Democratic Underground - Scoop: Suzan Mazur Asks Carl Bernstein Why Mena Is Not In His Hillary Clinton Biography

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00102.htm

"Good journalism requires a degree of courage in today's climate, a quality now in scarce supply in our mass media. Many current assumptions in America--about race, about economics, about the fate of our cities--need to be challenged, and we might start with the media."
--Carl Bernstein, New Republic, "The Idiot Culture"

Suzan Mazur Confronts Carl Bernstein On Mena & Hillary Clinton

By Suzan Mazur

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Carl Bernstein Booktalk: A Woman in Charge
10/5/2007, Barnes & Noble, 82nd Street & Broadway, New York
(Some of the less glowing excerpts)
�. . .appily I think we have a real biography here and what you end up with is a story and a woman�s struggle that enables you to decide with your own values, I hope, whether or not you think she should be the president of the United States. . . .
I learned that in 1989 Bill Clinton had fallen in love with another woman and wanted to leave the marriage. And Hillary, as Betsy Wright, Bill�s chief of staff in the gubernatorial years, told me, Hillary wouldn�t give him a pass. . . . And Betsy Wright sat down with him and said you have to tell me about the other women and whether or not it is going to cause you and Hillary such harm that you�ll never recover from it. And she told me that she had brought another person with Bill Clinton � a witness � because Clinton had a way of forgetting unpleasant things that he was confronted with. . . .
I first heard of him from mutual friends maybe when I was 30 years old or so. We have many mutual friends. But only Hillary Clinton understood early on his sexual compulsions, as she called them, if they became known -- and their effect became known -- would make him politically unviable. And so she took it upon herself to try to contain their effect. . . .
So increasingly, she took it upon herself to try and contain and keep him politically viable as more and more of these rumors seeped out. So you have to ask yourself � what does this do to the psyche of a spouse? . . . And it came to occupy more and more -- compromising, hiring lawyers, hiring private detectives to find out stuff about the women. And in some cases smearing the women. . .
I say in the last chapter of the book that Hillary Clinton has had a difficult relationship with the truth. . . . What do the missing billing records show? They show that she had a nickel dime law practice and that she wasn�t one of the great lawyers in America."
(Bernstein also told the audience Hillary Clinton �failed the D.C. bar exam�, the only Yalie of the group of 700 or so to flunk.)

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TWO BOOKS ABOUT THE CLINTONS
Carl Bernstein's ----- Roger Morris's

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Much has been written about the CIA cocaine operation at Mena, Arkansas during Bill and Hillary Clinton�s watch as governor and first lady of that state in the 1980s. So I wondered why Carl Bernstein left it out of his book on Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, when the argument put forth by Clinton biographer Roger Morris in his book, Partners in Power, was a particularly compelling one about the CIA operation taking place.

I decided to ask Bernstein formally for an explanation about this at his Hillary Clinton booktalk last Friday at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper West Side, situated a safe distance from the Columbia University and New York University war protest crowds.

Indeed, it was a restrained standing-room-only audience with neighborhood retirees in attendance and one or two street people to give the mix some real New York flavor.

Bernstein told me in essence during the Q&A following his talk that there is no evidence there ever was a CIA cocaine operation at Mena that �Clinton� was aware of.

Roger Morris, however, stands by his investigation of the Clinton Arkansas years. The award winning journalist and former foreign service officer who also served on the senior staff of the Johnson and Nixon National Security Council, reviewed thousands of documents related to the Mena episode and conducted 100 interviews in Arkansas before reaching the conclusion that the "Clintons" knew of the operation from the inception.
My interview with Roger Morris about Mena ran on these pages in July. Scoop: Deeper Into The Clintons' CIA Drug Nexus]

Following the Bernstein booktalk, I emailed Roger for his comment on Bernstein's remarks. Here is Roger's response:

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"I may have mentioned to you that I reviewed the CB (Carl Bernstein) book at the behest of the Globe&Mail ( Book Review: The Woman Who Would Be Queen ... Or President), a review that was critical but was actually softer than what I might have said about him and the sad decline he represents. . . . (See also� Undernews: The Crash Of The Democratic Party )
No one came to us with anything. Sally got the Seal archive from his widow after much hard work and several trips to New Orleans. The archive, which is now at the University of Nevada at Reno, or should be available there, I think, is what it is--exhaustive, unmistakable. The IRS pursued the widow for years. The CIA IG admitted to operations at Mena (though never drug trafficking, of course, there or anywhere else). Several law enforcement agencies, local, state and federal, had extensive records. I have rehearsed the documentation so many times. That on top of the corroborative/complimentary evidence from LD Brown, the Lasater connections , etc. etc.
Simply to ignore the story, as the apologists and (what grandma called) the fraidycats have is eloquent of the larger problem. And to believe that anything even a fraction of that magnitude went on there without Clinton being aware at some level beggars all imagination. But then Carl was not writing about him, I realize, and his book, among its many failures, is abysmal on Arkansas politics and the system there. Alas, I was a genuine admirer of Carl in the Watergate reporting (and was a source at one point), much beyond his ever-lightweight and subsequent sell-out co-author. Someday, of course, the Mena story will be opened further. But not from the Carl's, not from this culture. . . ."

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(See also�
Mena investigator Bill Duncan's riveting deposition
& Mena resource page)

I first bumped into Carl Bernstein one late end-of-winter night in 1992 at Rocco's, an Italian pastry shop on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, although I'd seen him some months earlier running around the warehouses just off Hudson Street wearing white shorts and a teeshirt with a towel around his neck -- flashing a huge smile -- and looking somewhat like a fish out of water in the then - offbeat West Village.

Bernstein was returning from NYU when he walked into Rocco's, having just finished teaching a class in journalism. He was a bit overdressed for the mild weather in a navy cashmere coat.

We introduced ourselves, drank some tea � mint, I think, and talked. Bernstein was interested that I�d covered the Gulf War for Newsday's editorial pages and for The Economist and that I'd recently been in Santa Barbara attending Prince Mohammed bin Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud�s opening a chair in Islamic Studies at USC�Santa Barbara, the prince�s alma mater.

As the conversation progressed, he asked me if I�d like to see his memorabilia at home several blocks away. (His place would later be featured in Architectural Digest.)

(for more including what happened next & a transcript of the Barne's & Noble exchange of views see�
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00102.htm)

Note To Mods: This post breaks the three paragraph rule with the permission of author and publisher.

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