Covering the Clintons' home turf
In 1996, while Bill Clinton was being renominated for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I went to Arkansas to check out Whitewater, Hope and Clinton's steak house hangout.
While all political and media eyes were focused on Chicago and the DNC, I got the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to fund my multi-day tour of the Clintons’ ozarky homeland.
The food was bad but the people, as always, were nice.
And it was fun to watch Bill Clinton give his 12-hour acceptance speech on TV while I tried to eat a massive slab of meat at Doe’s Eat Place, the Little Rock steak joint whose backroom was a club house for Clinton, Carville and the gang.
DAY 1
More than an hour after sunrise, the thick oak woods and dusty gravel roads of Whitewater — yeah, Bill and Hillary Clinton's infamous Whitewater real estate development — are still partially hidden by fog.
Not far away, the gently flowing White River is, as usual, covered by a thick layer of the bright morning mist that gives it its name.
Local residents of the Rea Valley — including river lovers who live like pioneers of 1840 and rank life's most important stuff as beer, bait and boats, in that order — are already fishing for trout or guiding tourists down the river in johnboats.
Welcome to Whitewater, USA, where once upon a time the First Couple of Arkansas and their banker friends Jim and Susan McDougal became partners in a slippery, unsuccessful real estate development deal that continues to haunt them politically, legally and metaphorically.
Whitewater, which won't be a topic of discussion by Democrats at their National Convention this week, is really hard to find and really hard to get to.
Traveling from Little Rock by road is an endurance test — more than 170 miles over roller-coasting, twisting roads for almost four hours.
Making the drive on a Saturday afternoon was like being part of an endless vacation caravan. A steady stream of speedboat-pulling, speed-limit defying, ATV-carrying weekenders poured northward on Route 65 from Little Rock, where the temperature was a muggy 95.
Through the towns of Damascus and Clinton to Yellville, you run an endless gantlet of antique stores, flea markets, tiny real estate offices and Baptist churches.
By the time you find the lovely town of Flippin and the empty woods of Whitewater at the end of Route 101 seven miles farther, you have passed through enough unsightly string towns to make a Mt Lebanon zoning officer weep.
For the curious or the masochistic, all the background of the sordid wheelings and dealings that have made Whitewater a never-ending news story and legal circus are contained in books like Roger Morris' "Partners in Power."
Inside the Beltway, Whitewater may be a hot topic, but few of the people in the Ozarks of north central Arkansas seem interested.
Certainly not the tourists who come to this vacation wonderland from around the world to yank the fat trout that are put into the White River for them.
Not the working stiffs who toil at resorts like Gaston's or make speedboats for Ranger Boat Co.
Not the local women who sew all day long like Third Worlders for MAR-Bax Shirt Co.
Not the rich people who live alongside runways and keep their private planes in oversized garages.
And certainly not Fran Dunn, even though Whitewater is virtually right in her back yard.
An unmarried nurse, Dunn, 59, recently escaped the crowds and crime of Southern California to live in the woods in a picture-postcard development called The Ranchettes.
Her charming two-bedroom cedar house in the woods (with satellite dish attached to the deck railing) would have cost her $250,000 in California, easy. Here it cost less than $60,000.
Dunn, who got up at 4:30 yesterday morning to do her laundry and to vacuum, doesn't normally talk to reporters who come looking for directions to Whitewater, which isn't on local maps and is not exactly advertised with neon signs or historical markers.
She usually plays dumb. Newspeople are even more unpopular in the Whitewater neighborhood than they are in the White House, Congress and everywhere else.
Reporters don't show up any more, but a few years ago, when Whitewater took off as a big story, waves of them came by land, sea and air to see the $30,000 cabin that Hillary once owned but never visited.
Anyway, the way Dunn and her friend Ann Dahhnan see it, Whitewater is the local slum.
To live in the Ranchettes, Dunn says, you have to sign a covenant 10 feet long. But Whitewater — 230 acres carved into 44 lots — is totally unrestricted, which is Arkansan for unzoned.
Which means that if you buy one of the five- to eight-acre lots for about $1,500 an acre, you can put anything you want on your land. Some buyers have built beautiful homes.But many others are living in trailers, shacks or half -built houses.
The people who live today in the House That Hillary Built on Lot 13 are John and Marilyn Lauramoore, who bought it from a local Realtor long after Hillary sold it.
The Lauramoores went through such hell during the media invasion — helicopters from Little Rock TV stations landing in their yard, reporters from England peering in their windows — that Marilyn started carrying an ax handle around.
She refuses to this day to talk to reporters. But her son, Danny, who just happened to drop in on Dunn yesterday morning, had a few choice things to say about media rudeness.
Danny, who didn't want his last name in the paper even if it was going to be published 1,000 miles away, doesn't understand what all the fuss is about Whitewater.
"It's just woods, ticks, fleas, stickers and rocks," he said.
Dressed in suspenders, jeans and work boots, wearing a good-old-boy's cap and a belt with a buckle the size of his fist, he fit the Arkansas stereotype.
He looked as if he had just walked off the set of "Deliverance." Except that, believe it or not, like Hillary Clinton and nearly every third person you meet in The Natural State, Danny isn't from Arkansas.
In fact, he was born near Warren, Pa., 40 years ago. And less than five years ago, before he moved to Whitewater to join his mom and stepfather, he was working as a truck driver for a steel company based in (the Pittsburgh suburb) of Bridgeville.
DAY 2
DAY 3
Little Rock guzzlers show no
respect for homeboy Bill
August 30, 1996
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Hey, yew all, stop chomping those obscene slabs of dead cattle flesh and guzzling those Rolling Rocks for a minute and listen up.
It's Bill Clinton, your ex-governor. The president of the U.S.A. Up there on the TV above the bar, giving a speech.
Aren't you going to watch? This time he's saying something really important. It's his acceptance speech at the convention in Chicago. The whole country is watching. OK, so it's really 25 percent of the country, but you get the point.
Stop the small talk about your own little lives. Show some respect for America's great political process. There are national crises to be addressed, federal deficits to be dealt with, Dickie Morris spin to be spun.
At least show some respect for the good old Arkansas homeboy who put your state on the national map and comes in here to Doe's Eat Place whenever he can to eat steak and drink from the same red plastic water glasses you're using now.
Don't pretend you never met Bill. In 18 years of constant campaigning, he's met every one of you 2.4 million Arkansans at least once.
He shook your hand at the mall. He hugged your Mom in '84 up in Heber Springs. He worked out next to your cousin at the downtown YMCA.
That's Bill the last time he visited Doe's in those autographed photos hanging on the wall, under the pair of old rifles and that dead game bird. Bill's the smiling man in the blue blazer, red golf shirt and giant jogging shoes.
But it was no use.
The customers in Doe's Eat Place last night at 9 p.m. local time — 12 in the front room, 30 in the side room — would rather eat steak. Doe's owner, George Eldridge, was the only person who cared what Clinton had to say.
"He looks good. He's got a good tie on, too," Eldridge said of the man he's known as a friend and supported politically since Clinton sought his first vote.
The president is coming home to Little Rock this weekend, but Eldridge would have heard from the Secret Service by now if he were going to drop in.
Eldridge had been hoping he'd be able to get Clinton to go dove hunting with him Sunday. The proprietor wasn't surprised by the lack of interest in the president's speech. Most big-time political groupies who come into his place were in Chicago or watching quietly at home.
Or maybe what Kane Webb, an the Arkansas Democrat Gazette editorial writer, said is true. Maybe many Arkansans are weary of national politics, worn out after four years of riding the never-stopping Clinton administration roller-coaster that has brought them joy and disappointment and visited honor and disgrace on their state.
If there were any Little Rockians out on the town last night who were interested in watching Clinton's speech, the place to go looking for them would be Doe's, a unique and amazing political gathering spot in downtown Little Rock.
It may just be a coincidence, but it was about the time infamously raucous Rolling Stone writer Hunter Thompson was disrupting the serenity of Doe's with an interview of Clinton there in 1992 that some lobbyists decided the restaurant's side room wasn't private enough for their deal-making.
So a private paneled room was constructed for them behind Doe's busy, grease-spattered kitchen.
The "Power Room" — as the staff quickly dubbed it — can be locked from the inside and has its own wet bar, TV, bathroom and door to the outside.
The last time he was at Doe's, Clinton used the "Power Room" to hide from the crowds as he did a live TV interview during an NCAA basketball game featuring his beloved Arkansas Razorbacks.
But even in the "Power Room," Clinton was far from getting presidential treatment. The bare concrete floor, plastic tablecloths and a huge, ugly painting of "Bacchus, the God of Wine," made it impossible for him to forget that he was still at Doe's Eat Place.
Good piece as always, but Bill has a rare error. The name of the restaurant was and is Doe's Eat Place. I lived down there for three years.
I don't like Bill Clinton, but your articles were nicely done and interesting. There are some people who can't see the truth when it's slapping them in the face. Sad