A WHITEWATER WHITEWASH IN THE MAKING

The start of hearings into the Whitewater affair by the House Banking Committee this week has confirmed the worst fears of those who expected a severely constricted inquiry and a whitewash in the making. Any reader who doubts the accuracy of that statement should watch as much of the hearings as time permits and make his or her own judgment.

Anyone with clear memories of the senate Watergate hearings (1973) or the House impeachment hearings (1974) can immediately spot the differences between real hearings and the sham variety under way in Washington. Real hearings are legitimate inquiries, with truth seekers on both sides of the aisle. The sham variety has rigged rules, rigidly imposed by the controlling majority, that block at every pass any possibility of a searching inquiry that will take it wherever the facts lead.

The problem begins with committee chairman Henry Gonzalez, D-Texas, and the rules he rigidly and arbitrarily enforces on straight, party-line votes. To take just one example, consider the ludicrous fact of the five-minute rule that limits questioning by each committee member. To begin with, this isn't enough time to conduct real and searching questions, with time for thoughtful answers or the occasional follow-up necessary to real dialogue. But chairman Gonzalez ruthlessly enforced the rule Tuesday, even allowing the president's counsel, Lloyd Cutler, to make open-ended speeches that consumed the time of the inquiring member. If the student council at our local junior high school operated this way, the sponsoring teacher would have to call them down on fairness grounds.

The ranking minority member, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, has a well-earned reputation for bi-partisan respect. His record, for example, includes having gone after the savings and loan debacle with plenty of zeal during Republican administrations. Rep. Leach stated weeks ago that the terms of the inquiry were so restricted that the committee would be looking at "a mere 5 percent of the Whitewater mess." After a couple of party-line votes and arbitrary rulings by the chairman Tuesday morning, Rep. Leach stated that, "We're now looking at only a fraction of that 5 percent." It is as though in baseball, a majority vote had shrunken the strike zone for one side and permitted only fastballs, no curves.

About Cutler, one point is crucial. During his testimony Tuesday, he was treated with extraordinary deference, especially by committee Democrats. The general attitude of the committee toward him was rather as though he were an independent finder of fact, hired by both sides of a dispute to look into the dispute and ferret out truth from fiction.

This is a serious misunderstanding of Cutler's role and function. He is a lawyer with a client and nothing more. His client is the president of the United States, whose administration is the very subject of the inquiry. His version is far from the last word. What would anyone expect him to say? He is going to do what all attorneys do: construe the facts in a light favorable to his client. There is emphatically nothing amiss about Cutler's doing this; an attorney does his client a disservice if he is not a zealous advocate. What is astonishing is an attitude by committee members that treats his pronouncements as though the oracle had spoken, when he is presenting one side of a highly disputed set of facts.

We hold out the hope that the Senate hearings, scheduled to start Friday, won't be such a travesty. If they are, then it will be all the more important for voters to be paying attention, for public opinion and the ballot box are where accountability must be enforced.