He Must Have Learned Something -- But What?

By Rick Horowitz

WASHINGTON -- The folks who keep track of things are in a lather. They draw parallels. They draw lessons. And this time around, they wince at the picture that's emerging.

"Don't they remember?" they cry in frustration. "Haven't they learned anything?"

Maybe so, maybe no.

These slow learners, these people who show no signs of memory, live and work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Their failing? Their fatal flaw? (According, at least, to the folks who keep track of things?) They don't know how to handle a scandal.

This is not a small thing. Not in this town.

Now it's the videotapes -- the Big Guy surrounded by money, awash in fat cats. So they do exist, these tapes, though for months the official word was, "What tapes? There are no tapes." There are dozens of tapes.

Before the tapes, it was something else, and something else, and something else. Papers misfiled, documents suddenly gone (and just as suddenly back), delayed discoveries and embarrassed explanations. All of which didn't strain credulity -- it tore it to shreds.

(Daily Puzzler: If the Clinton legions are even half as incompetent as they so willingly claim to be, if they're even half as overworked, overwhelmed disorganized and downright sloppy as they insist they are, how come none of their "mistakes" ever goes the other way? Wouldn't you expect, for instance, that just once, given the law of averages, some no-talent clerk or in-way-over-his-head functionary would accidentally release some damaging piece of evidence ahead of time, instead of late? Just accidentally send it over to the Justice Department or the Senate before the subpoena was issued for it? Just wondering.)

Anyway: This is the way it's gone for months -- for years, really -- each fact and figure handed up grudgingly, belatedly, each seemingly minor mess-up inflated to scandalous proportions. And the thing they supposedly don't remember, this Gang That Couldn't Deal Straight, the lesson they apparently still haven't learned, is:

The coverup is worse than the crime.

Isn't that the lesson of Watergate, after all? It's not what you did that gets you into so much trouble; it's all the contortions you go through trying to hide what you did. The folks who keep track of things know this better than they know their own names: When something looks bad, get it out, get it all out, and get it behind you.

The folks who keep track of things have lived and breathed the lesson of Watergate for a generation now. They know Bill Clinton's not a stupid man -- how could he have missed it?

But there are lessons, and there are lessons. How about the lesson of Iran-Contra?

There was delay and obfuscation galore in Iran-Contra; the Reagan White House tried to run out the clock on the congressional investigators. There were plenty of sudden, inexplicable memory lapses in Iran-Contra. There were combative witnesses who told congressmen where they could stick their curiosity. (Any of this sound familiar?) Documents weren't simply withheld for suspicious intervals; whole piles of them went directly into the shredder, never to be seen again.

The Reagan White House forgot -- or ignored -- every lesson of Watergate.

And it worked.

The president was not brought down by scandal; he finished his second term with his reputation largely intact. His vice president did not pay a price; he was elected president in his own right. Did the country ever get the full story? Not even close. But were the people at the top held accountable for what they did, or what they knew? Not even a little bit.

There are lessons, and then there are lessons. The question is: Where does Bill Clinton go to school?

10/17/97