Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies and
Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI.
by I.C. Smith
(Nelson Current, 376 pages, $26.99)
Historians sympathetic to Bill Clinton often say that the final
chapter on his life hasn’t been written, implying that Clinton’s
life will appear more impressive over time.
What’s far more likely is that it will appear more buffoonish
and corrupt than even critics during his lifetime realized.
In Inside: A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic
Bungling Inside the FBI, I.C. Smith provides historians with
more testimony on Clinton’s astonishing carnival of fakery. The FBI
dispatched Smith as special agent in charge to Arkansas in 1995.
Smith quickly found himself wading through the sludge of the White
House Travel Office scandal. “Lying, withholding evidence, and
considering — even expecting — underlings to be expendable so the
Clintons could avoid accountability for their actions would become
the norm,” Smith concluded.
While the liberal media played dumb about Clinton’s corruption,
Arkansans didn’t, Smith noticed. They supplied him with endless
stories of scandal and mischief, many serious, some risible, such
as the time Clinton accidentally bought a $400 purse on a visit to
a Little Rock boutique owned by one of his mistresses. “One day
Clinton came in and was fidgeting about while the owner waited on a
customer when he suddenly spied one of Hillary’s friends enter the
store,” writes Smith. “He quickly grabbed a purse and loudly told a
sales clerk, ‘I think Hillary will like this one.’ She rang up the
purchase, and Clinton discovered he had just bought a $400
purse.”
Traveling around the state, Smith saw that “there was very real
‘Clinton fatigue’ in Arkansas well before those became buzzwords to
describe the condition many Americans felt when he was president.
On more than one occasion, Arkansans told me that the only way to
get rid of Clinton was ‘to send him to Washington.’” Smith met one
Arkansas judge — a “lifelong member of the Arkansas Democratic
Party” — who would take his Arkansas lapel pin off on his travels
during the Clinton years.
Even Arkansans in the tank for Clinton grew “disillusioned” with
him, writes Smith. Journalist Gene Lyons, famous for positing the
Lewinsky-is-a-stalker thesis on Meet the Press, felt like
an ass after Clinton was backed into acknowledging the affair. “I
asked Lyons how he felt after it became apparent that Clinton had
lied,” writes Smith. “Lyons said it had been easier for him to
forgive Clinton than it had been for his wife, who had taken
Clinton’s picture off the wall in their house. ‘I’m not sure she
will ever hang it up again.’”
Smith grew familiar with the Arkansas political machine that
Clinton had manipulated effortlessly. He observes that Clinton used
the machine to keep at bay potential Democratic challengers — a
practice that explains the dearth of Democrats once Clinton left
the state. Arkansas became a red state Al Gore couldn’t even win
because Clinton’s solipsism made a vibrant Democratic party in the
state impossible. The Clintons, writes Smith, “would not tolerate
any political challenger. The spotlight was to shine on them and
them alone. Consequently, when Clinton left office and was followed
by a still wounded politically (and future felon) Jim Guy Tucker,
there was no Democratic party heir apparent to the governor’s
office.” According to Smith, Clinton made sure Tucker would never
challenge him by torpedoing his Senate run against David Pryor
through a “whisper campaign.” This neatly put Pryor in his pocket
and cleared away Tucker as a future rival.
Smith’s fund of anecdotes — which range over 25 years of
service in the FBI — throws light not only on Clinton but on an
era of porous defense in American law enforcement that made the
U.S. a soft target on 9/11. He records a staggering number of
blunders in the FBI but leavens the tale with moments of gallows
humor. He can chuckle over the time Bill Clinton’s portrait was
ripped off from the Arkansas State Capitol but recovered when a
homeless man “tried to sell it on the street for two dollars.”
Clinton’s legacy isn’t worth much more than that. It’s said that
every generation gets the leader it deserves. Clinton was certainly
the leader the media thought this generation deserved. As Osama bin
Laden plotted, a late-night comedy culture accepted a punchline
presidency — and the media prided itself on a lack of vigilance
towards its occupant. In the final pages of the book, Smith reaches
a conclusion that the old media still can’t admit: “Had the media
done its job, there would arguably have never been a Clinton
presidency.”
