In my post
yesterday on Chris Cox’s actions on short selling, in the
penultimate paragraph, I wrote of an experience back in 1993 where
I and Bob Livingston worked closely with Cox on a small matter that
gave me a window into Cox’s views on short selling. Amazingly,
today I run across a
blog by a guy who doesn’t agree with that position, but who
otherwise tells very accurately the rest of the story. I also wrote
last week about how I first met Tony Snow because a top aide in
Livingston’s office was a friend and neighbor of Tony’s. What I
didn’t write was that it was through this episode, described by
this blogger, that I met Tony. It was this blogger who wrote the
study that prompted Tony to write the story that prompted
Livingston and me to follow up with Tony for more details and then
start the little investigation that began with four congressmen and
ended up basically with just Cox and Livingston leading it.
We actually unearthed some serious evidence that Hillary Clinton
had good reason to know she would profit from her jihad against the
pharmaceutical companies, but not in a way that was demonstrably
illegal. But the tawdriness of her actions was missed by the public
as a result of an errant (and rather unimportant) footnote in our
report that mistakenly assumed a document was referring to
Hillary’s hedge fund, Value Partners, when instead the Hillary
allies claimed that it was referring to the “value of the
partnership,” or something like that. Of course, the media,
especially Newsweek, ignored the absolutely rock solid rest of the
report (which soberly laid out the facts and made no extravagant
claims) and seized on the errant footnote as if the footnote’s side
point were the key claim in our report, in order to dismiss the
whole report as unreliable. But the truth was that Hillary was
indeed part of a tightly held hedge fund group (I think I remember
that the only three partners were Hillary, Webb Hubbell, and Vince
Foster) that was short selling pharmaceutical stocks rather heavily
just as Hillary’s health care task force, and her public
statements, were attacking the pharmaceutical companies and driving
their stock price down.
The hedge fund manager did indeed report those shorted positions
to the White House (and we think to Foster specifically) BEFORE
Hillary’s public anti-pharmaceutical statements. Tony
Snow’s column on it was absolutely correct in its essentials, and
the little Livingston-Cox report on it was absolutely right, and
Cox did a friggin’ brilliant job explaining it all on TV — again,
in measured tones and terms — before the errant footnote got in
the way. And it was in the course of the lengthy meetings on the
subject, sometimes with just Cox and one aide of his and Livingston
and me in the room, that I saw first-hand the power of Cox’s mind
and also his essential fairness and thoroughness and decency. It
was also during all of that that I first got to know Tony Snow a
little bit, and found him to be the wonderful, generous human being
who has so rightly been praised and missed so deeply by so many
this week.
