Frank by Barney Frank

Author:Barney Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711429
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8

DEFENDING CLINTON

Ever since 1993, I’d been defending both Clintons from Republican attacks on their integrity. Serving on the Financial Services Committee, I observed the investigation into the Clintons’ Whitewater investments firsthand. At first, the Democratic majority easily defused the assault. When Clinton’s aide George Stephanopoulos testified before our committee in 1994, I noted how nervous he seemed. As Stephanopoulos recalls in his memoir, I sent him a note from the rostrum saying, “Relax George. We’re kicking the shit out of them.” And we were.

Consequently, when the Republicans took over the House the next year, they were determined to turn the tables. They convened two full weeks of hearings, to be followed by a report that they were certain would expose the Clintons’ bad behavior.

They fell embarrassingly short. Their first obstacle was that there was nothing there. Their second was the Republican chair of the Financial Services Committee. If Diogenes had come to Washington searching for his honest man, I would have sent him Jim Leach.

No one who tries to be effective in Congress can be entirely free of partisan considerations, not even those few who assert their independence. As a liberal Republican in the House—a category that is no longer an endangered species but an extinct one—Leach may have welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate his party loyalty by reopening the investigation. And he did appear to be genuinely put off by what he saw as the first couple’s unseemly willingness to use political influence in the pursuit of private gain—a feeling not mitigated by the fact that they had done so ineptly and had actually lost money on the deal. But as the hearing proceeded, and it became clear that there was much less to the accusations than met the eye, his integrity overpowered his partisan instincts. The two-week hearing ended after one week. More significantly, the committee never issued a report on the matter. This reflected common political sense: If you don’t have anything bad to say about your opponents, shut up.

The Republicans were not ready to give up, but to the Clintons’ good fortune, the next congressional investigator was one of the House’s least credible members, Dan Burton of Indiana, who chaired the Committee on Government Reform. I had experienced his penchant for silliness before. When I’d announced that I was gay, he’d announced that he would no longer use the House gym, lest I’d infected the place with AIDS. He got over it after a while.

This was not the only time my sanitary habits came up in a discussion with an Indiana Republican. During the gays in the military debate, Senator Dan Coats, who had volunteered to lead his party’s effort to maintain the ban, said in one of our joint TV appearances that it was entirely legitimate for straight members of the armed forces to object to being nude in our presence. Borrowing a line from Alfred Hitchcock, I told Coats that I regularly worked out in the House gym and had not been having myself dry-cleaned.

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