years of contentious, costly, and painstaking
effort, the independent counsel could affect the outcome of a presidential
election through sheer inadvertence?
While professing that it never occurred to him that the
indictment would touch the election, Walsh flatters himself, essentially
claiming that, without even trying, he had changed the course of history—and by
citing King and Stephanopoulos, he acknowledges the media and the Clintons for
helping make this happen.
Six weeks after the indictment was filed, on December 11,
1992, a federal district judge threw it out.
The
New York Times reported that Judge Thomas F.
Hogan “said the new charge violated the five-year statute of limitations in the
Iran-contra case and improperly broadened the original indictment that was
filed in June against Mr. Weinberger.”
On January 20, 1993, William Jefferson
Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd president of the United States.
As the press continues to fuss over Comey’s
“unprecedented” actions, it is worth remembering that they are wrong, and that
they were largely responsible for giving us the Clintons in the first place.
And as for Secretary Clinton’s emphasis on the “unprecedented” nature of these
circumstances, it raises further questions about her memory, or her dishonesty,
or both.
C. Boyden Gray served as White House counsel under
President George H.W. Bush and as U.S. ambassador to the European Union under
President George W. Bush. Elise Passamani earned her doctorate in French
literature from the University of Oxford in 2015.
