Don't pardon corruption

There is an emblematic moment at the start of Bill Clinton's political life. It is January, 1974, and the 27-year-old future president, only months out of Yale Law School, is back in Arkansas eager to run for Congress. A relative unknown, he faces an imposing field of rivals in the Democratic primary, and beyond, in the general election, a powerful Republican incumbent. Yet as soon as he enters the race, Mr. Clinton enjoys a decisive seven-to-one advantage in campaign funds over the nearest Democratic competitor, and will spend twice as much as his well-supported GOP opponent.

It begins with a quiet meeting at his mother's house in Hot Springs. Around the kitchen table, as Virginia Clinton will describe the scene, avid young Billy meets with two of his most crucial early backers -- uncle Raymond G. Clinton, a prosperous local Buick dealer, and family friend and wealthy businessman Gabe Crawford. As they talk, Mr. Crawford offers the candidate unlimited use of his private plane, and uncle Raymond not only provides several houses around the district to serve as campaign headquarters, but will secure a $10,000 loan to Bill from the First National Bank of Hot Springs -- an amount then equal to the yearly income of many Arkansas families. Together, the money and aircraft and other gifts, including thousands more in secret donations, will launch Mr. Clinton in the most richly financed race in the annals of Arkansas -- and ultimately onto the most richly financed political career in American history.

Though he loses narrowly in 1974, his showing is so impressive, especially in his capacity to attract such money and favours, that he rises rapidly to become state attorney-general, then governor, and eventually, with much the same backing and advantage, president of the United States.

Those obscure origins have been a ghostly echo amid the pall of scandal that now hangs over Mr. Clinton's last days in the White House. The gush of lavish gifts from retainers, the fat contributions to the Clinton presidential library, his legal defence fund, Mrs. Clinton's own senatorial war chest, the favours to and from relatives and old friends, and, of course, the notorious 11th-hour pardons of criminal financier Marc Rich, drug kingpin Carlos Vignali and others whose allies variously funnelled money to the Clintons: There is a sense in which we have seen it all before, though a sense, too, in which most Americans still don't grasp what they are looking at.

Around his mother's kitchen table that winter a quarter of a century ago -- like so much that happened over the course and climax of the Clinton presidency -- nothing was quite what it seemed. No mere businessman with a spare plane, Gabe Crawford presided over a backroom bookie operation that was one of Hot Springs' most lucrative criminal enterprises. And just as Marc Rich, with his sordid international trafficking from Manhattan to Tripoli, was no ordinary investor, the inimitable uncle Raymond -- who had also played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in keeping young Bill out of the Vietnam draft -- was far more than an auto dealer. In the nationally prominent fount of vice and corruption that was Hot Springs from the 1920s to the 1980s (its barely concealed casinos generated more income than Las Vegas well into the 1960s), the uncle's Buick agency and other businesses and real estate were widely thought to be facades for illegal gambling, drug money laundering and other ventures, in which Raymond was a partner. He was a minion of the organized crime overlord who controlled the American Middle South for decades, New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello or "Mafia Kingfish" as his biographer John Davis called him.

It was in this milieu, this shadow, that Bill Clinton began his climb to power, and from which, in a long, twisting line from Mr. Crawford to Mr. Rich, uncle Raymond and Mr. Marcello to Mr. Vignali, he has never really emerged.

Through it all, Mr. Clinton and his apologists, and even political foes bound by their own ample corruption, would claim that there was no evidence of any specific quid for the quo of all the provenance and support -- when, in fact, the record would be filled with fix and favour, and when in truth it was Mr. Clinton himself as political virtuoso (and as blackmail-vulnerable sexual satyr) who was always the quid his backers sought.

The shrouded pardons this January belong to a seedy history. As Arkansas attorney-general, Mr. Clinton looked the other way from the state's pervasive organized crime and corporate depredations. As governor for a dozen years, he made the state a haven for speculators and profiteers while its legendary poverty and inequity of income deepened. He made the Arkansas Highway Department and Development Finance Authority what one witness called "his own political piggy bank" with millions in public funds funnelled to Clinton allies and ultimately back into Clinton campaigns.

He and his relentlessly ambitious wife exploited his public office for every possible personal enrichment to the furthest edges of the law. He pardoned his long-time supporter and social intimate, Dan Lasater, a fast-food and bond-market millionaire convicted on major drug charges and with documented links to organized crime, who had protected for a time Mr. Clinton's cocaine-addicted half-brother Roger, with whom the then-governor himself had used cocaine according to several witnesses, and whose own pardon from a 1984 narcotics-distribution conviction was one of those final, furtive acts of the ex-president.

Not least, it was governor Clinton who likely tolerated and concealed, perhaps even abetted, what we now know beyond any doubt -- from U.S. intelligence records, investigations by the House Banking Committee, and private documents of the principal drug-runner, Barry Seal -- was a major narcotics smuggling operation in the 1980s based in part in Mena, in western Arkansas, in a profoundly corrupt episode enmeshing the Central Intelligence Agency in its Iran-Contra machinations, the Colombian drug cartels, and organized crime in the United States.

As American editor Sam Smith summed it all up in a recent on-line issue of the respected Progressive Review, "Clinton was raised by mob-connected relatives and backed in his campaigns by members of the Dixie Mafia -- including major drug traffickers. He used their cocaine, appointed them, covered for them, looked the other way for them, partied with them, cut deals with them, and now has pardoned some of them."

As for Mr. Clinton's comparable record then as president, the story is still relatively less documented, though historians will have much to examine. Well beyond the fiscal fixes for speculators in America's now-burning-out boom, or the myriad favours in acts done and undone for Mr. Clinton's more open corporate patrons from Wall Street to the Las Vegas Strip, beyond even the exiting pardons, there are old shadows.

The tracks run from American collusion with the Russian Mafia, to quiet suppressions of law enforcement in the drug trade and its massive money laundering pervading the U.S. banking system, to the soon-to-be massively corrupt impact of the North American free-trade agreement, known among officials for its Mexican dimension as "the North American Free Trafficking Agreement."

Eventually, history will judge Mr. Clinton harshly, as one of the most corrupt U.S. presidents. Meanwhile, his indomitable wife, with her own little-known background, will be a force on the American scene, if not accompanied by some reprise by Mr. Clinton himself as a mayor of New York or in some other role. In any event, the reality of what they have been and done will continue to cry out for an honesty and radical candor not even most of their strongest critics have yet managed.

In the end, of course, the reflections they give back of a nation's long-time heedlessness, surrender, and in many cases complicity, will be ugly. Refusing to face the Clintons is a national transgression from which there is, and should be, no pardon. Award-winning historian Roger Morris wrote Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America. His new book, co-authored with his wife Sally Denton, is The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America , to be published by Alfred A. Knopf on March 20.