Easy Chair Series

Interview Howard Phillips, Part 2

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 24-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC312

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 312, March 18, 1994.

This afternoon Otto Scott and I are happy to have as our guest Howard Phillips. We are sorry that Mark Rushdoony and Douglas Murray could not be with us, but very happy to have Howard share with us his insights about the state of things in Washington, DC.

Howard, would you like to comment on what is happening right now with the administration and with Congress?

[Phillips] Well, Rush, I am afraid to say that things don’t look any better up close than they do from a distance. And I would say that contrary to what Jubilation T. Cornpone said, the country is not in the very best of hands. We have looked at a number of issues and both parties seem determined to do us in. In the case of socialized medicine the American people have rejected what Bill and Hillary are arguing for yet the Republicans seem determined to push for some kind of health plan. In the case of NAFTA the overwhelming majority of Republicans at the grass roots level oppose this unconstitutional scheme to move us closer to unaccountable new world order institutions. Yet the Republican party in Congress voted overwhelmingly in support of that. There is a crime bill before Congress which passed the Senate 95-4 which abridges our right to keep and bear ours, which seeks to federalize control over local law enforcement which provides subsidies for radical feminist organizations in the name of fighting wife abuse, spousal abuse in some sense and such things.

There is no real opposition in Congress to the problems. When you look a the abortion issue we look at the Supreme Court and we have Harry Blackmun named by Richard Nixon, John Paul Stevens named by Gerald Ford, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy named by Ronald Reagan, David Souter named by George Bush. Right there you have got a majority for Roe v. Wade. It was entirely predictable how they were going to vote with the possible exception of Anthony Kennedy. Sandra Day O’Connor was a leader of Planned Parenthood in Arizona. She voted pro abortion in the Arizona state Senate. David Souter as a hospital trustee in Concord, New Hampshire voted to change the policy of his hospitals from zero abortion to convenience abortion. He already had the blood on his hands of many babies before he was named by George Bush. Even Scalia and Thomas who are, by comparison, far superior are unwilling to declare that the unborn child is a human person entitled to legal protection. And Stevens has observed that if that were done that abortion would be unconstitutional in every city and town, every state in the nation. And both parties have supported the funding of the homosexual movement on issue after issue. There are arguments over degree, but not over direction.

So that is very troubling. There is very little strength in Congress for the changes that need to be made.

But there is good news, too. The good news is that when our people organize they can win some victories. I am proud that my son Doug has had the opportunity to work for Mike Faris at the Home School Legal Defense Association. And Doug was part of the great victory which rejected George Miller’s amendment which would have made home school teachers and other private and Christian school teachers potentially subject to certification requirements at the state and local level. And that was a situation in which tens of thousands of home schooling parents and others from around the country joined in and what at once appeared to be a foregone conclusion turned into a 424 to one route of the enemy with only George Miller voting for his particular amendment in that area. And then there was another amendment that Congressman Army of Texas put forth which further eroded some of the tangential dangers in H. R. Six. Tragically, H. R. Six itself has not been defeated and we are still not able to get the leadership we need from the top of the Republican party to reject the basic concept of a federal role in education.

One of the hottest things in Washington, I think we should devote at least some attention to it is the difficulty in which the Clintons find themselves in what has come to be known as Whitewater. The allies of the Clintons—and their allies are many in the government and in media and the legal community—suggest that this is a trivial matter, that it makes ... that it is nothing compared to Watergate, but I would argue that this is the most serious criminal matter that has ever involved a President of the United States.

It is a complicated issue if you simply look at this part or that part or the other part. But what it really is, is an issue of an effort to obtain political power by using other people’s money. That is what it really boils down to. And what we are looking at is a situation in which over the years the Clintons used the state treasuring in Arkansas and the credit of the Arkansas government and they used the credit of the federal treasury through the FDIC backing up non productive S and L loans to provide what made approximately something in the neighborhood of 100 million dollars for their political allies, for their friends. And the Arkansas taxpayer, the American taxpayer has been stuck with the bill. And what makes it a subject for criminal action scrutiny now is that Mrs. Clinton on the evidence seems to have been involved in a conscience conspiracy to destroy evidence, to obstruct justice and it also appears that the President many very well have been involved in this personally. Certainly some of his top appointees are involved in it.

The Whitewater scandal has many dimensions to it. And that is one of the reasons why it is hard to explain in a paragraph. It has the dimension of Vince Foster, the unusual circumstances of his death which, as we tape this broadcast have not been explained to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of many other observers and journalists. We have a special counsel who is part of the establishment, a good friend of the former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum who was a major subject of investigation, a man whose law firm benefited from fee recovery efforts by David Jamie Gorelick who has replaced Philip Heymann as the deputy attorney general of the United States, a man who according to a column by Bill Safire agreed early on that vast areas of potential criminal scrutiny were beyond such scrutiny because they were conceded to be within the realm of lawyer client privilege.

We have a very unusual scandal relating to the fact that many members of the White House staff have not yet received security clearances and many excuses have been given for this, but there is widespread suspicion that it may relate to drug related activity or other unseemly activity on the part of some of them.

One of the names of which we will hear more as this scandal unfolds is the name of Dan Lassiter. Mr. Lassiter had a company in Arkansas which received from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, courtesy of Governor Clinton in 1986 more than 664 million dollars in state bond sales contracts and those contracts netted Dan Lassiter’s firm 1.6 million dollars in fees. What is interesting is that in that same year Lassiter was convicted of cocaine distribution and he wound up serving 30 months in prison.

Lassiter was very close to the Clinton family. He was introduced to the Clinton boys by Billy’s mother, Virginia Kelly who met Dan at the racetrack in Little Rock. And when Roger was under duress because he owed some money to drug dealers, Lassiter coughed up 8000 dollars to help Roger Clinton pay off his bill to those drug dealers.

While Lassiter was in prison, a young lady by the name of Patsy Thomason was his trustee and ran his firm. The interesting thing is that Patsy Thomason is now the director of administration on the White House staff. She is one of those without a security clearance and she is one of those who was involved with Bernard Nussbaum in rifling the files of Vince Foster in the hours after his death was reported.

Again, as part of this Dan Lassiter story which is just one of many stories, in 1987 Hillary Rodham Clinton, after some lobbying gained form the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation the right to represent the American taxpayer in a suit against Dan Lassiter even though Lassiter had been flying her husband all over the place as part of his political activities and had been raising substantial sums for Lassiter. And isn’t it interesting that Hillary helped negotiate an out of court settlement in which a 3.3 million dollar claim against Lassiter by the FDIC was settled for 200,000 dollars. So she was able to save her friend more than three million dollars and then Clinton pardoned Lassiter in 1990 when he was Governor.

This is just one of about a dozen significant things.

This situation stinks. We are talking about serious criminal activities which on the evidence, circumstantial as it may now be seems to directly involve the president and Mrs. Clinton. It seems to me that we have to avoid having this swept under the rug by the special counsel named by Janet Reno with the permission of Web Hubble who himself was involved in some very shady activities. We need to avoid having this swept under the rug after some superficial brief hearings in the House and the Senate. We need to have impeachment hearings. I am not prepared to say that Bill Clinton should be impeached. I am prepared to say that there is enough evidence to warrant a full inquiry to determine whether he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. There is circumstantial evidence that he is.

And that is why the Conservative Caucus has organized something called the Coalition for Congressional Impeachment Inquiry and why we are working closing with Floyd Brown of Citizens United, why we are in touch with various journalists and working with other conservative groups to try to make this a referendum question in the 1994 elections. We think that eerie candidate for Congress, regardless of party should be forced to answer yes or no: Would you vote for a congressional impeachment inquiry?

Now I have done some reading about past impeachment efforts involving Andrew Johnson. I was involved in the Nixon administration at the time of the Watergate affair, although I was not involved in Watergate. And it generally takes a couple of years for these things to run their course and to reach climax.

I think it is possible, because of the stench of scandal and the political effect it will have on democratic political fortunes that this could come to a head during 1994, but it is also possible that it may drag on beyond 94 and that the Democrats will wait to see how voters react in the 94 elections before reaching a decisive conclusion.

[Rushdoony] How do you think the voters will react?

[Phillips] Well in the early days of Watergate it was all too complicated then and it seemed trivial and I think that is the case here. But these proceedings develop a life of their own and even though the press is a kept press and even though it forgives all of Bill Clinton’s sins because they are sins which, very often, they commit themselves and because Bill Clinton is perceived as an instrument of their ideological objectives. Nonetheless, the simple fact of competition, the simple fact of leads to be pursued, the simple fact that there is integrity on the part of many people in the media, not as many as there should be, leads me to believe that this is going to go on and on until it culminates in the departure from office of the Clintons.

If the American people understand what the Clintons have done, if they understand how they have cheated on their taxes and failed to pay many thousands of dollars which they owed, if they see how on the surface it appears they were guilty of willful tax fraud at the same time they are raising the taxes on other people, if the stench of hypocrisy and ridicule infects the Clinton administration, I think they are going to have to go down.

[Rushdoony] Political cartoonists have not agreed with the editorials in the various papers. The editorials have been supportive of Clinton. The political cartoonists have turned him into a joke.

[Phillips] That is true, although even the New York Times and the Washington Post have begun to carry some cautionary pieces with respect to the Clintons saying, “Ok, folks, let’s get your act together.” Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and Quinlin in the New York Times, Paula Rains, the editorial page editor of the Times, even the New Republic, are all giving the Clintons advice. They are saying, “Well, Hillary, you have got to have a Geraldine Ferraro let it all hang out press conference and, Bill, you have got to do this and that and these things seem to be troubling on their surface. Let’s get it out. Let’s get rid of it.” But there may well be a good reason for what is going on. First of all, Hillary was part of the Nixon impeachment inquiry.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Phillips] She worked for Bernard Nussbaum who was a senior staff director and she learned that the biggest mistake Nixon made was that he didn’t burn his tapes. She is not going to make that mistake. By all accounts she has done everything she can to destroy relevant documents. So that is a major irony involving this.

But speaking of cartoons, there was one that was carried by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette recently in which there were two IRS agents portrayed together. One of them was sitting down looking into a computer screen and he said to the other, “So you want to investigate the President for filing a false tax return?” And the other one, the other IRS agent said, “Right. Bill Clinton listed himself as head of household.”

And clearly that wasn’t true in the view of the IRS agent.

So the cartoonists are doing their job.

[Scott] I don’t think the press has done a very good job in explaining these matters and the number of journalists who have entered government service is becoming a growing disgrace.

[Phillips] It is a joke. It is a revolving door. Look... and without any derogation intended necessarily, just look at some of the famous people. You look at Cokie Roberts a young lady who on a personal level I have regard for. I have known her for a number of years and she comes from a very nice family. But it is a family of liberal Democrats. Her dad was the Democratic Speaker of the House... or majority leader in the House of Representatives. Her mother Lindy was a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana. Her sister Barbara was a Democratic mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. She is married to Steve Roberts, a protégé of Barney Frank. And his brother Mark was an economics advisor to George McGovern in 72. To suggest that she is impartial is ridiculous.

You look at the fellow who runs Meet the Press, Tim Russert, a very capable moderator who used to work for Pay Moynihan. He used to work for Mario Cuomo. You... I am sure that we could cite many, many other examples. Burke at ABC was Ted Kennedy’s administrative assistant. Across the spectrum these people go in and out of journalism and I yearn for the days at the beginning of the American public when there was great candor.

Thomas Jefferson had his friend Samuel Smith who ran the National Intelligencer and there was no doubt that that was a partisan Jeffersonian newspaper. Abe Lincoln owned a number of German language newspapers in Illinois and other newspapers. He was a media czar and there was no mistake about the fact that these were partisan instruments to advance his career.

Today there is the hypocritical pretense that these journalistic outlets are neutral when, in fact, they are agents of radical liberalism.

[Scott] I am beginning to think that it might not be a bad idea to put some biographical information about some of these writers. We don’t know, for instance, when there is a religious editor where he comes from. And this is a very pertinent point.

[Phillips] You bet.

[Scott] And the same is true of some of the others.

[Phillips] I asked... I like the question you always ask. Tell me about your father.

[Scott] Yes.

[Phillips] Maybe we should do that with the journalists.

[Scott] Exactly. Where does he come from?

When Hillary Clinton first came to public attention she was born in Swarthmore. And we still don’t know anything about the Rodham family at all.

[Phillips] Well, I knew Hillary slightly when she was at Wellesley. I was chairman of the Republican party in Boston at that time.

[Scott] So it was Wellesley, not Swarthmore.

[Phillips] Right. She was in the young Republicans. And somewhere along the way she stopped being a liberal Republican and became a very liberal Democrat. But it is interesting to search the histories and to discover the associations.

Of course, she was heavily involved with the federal legal services program. She was the chairman of the Legal Services Corporation. When I was director of OEO the Office of Legal Services was under my jurisdiction. I tried to close it down. I tried to prevent Nixon from creating the Legal Services Corporation. One of the people I fired at OEO was a fellow named Mickey Cantor who is now Bill Clinton’s trade representative. I knew a lot of those folks back in those days. Many of the people in the Clinton administration are bad old memories.

[Scott] {?}

[Phillips] Interestingly they served under Richard Nixon because like most Republicans he never had the wit or the will to clean out the refuse of a legacy of the Democrats. They were more afraid of a bad day in the Washington Post than they were afraid of four bad years of perpetuating that against which they had pretended to campaign.

[Scott] Well, that brings up the moral paralysis of the Republican party.

[Phillips] Indeed, it does.

[Scott] They are the greatest collection of cowards in the country.

[Phillips] Well, they operate on what Gerald Ford said. I remember vividly. I was in California on the day that Gerald Ford made his first speech to Congress. Nixon resigned on August ninth, 1974. On August 12th Gerry Ford addressed Congress. I was up in the mountains in this area and I was with a group of people who were of similar perspective and we had the radio turned on. There was no television. And I remember Gerry Ford sad to Congress, “I offer you a banner of consensus, compromise, conciliation and cooperation.”

Basically what he was saying is, “Don’t hit me. I surrender. I am on my knees and I won’t do anything to hurt you.”

That is the Republican approach to government. They assume that he left will surrender power by consensus when, in fact, when there is something worth fighting about you can only gain it by confrontation. The only way we are going to take this country back is by confrontation between the force of good and the forces of evil to put it that bluntly. And the Republicans don’t have the stomach for it.

[Scott] Well, Newt Gingrich who has said so many things, some of which are very quotable said the difference between businessmen and politicians is that in business all transactions have to be compromised. Both sides have to win something in order for a transaction to occur. Therefore, business is based upon compromise and negotiation. Politics, on the other hand, he said, consist of one person winning and another person losing. So politics is confrontation. That is the reason, he said, that we cannot seem to talk businessmen into sensible political positions.

[Phillips] Well, unfortunately Newt Gingrich seems to have forgotten his instructions.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Phillips] Because he basically is leading the Republican party into a posture of compromise on a number of issues. He delivered a lot of votes for NAFTA. He is trying to work out a compromise on socialized medicine. He is seeking to moderate the Republican position on abortion, et cetera, et cetera ad naseum. And the Republican party has lost any moral claim on the support of Christians and conservatives, because if you ask a man for his dollar, if you ask him for his time, if you ask him for his vote, you have a moral obligation not to have thrown the fight before the bell rings. These folks have thrown the fight.

We have a moral duty to pursue victory and to conscientiously seek it. The odds against us may be extraordinary, but I would rather face long odds and only go a little way and then do... fly a flag under false pretenses which is what the republicans are doing. They are the problem we face. They are a greater danger to our liberties than the Democrats are and that is why the Republican party must be removed from the middle of the road if we are ever to take this country back.

[Scott] I agree. I didn’t quote... make that quote because I admired the man who made it. After all, he {?} the President praising the military. And this is a President who came into politics opposing the United States in Vietnam, who traveled to Russia at a time when only fellow travelers could get there.

[Phillips] And who lived in Czechoslovakia in the company of the known Communist party operatives.

[Scott] This is a man whose background is highly suspect and I am sorry to say he comes from a family that has a number of criminal violations in its members. So if we go back to my old question of what did his father do, in this case there is some question about what his father did.

[Phillips] Well, he fathered a number of children who keep popping up in the strangest places.

[Scott] Yes, I know. Half Congress is likely to be his half brother.

But this is a rather serious issue. We are being told now for the first time in my recollection that character doesn’t count. Well, if character doesn’t count what does?

[Phillips] No, character is at the very heart of the matter. And it has been a lack of character among our people and among our leaders that has led to so many of the problems we have.

The stories involving Clinton and White water are so extensive and extraordinary. If you look at Web Hubble, who recently decided to resign which was a very helpful move to the Clintons, here is a guy who negotiated a deal for Seth Ward, his father-in-law who had borrowed 600,000 dollars from the Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan without in any way disclosing to the FDIC that he had a personal family stake in this thing. He and his colleagues at Rose Law Firm secured the right to negotiate a settlement with his father-in-law and they wrote off all except something under 20,000 dollars perhaps 13,000 dollars had to be repaid.

So it was in this manner that they used the S and Ls as a piggy bank to reward their friends and underwrite their political activities. An extraordinary scandal. Grand larceny on a major scale.

We have the other case of Dan Hale who accuses Bill Clinton of having pressured him to cough up 300 grand from a small business investment corporation source which redounded to the advantage of Susan MacDougall, the wife of the founder of Whitewater despite the fact that the source of the money indicated that it was to be used only to help the disadvantaged and others in categories no way analogous to those of Susan MacDougall. We are talking about major financial scandals without even getting into the unusual personal scandals in which both the President and his spouse may have been involved.

[Scott] Well, it is very interesting because the press is now saying, “Well, after all that happened when he was governor of Arkansas that Arkansas operates that way and that this is just not relevant to his present situation as President.”

Now when Spiro Agnew was brought up before the court and had to plead guilty to accepting bribes he didn’t accept bribes as Vice President. He accepted bribes as Governor of Maryland.

[Phillips] And, in fact, as I recall what they did was get him on the failure to pay taxes on cash which he argued he had received as campaign contributions and which the government argued...

[Scott] ...were not

[Phillips] ... were not campaign contributions.

[Scott] Well Paul Johnson the English historian... I haven't seen this by any American author or writer or journalist said that when Lyndon John was Vice President he did collect bribes.

[Phillips] There is significant evidence to suggest that hat was the case and, of course, many people including our good friend in Texas who wrote that marvelous book {?} who wrote the book Effective Looks at Lyndon had considerable evidence that the Johnson family enriched themselves mightily.

Spiro Agnew was very harshly treated by the media. He was obviously targeted because they knew that to get Nixon they had to get Agnew first. The last thing they wanted was that Ted Agnew succeed to the presidency. And as a result they made a major effort to put him in a position where he concluded that he had to plead nolo contendere to some charges that were brought against him. He unfortunately had attorneys who, in my view, were not on his side, who were very liberal and who pushed him into what I believe was a very unwise decision. My own view is that Agnew should have fought the charges because I think that they... that it was... that it was a matte of some doubt as to whether it was a question of bribes or campaign contributions. And certainly if you contrast it with some of the greater crimes that occurred among more respectable people in the Nixon administration and other administrations, it was a very petty thing, indeed.

I got to know Agnew pretty well during the 1960s and early 70s. I first met Agnew when I served as an assistant to Ray Bliss when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bliss ran something called the Republican Coordinating Committee and three times a year he would bring together leaders of the Republican governors, living presidential candidates, et cetera and I got to know F. Dirksen and Tom Dooley and a lot of other people simply by being the door keeper and a fly on the wall and being around to chat with them in the coat rooms.

When I met Agnew I didn’t like him very much. He was very... seemed to me to be very arrogant, very contemptuous of people who were of a lesser stature than he and he was at that point a member of the Rockefeller wing of the party.

In 1969 when Nixon took office I set my sights on being the executive director of the President’s Counsel on Youth Opportunity. And that was an entity that had been set up by Lyndon Johnson as something for Hubert Humphrey to use to ingratiate himself to the mayors of the largest cities.

I sought it out because it... among other things would get me an education in how the government worked. It was an inter cabinet agency and it didn’t work out well. I got to sit in on some cabinet meetings and meet people in every department and agency when I finally got there.

But when I was first interviewed by Agnew he rejected me for the job because I didn’t do very well in the interview and I didn’t think we were ever going to hit it off. People on his staff liked me and they convinced me to take a lesser position. I was eventually pointed to the top spot.

When I became director of OEO in 1973 which was four or five years later, I still had a distant relationship with Agnew. He had, I think, gradually gained respect for me during that relationship with the youth counsel. But we were not what you would call close.

Then when I was named the director of OEO on a particular occasion I was called upon to testify before a committee of Congress and I ... and the entire Black Caucus came up to grill me and I endured five hours of testimony and the Washington Post declared it to have been a very good day for me and I think it was. I think I knocked them all out of the park.

And Agnew called me in my car as I was traveling around Capitol Hill the next day and he just said how much he appreciated what I had done and that he wanted to help me and work with me. And from that point forward Agnew and I became pretty close friends and whenever I had a battle with the liberals in the Nixon White House, Agnew with no prospect of gain would take on John Ehrlichman. He would take on Ken Cole, the head of the domestic counsel. He would take on Leonard Garman, Richard Nixon’s left wing special counsel. And he did a great job of shoring up my position at a time when I was virtually alone with the exception of Agnew trying to close down the Great Society.

So I have admired him as a man who knew what was right, who was willing to fight for what was right and who had a... he was a man of moral courage and of extraordinary knowledge, eloquence and he had his weaknesses as we all do. And I will never recall... I will never forget recalling the poignancy of his last day in office. He did the honor of asking me to join him in a long afternoon at Trader Vick’s restaurant in Washington where he tried to drown his sorrows in some of the beverages they were providing at that establishment. And it was something that I will never forget to see a man who was on the verge of potentially becoming president of the United States. There was no doubt that other things being equal he would have succeeded Nixon as the Republican nominee in 1976. If Nixon had fallen and he were the Vice President he would have succeeded to the presidency.

I believe that because of his character, his moral courage, his core principles he would have been a very great president and he knew how bad things were. He knew what needed to be done and I saw the extraordinary pain he was suffering to realize how true his own weakness and imperfections so much had been lost. And that ... it greatly impressed upon me the realization that those of us who seek to lead our cause have to strive mightily to resist those temptations, those ethical shortcomings, those improprieties which would disqualify us at key moments from carrying the torch to victory.

But when you look at even the most extreme charges brought against Agnew and contrast them with what is on the table already with respect to Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, other key members of the administration, there is no comparison. What is obviously is the double standard.

[Rushdoony] And you would have to add that what other men who are holding office and are highly regarded are doing and nothing is done to them.

I recall in the 1950s a man in politics telling me that increasingly, even back then, if there was noting you did that could be held over you, your chances of getting elected...

[Phillips] That is right.

[Rushdoony] ...were not good

[Phillips] That is right.

[Rushdoony] ...because a good candidate was one that could be controlled.

[Phillips] That is right.

[Rushdoony] So he left politics. He couldn’t stomach that kind of environment.

[Phillips] Well, we... we have got to be willing to have everything spread on the table. Unless you are willing to die, not just physically, but in terms of contemporary reputation, you cannot prevail, because the enemy will see it as weakness.

If they know that they can disarm you and cripple you because you fear a bad day in the newspapers, because you fear the criticism, because you fear losing your government contracts, your income, whatever, you are gone. You have got to be willing to when you go to battle politically as when you go war to lose everything. And if you are not ready to die, you can never win.

[Scott] Well, just imagine. When Nixon was under fire there was an abortive attempt to bring out Mr. Lyndon Johnson and he was immediately shouted down. Lyndon Johnson was an honorable man.

Now the honorable man had 30 million dollars that he made out of monopolistic television stations in Texas during his time in governmental office. And he said his wife was a wonderful business woman. And this was never challenged, never investigated, never checked out, whether there was any special pressure brought to bear to get a license or anything else, or to keep anyone else from getting it. I remember J. B. Saunders refused to acknowledge that he knew Lyndon Johnson. He knew him, but he refused to acknowledge it. He was not proud of the acquaintance.

[Rushdoony] Well, two of the three volumes of Karo’s Life of Johnson have been published. Already a counter volume has come out that does nothing but go after Karo rather than the facts.

[Phillips] Karo has done a brilliant job.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Phillips] What a magnificent...

[Scott] He is having a problem getting a publisher for the third and final volume.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Phillips] I recall reading aloud portions of the second one. I think it was called Means of Ascent. The first one was Ascent to Power. The second one was Means of Ascent. What I found hilarious was the description of Lyndon Johnson’s kidney stone. I don’t know if you remember that.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Phillips] ...from the book.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Phillips] Johnson was so driven by ambition that he tried to suppress the reality and this tremendously painful kidney stone. He had to go to the hospital to have it removed in some way, but if he got off the campaign trail he would lose his chance to be a US Senator. So he would ride in agony on the back seat of the car. He would change his shirts nine times a day. He would go on a stage and pretend to be vibrant, healthy, smiling and happy and then he would instantly collapse afterwards. And it is really even though it is authentic history, it is a parody of a man consumed by ambition. And, of course, there were other things in there, too, that show the degree to which this man was like Clinton, a man of large appetites, sexually of large appetites in terms of power, large appetites in terms of money.

[Scott] Well, of course, what Clinton did in the war... now I remember World War II and there were very few men my age who could resist serving who had any spirit at all. It just was one of those things where you felt impelled to get involved. And for a man of comparable age to stay out of Vietnam was especially unworthy.

James Fallows, I believe it was, who wrote an apologia in Harper’s magazine later, he went down to the draft office with the contrived excuse and he got away with it and then he left and as he left he saw what they called the grunts lined up, the boys who didn’t go to college because the college boys were given an exemption. And he felt shame as he drove by them.

[Phillips] He consigned them to a death which had been his destiny.

[Scott] And he wrote this apologia and he became widely honored for having acknowledged what he had done. And, as a matter of fact, he stands out from the rest because Mr. Clinton has never apologized.

[Phillips] And, of course, what Clinton did was even more dishonorable. He raised draft dodging to a high art. I don't think anyone did it in a more elaborate arcane way than he did.

[Scott] He broke every promise.

[Phillips] Yeah. This is a man utterly without shame, utterly without principle who is able to lie with a clear conscience because he has divested himself of conscience.

[Scott] Well, it is interesting to notice that he smiles, that his face is unlined. He shows no signs of strain while the flames are arising all around him. He has these staged press conferences where every question has been written by the White House staff before it is announced and then he has these little demonstration meetings here and there where people selected, pre selected comprise the audience and get up and read off their little card and he has an actor’s gift of making his answers sound spontaneous. What a press we have. Pravda didn’t do as well.

[Phillips] It is extraordinary. A kept press. Although we have to say that there are exceptions. In the case of Whitewater we have to commend the Washington Times for an extraordinary job of investigative reporting. We have to commend Chris Ruddy of the New York Post who did a brilliant job of raising what everyone had silently suspected and that is that there was much more to Vince Foster’s death than was first revealed. And we have to also pay tribute to the boys at Wall Street Journal who have relentlessly called attention to some of the problems. And there have been a columnist here and there who have also done a good job at key points. Bill Safire has made some good points. Others have, as well. But there is a lot to this story which has not yet been effectively communicated.

One of the interesting things is that Web Hubble, Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton who were three of the four musketeers, the fourth being a fellow named William Kennedy who is the... now one of the deputy counsels at the White House had formed an investment group among themselves called Midlife Investors. And they arranged it in such a way that Hillary did not make Chelsea Clinton her beneficiary. She did not make Bill Clinton her beneficiary.

[Scott] ...in her will?

[Phillips] In the investment agreement with Midlife Investors.

[Scott] I see.

[Phillips] You know, as you would have a beneficiary insurance policy you would have this agreement.

[Scott] Right, right.

[Phillips] In this agreement Vince Foster was beneficiary and Vince Foster did the same thing. Hillary Clinton was beneficiary.

Now you don't have to trust me for this. This was on the ABC News the other night. Now it would seem to me that would be a headline.

[Scott] A little bit incestuous, wouldn’t you say?

[Phillips] On the front... on the front page... well, adulterous, perhaps, if not incestuous.

[Scott] Yes, yes, yes.

[Phillips] But this is the kind of thing that the press has not brought up. And just imagine what would have happened if Pat Nixon had been in an investment plan with Richard Klindings and John Mitchell or one of those folks and had ruled out Tricia and Julie and Dick and had left it to the Mitchell family. Something would have been made of that.

[Scott] Well, something was made... something was tried to be made out of some woman that had a very passing impersonal relationship with George Bush.

[Phillips] Jennifer Fitzgerald.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is getting so bad that not much you can do but laugh. It is a great...

[Phillips] And, of course, there is a lot more. We could speak all afternoon about the Arkansas scandals because there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of them even before you get into the problems of Clinton’s apparent personal behavior with women.

There is one scandal which we will just share with your listeners and let me just put a caveat here that this is something I have received second hand from a journalist who formerly worked in Arkansas and this is not yet been in print and it is not something that I can corroborate. But in Arkansas there was a fellow named Say McIntosh who had been an activist in the Democratic party, a black man who at one point had been named Man of the Year by the Democratic party in Arkansas.

A number of years while Clinton was Governor Mr. McIntosh’s son was convicted of drug charges and was given a very long prison sentence of decades. And McIntosh was outraged by this, concluded that this was racial discrimination at its most blatant. He said that if his son were white he would not have received this kind of sentence and in fairness to McIntosh if you look at the sentence that was given to Dan Lassiter there is some support for what McIntosh is saying.

McIntosh at some point in the 80s began going after Clinton accusing him of having fostered a child by a black prostitute. The child’s name was Danny and McIntosh actively advanced this story. It was picked up by one of the national tabloids. It was carried in there.

Just before Clinton was to announce for the presidency, formally announce, McIntosh made clear to the Clintons that he was going to bring a legal suit which would require Clinton to take a blood test and to be deposed under oath with respect to the story of this particular child.

As I am given the information and, again, I cannot independently corroborate this, McIntosh was visited by an attorney who was a friend of Mr. Clinton and McIntosh for whatever reason became silent. From that day forward he has not said another word about Bill Clinton and Danny who supposedly is the son of a prostitute by the name of, I think, Bobbie Williams.

Low and behold, after Clinton was elected president there was a given day when Clinton resigned the governorship. Jim Guy Tucker became the governor and then Jim Guy Tucker left town and the president pro tem of the state Senate who happened to be a black man, a Democrat, took office for a day and in that one day he pardoned an number of people. And one of the people that he pardoned was the son of Say McIntosh.

Now there are some people who are alleging that there was a quid pro quo there. I don’t know whether there was nor not, but I know this is being investigated by some of the more honest people in the journalistic community. If that is ever developed into a question of fact rather than one of speculation, it could have interesting repercussions and in on its own.

[Scott] Well, I am afraid you are right. We could spend the afternoon going from one of these episodes to another.

[Rushdoony] Well, there is also the fact that apparently during those years there was an airport in Arkansas which was the landing site for drug bearing planes.

[Phillips] There has been talk about a scandal involving Mana, Arkansas. Again, I don’t have all the facts, because it is a story still be developed. And one of the things that makes it interesting is that a company called Park A Meter, which received significant funding from Bill Clinton though the Arkansas Development Finance Administration Authority was headed by the father-in-law of Web Hubble and apparently Park A Meter had a key role to play in matters which occurred at Mana, Arkansas. And there are people like Larry Nicolls of Arkansas who has had a long running dispute with Clinton from the days when he was Governor. Jim Johnson the former justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court and others have suggested that when the Mana, Arkansas story is fully told that that could be as serious as anything else that has been discussed with Mr. Clinton.

[Scott] Am I the only one who recalls that when Clinton was running for the presidency that he bragged about the wonderful things that he had done in the state of Arkansas?

[Phillips] Well he did a lot of things in the state of Arkansas.

[Scott] Well....

[Phillips] Wonderful is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

[Scott] Well, he claimed that he reduced taxes and that he had increased business and he had lifted employment. Arkansas was one of the pearls of the union and Perot, as I recall it, was the only one to pour water on those claims.

For some reason or another Mr. Bush and the Republicans played a strangely flaccid...

[multiple voices]

[Phillips] I am not going to go beyond a hint here, because I don’t want to tread in waters that are premature to discuss, but there are many people who blame Ross Perot for the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. But I think there is some credence that can be given to the argument that George Bush pulled his punches with respect to Bill Clinton, because he and Bill Clinton.... he was aware that there were some punches that Bill Clinton might throw at him that he didn’t want to have thrown. And some of those may relate to certain o the matters that we have touched upon this afternoon. And I think before this is over we are going to get a new perspective on the reason why George Bush ran so weak a campaign in 1992.

[Scott] Well, that would be very interesting.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that I find very troubling is the loss of moral indignation in this country. I think we are so used to seeing—and it is one good reason for staying away from television—the most crooked kind of portrayals of politicians, of businessmen, of people on all levels on television that we take it as a fact of life that in every area of life around us corruption is the norm. And I think that prevalence is one reason why there isn’t a tremendous outrage at what is happening in Washington.

[Scott] But has some disillusion and cynicism across the country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

You can recall, Otto, from the 30s how incidents that we today would consider minor and which would get maybe a few sentences on the back page would be on the front pages from coast to coast because of the moral shock.

[Scott] Well that is also true that airs were cleared. When Hugo Black was made an associate justice of the Supreme Court it was disclosed that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and, of course, that was headlines. Justice Black went on the air and he made a very short speech, perhaps 15 minutes or so. He said, “It is true. I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I joined when I was a young ambitious lawyer in order to get political backing. And I left as soon as the backing was no longer necessary.” And it ended the whole discussion, because things came up and were answered and that was that.

Well now nothing comes to an end, nothing comes to a conclusion, nothing is resolved.

[Phillips] Lying has been raised to a high art.

Of course, another example of that was Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was one of several men who had a more than friendly relationship with a particular woman in Buffalo, New York. It was not clear who had impregnated the woman, but the woman did have a child and although it was not certain that Cleveland was the father, he assumed responsibility for it. And even though the campaign refrain that year was, “Ma, ma, where is my pa? He has gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha,” nonetheless there was a measure of respect for the manliness of Cleveland in acknowledging his sin and expressing remorse for it.

[Scott] And that was the end of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. He came out ahead because he confronted the fact. He was thoroughly honest about it, more than necessary because the likelihood is that he was not the father. But it was a Christian country and they respected him for the way he confessed his sin.

[Scott] Well, we don't have this let us say realism, sense of realism. And we don’t get the straight answers. I think it is the lack of straight answers that bothers people more than anything else. These long convoluted accusations of lack of compassion instead of a response.

[Phillips] Well, there is another recent example of it with Chuck Robb in Virginia. I don't know if has been carried here.

[Scott] Yes.

[Phillips] But the Washington Post carried more detailed account than I have seen elsewhere. The Washington Post got hold of some memos written by members of Robb’s staff in which they spelled out specific reports of Robb’s presence at parties in which there was drug use and Robb’s suspected involvement in a number of adulterous relationships. And Robb said—and I apologize to your listeners for the candid answers, but I have heard some candor on your tapes in the comments. I heard candid comments in the past. Robb said, “Well, I chose my language very carefully. When I said that my wife was the only woman I had ever loved, I was referring only to coital relationships. I did not exclude other forms of relationships with young women.”

And it went on in the front page of the Washington Post to suggest what the nature of those might have been.

And, again, here is a man who behaved disgracefully and had he been candid in apologizing as Alexander Hamilton did when he was caught in an adulterous relationship, in a way that destroyed any prospect he ever had of becoming president. Instead of becoming ... instead of being forthcoming he has dragged his family through a long period of rumor and innuendo. He has diminished his stature as a man and he has placed in even greater jeopardy his prospects for reelection.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is up. Howard, thank you very much for being with us and for sharing these things with us.

[Phillips] This is an x-rated tape I hope. I put you in jeopardy.