Honor Among Bubbas

In 1994 White House Chief of Staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty made some telephone calls on behalf of his old friend Webster Hubbell. Webb—a former Arkie like McLarty and President Clinton—had just resigned from the Justice Department because of accusations that he’d defrauded his Little Rock law firm. Mack had the nerve to help his buddy find new work. “Hush money,” the president’s critics called it.

Daily newspapers all across America put this shocking tale on their front pages last month. Me, I’m an assistant editor at the San Jose Mercury News, and I might not have run the story at all. But then, having spent some time in Little Rock, I know Mack personally. And I know just how characteristic, and how Southern, such behavior was for the president’s friend since their boyhood together in Hope, Ark.

Every time I read scandalized stories about Mack’s friendship with Webb, I end up wishing that the reporters covering the White House had a better understanding of the South. The suggestion that McLarty’s only motivation for helping Hubbell was to keep him from cooperating with Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is based upon a fundamental lack of understanding of Mack, of Arkansas, and of the region. That’s a distinction common to much of the nonsense that’s been lumped together under the salacious catch-all “Whitewater.’

People who do understand the rural South are more apt to realize just how stupid this Whitewater thing is. Most of you may not be paying attention to it, but those of us who know Arkansas sure are. And boy does it look different through our eyes.

First, there’s talk about a conflict of interest. It’s no surprise to me that Mack McLarty would lift a finger for a friend embarking upon a new career. He did so twice for me. The first time was in 1985, while he was president of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company. Clinton was governor, and I had just quit my job since I was planning to start an alternative newspaper like the Scene. Shortly after Spectrum received its earliest publicity, I received my first order for a subscription. Mack McLarty’s check arrived even before my own parents offered to pay. Over seven-and-a-half years, I don’t believe he ever let his subscription lapse.

Nine years later, after I moved to California to edit another weekly newspaper, Mack sent me a second letter wishing me well—this one was written on White House stationery no less. The gesture meant a lot to me—even if I found it hard to believe he’d actually taken the time to send it.

But that’s Arkansas. People are still neighborly there. And conflicts of interest are more numerous because there are so few interests to get conflicted.

The whole state reminds me of the movie-trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. After one player names an actor, the other players have six moves or less in which to connect that actor to a movie featuring Kevin Bacon. Use the same technique and you can pretty much connect any two Arkies. Which has made it all too easy for some of these half-informed reporters to dive-bomb into Little Rock, fly out a few days later, and then start trading in guilt by association: Person A has loose morals; Person B used to work, sleep, eat, or commingle funds with Person A; hence Person B has loose morals too.

“You know how it is; you piece together this and that and you make this grand conspiracy,” Hubbell recently told the Arkansas Times newspaper, in a rare interview. “But is it some grand conspiracy, or is it Arkansas?”

Consider this example: Let’s connect me to Democratic fund-raiser Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie in six moves. Last January, I received an invitation to a great inaugural wingding thrown by David Pryor Jr. (1), son of U.S. Sen. David Pryor, D-Ark. (2), who once ran against U.S. Rep. Ed Bethune (3), an Arkie Republican who is Newt Gingrich’s latest lawyer, replacing Jan Baran (4), the GOP general counsel Newt blamed for all that bad legal advice who believes no laws were broken by Supreme Master Ching Hai (5), the Vietnamese religious figure whose followers funneled donations through Charlie Trie (6), a Clinton pal who used to own a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock.

The thing is, this link-up doesn’t really take me six moves. I’ve eaten at Trie’s restaurant hundreds of times and have met him personally. I know the Pryors and the Bethunes too and have even met the Supreme Master once. And that ain’t the half of it.

Last year I bought some undeveloped land on the White River, not far from where Clinton’s bum land deal went down. My weekly newspaper used to rent space in a building financed by the savings and loan at the center of Whitewater. I took a class alongside its president, John Latham, and once employed his sister as my classified advertising director. I interviewed Vince Foster several times. I worked right across the street from Indonesian financiers Mochtar and James Riady. I used to look out the window of my office and see Clinton jog by. I ran into him and his best friend—yes, Webb Hubbell—every Christmas Eve at a local store. And when my girlfriend and I and gazed out her back door, we were staring at the back of the governor’s mansion.