WASHINGTON — Forty years ago this autumn I began my
professional life as an innocent procreator of wisecracks by
founding The American Spectator, a magazine that I suppose
is taking its place in American literature as one extended
wisecrack. At the Spectator we have always seen a joke
lurking where the humorless and smug perceive a sacred cow or a
golden opportunity. This week it became clear that a joke is a
dangerous thing — the humorless and the smug are in the
ascendancy.
My most famous wisecrack has denied my fellow Americans the
services of a lawyer who would surely be acclaimed in American
history as one of our finest attorneys general, Ted Olson. Perhaps
I should take a vow against ever again uttering a flippant or
sardonic remark. From now on I may growl like the Hon. Patrick
Leahy or snarl like the Hon. Harry Reid. In a moment of levity I
referred to series of Spectator news stories that were
always factual and remain irrefragable as “the Arkansas Project,”
and though my friends laughed Democrats under the Clintons’ weird
spell cowered and envisaged images of McCarthyism
and The Red Scare. For a decade I have witnessed
my harmless flippancy enter the history books as a political hate
crime. This was not my intention.
Early in the Clinton Administration, when the scandal-prone
Forty-Second President of the United States was sweating somewhere
between her Travelgate and her Filegate en route
to his Monicagate, I decided that investigative
journalists were going to have a field day as long as the Clintons
held high office, testing the rule of law and attracting the
attention of what are called the authorities. Thus I raised funds
to improve the investigative reporting of the Spectator.
What now sends hysteria through polite society as the Arkansas
Project was initially labeled Expanded Editorial and Reporting. It
was funded not unlike the funding of National Public Broadcasting’s
“Frontline,” save for our superior record of accuracy.
Olson, having been on the Spectator’s board of
directors during the 1990s, has been twice implicated in the
Arkansas Project by the likes of Leahy and Reid, once during his
successful confirmation hearings for solicitor general and now
while being considered as a nominee to head the Justice Department.
As the project was an effort at reportage, and Olson is — merely
to quote the Wall Street Journal — “one of America’s
finest lawyers,” you can be sure he had no journalistic or
editorial involvement in it. He may have given some legal advice,
but it would have been minimal. We broke no laws. We did not even
skirt the law. All we did was report what turned out to be the
Clintons’ misbehavior, misbehavior that is now on the historical
record. Thus far in this era of the smug and humorless, it is not
illegal to report the news. As the Wall Street Journal
editorialized in defense of Olson, “committing journalism is not a
crime. The Arkansas Project was never accused of breaking any laws,
although the Clinton Justice Department did investigate the
magazine over the campaign, which strikes us as a much creepier
sort of partisanship than exercising one’s First Amendment
rights.”
Actually there were charges. The American Spectator was
accused of threatening violence and of witness tampering — both
felonies — by the Clintons, their pliant attorney general, Janet
Reno, and her collaborator, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder.
After reviewing these charges with the assistance of a grand jury,
the government’s special counsel concluded the accusations were
“unsubstantiated or, in some cases, untrue.” That has not stopped
the ex-Boy President from repeating the witness tampering charge in
his memoirs and on the walls of his dubious presidential library.
Thus does the Arkansas Project continue, not as a wisecrack but as
a “dark episode” in American history.
The general complaint against Olson has been partisanship. But
he would never be so partisan as to harass a small magazine for
“committing journalism.” One of his ripostes to his attackers last
week was to note that Pulitzer Prizes are given for investigative
journalism not jail sentences, at least not in this country. Well,
I expect no Pulitzer Prize, and after the Clintons’ last round of
attacks I received no jail sentence; but if I had, so what? Call me
narcissistic if you will, but I have never been able to comprehend
what is so unpleasant about solitary confinement.
