WHITEWATER'S TIDE

Mark this past week down as a turning point in media attention on the Whitewater affair. Two years after the decidedly second-tier Washington Times began feeding its readers a steady diet of revealing fact and comment on the cluster of ethical and financial improprieties collectively known as Whitewater, the trail has been joined by dominant elite media such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Perhaps some day schools of journalism will hold symposia on how and why two world-class newspapers with vastly greater resources allowed themselves to be scooped so consistently by a small-fry rival with only a tiny fraction of their investigative capabilities. With the single exception of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which hired its own investigator, no other mainstream media organization has deemed the budding scandal worthy of any but the most cursory attention. Until now.

In the last week, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have put the disturbing story on Page 1. The Post headlined a 70-inch treatment in its Wednesday edition, "The Mystery in Foster's Office/Following Suicide, What Drove Associates' Actions?"

What has finally piqued the attention of even liberal organs such as these two johnny-come-latelies is the astonishing performances, in front of a Senate investigative committee, by a string of administration witnesses and Clinton pals from the private sector. Notable from the first category is Maggie Williams, chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and from the second, New York attorney Susan Thomases, who is reliably reported to be the first lady's closest friend and confidant.

It is doubtful that any witness before any congressional committee in recent years has even approached Williams when it comes to sheer, open contempt for her questioners on the senate committee. She has suffered wave after wave of amnesia. To say she has been uncooperative and hostile is an understatement. Some observers are beginning to wonder whether she hasn't opened herself to perjury charges.

Championship honors in the amnesia category, however, will go hands down to friend-of-Hillary Susan Thomases. To watch her testimony this past week was profoundly disturbing as she told senators, time and again, that she could remember almost no details of the events following the suicide of former assistant White House counsel Vince Foster. These were events in which she played a key role, in intimate and regular consultation with Mrs. Clinton herself. Thomases' testimony was so bad that even staunchly partisan committee Democrats stopped defending her.

From administration witnesses' own mouths, contradiction piles upon contradiction. There are missing files and missing logs of how much work Mrs. Clinton performed for the failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which made the Whitewater loans, and which appears to have been looted as a piggy bank for the Arkansas political elite. There are all the mysterious goings-on that followed the Foster suicide, and the question of the first lady's role in them. The White House has taken refuge behind one of the flimsiest-ever claims of attorney-client privilege. Richard Nixon had a more meritorious claim when he asserted executive privilege during the Watergate affair. He lost in the Supreme Court by a vote of 8-0.

It is hard to see why the Clinton White House would continue down this road of obstruction and obfuscation. As mainstream media outlets join the hunt, more and more Americans will agree with the judgment of eminent New York Times columnist William Safire. Given the way the president, his wife and their friends are behaving, Safire concluded, "Something is under that Whitewater rock."