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Type Of Activity | Presidential Activities - WHCA A/V Support | ||
Location | |||
Location | Washington DC | ||
Date of Activity | Jan. 1, 1995 and Aug. 23, 1996 | ||
Coordinates | |||
On October 4 1997, Time magazine is credited with breaking this story, deep into the Senate hearings on campaign finance reform, the Clinton administration turned over to investigators “belatedly discovered” videotapes of the infamous White House coffees and contribution's received to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. Within days, the White House Communications Agency, the unfortunate maker, and keeper of the tapes, just as was the case with the Watergate tapes found itself under siege again from all sides. Why hadn’t the agency responded to previous committee inquiries regarding taped events? Why had WHCA ignored a memo from the White House requesting all videos of coffees and political events?
Attorney General Janet Reno was furious. President Clinton said he was even more furious. And Senate Committee Chairman Fred Thompson and his Republican cohorts were downright apoplectic. Having requested all pertinent information on the events months earlier, GOP lawmakers charged that this delay in producing the tapes was another example of the administration’s obstructionist “foot-dragging.
” Between Jan. 1, 1995 and Aug. 23, 1996, some 1,500 people were invited to the White House for coffee sessions and with the right political contribution an overnight stays in the Lincoln bedroom as guests of President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore. The coffees were a fundraising scheme hatched by Clinton’s longtime political adviser Dick Morris, and may have raised more than $3.5 million for the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton/Gore re-election effort. But now the questions are, who were the donors invited to these gatherings and what promises did they receive from the administration in exchange for their political contributions?
As the news media detailed the furious finger-pointing, what emerged read more like a comedy of errors than a grand conspiracy: The White House had sent a memo to WHCA in April, but part of the memo hadn’t gotten distributed by the White House Military Office, so WHCA officials didn’t know the White House wanted the database searched specifically for coffee footage, and certainly nobody at WHCA had thought to query the database using the keywords “coffee or Lincoln bedroom.”
But an even more basic question is likely to remain unexplored: What were WHCA camera crews doing at those coffees to begin with?
The agency’s stated reason for attending the events sounds benign enough: The duties of the White House Communications Agency include videotaping “key” moments in the presidency for posterity. But while this may be a valid explanation for WHCA crews’ tailing the president to peace conferences and their presence around him during state dinners, it still leaves the question of why they were on hand for DNC fund-raisers and White House love-ins with big-money donors. The agency is, after all, under operational control of the White House, and senior White House aides are, in fact, the folks who arrange for WHCA coverage of an event.
Didn’t the president or someone on his staff ever question the wisdom of having Bill Clinton’s years in office memorialized as a never-ending kiss-up to checkbook-swinging fat cats? Granted, fund-raising is fast becoming the primary activity of America’s elected officials. But to preserve in Technicolor detail the pathetic realities of today’s political money-grub is hardly a shrewd move for a guy supposedly obsessed with his presidential “legacy.”
A handful of explanations for WHCA’s videotaping the coffees comes to mind. One, President Clinton wanted them there. After five years in the Oval Office, Clinton’s judgment may have been so eroded by all of the bowing and scraping that accompany the job, that he came to assume any move he made merited video documentation. (Footage of at least 44 coffees and more than 200 fundraisers were turned over to congressional investigator's.)
Aplausible scenario is that Clinton never thought twice about the cameras being there—that he is so accustomed to being shadowed by the video crews that he no longer notices when they’re around. This, at least, was the impression given by former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes in his October testimony before Congress concerning the WHCA incident. When asked about the agency’s function, Ickes responded: “I’m fortunate, I think, that I know little about it. They were around a great deal of time to the extent that those of us traveling with, or with the president in meetings or otherwise, came not to even notice them, quite frankly…. My understanding [is] that they were a unit of the United States military and that their function is to record … certain events and certain statements by the president. I don’t know when they are called. I don’t know what the criteria is for what they film and what they take on audio. All I know is they were there, and they were there quite frequently, but not all the time.” Ickes’ offered similar insight into the workings of WHCA’s operational overseer, the White House Military Office: “There is a military unit in the EOP [Executive Office of the President]. I don’t know how it is structured. I don’t know who it reports to. And I don’t know from whom it takes its orders, quite frankly.”
One might get the impression from Ickes’ statement that, despite its size, WHCA has never been very important to anyone in the White House. One would be wrong. If anything, the agency’s low profile was once a sign of the exact opposite. As a part of the even lower-profile White House Military Office, WHCA has long been among one of the least understood government agencies.
From the Eisenhower administration up through Reagan, WHCA’s overseer, the White House Military Office, is known to have controlled a multimillion-dollar secret fund (maintained ostensibly for the construction of presidential bomb shelters) into which the president could dip any time and for any purpose he so desired. The various abuses of this fund—including JFK’s upgrading family properties, President Johnson’s spending millions to improve the wiring and plumbing at his Texas ranch, Nixon’s using half a million for a swimming pool at Camp David—are outlined in the 1980 book Breaking Cover, by former WHMO Director Bill Gulley. The White House Military Office simply hid any expenditure the president did not want examined by “classifying” it as a matter of “presidential security,” said Gulley, who noted that WHCA personnel were frequently employed for these “classified” projects. For example, from the time he left office until six months after his death, LBJ had a dozen WHCA staffers down at his ranch, compliments of the WHMO fund.
The book also includes memos documenting WHCAs setting up of LBJ’s secret taping system. Wrote Gulley, “It’s no exaggeration to say [the Military Office is] the President’s Aladdin’s lamp: there’s nothing that can’t be done, and there’s a bottomless pit of money, ingenuity, and resources to do it with.” When Breaking Cover was released in 1980, the Reagan White House admitted to the existence of the secret fund, which had survived undetected throughout the uproar and paranoid aftermath of Watergate, but vowed that the Gipper would never dream of misusing it. WHMO and the White House Counsel’s Office have been unavailable for comment on the current status of the fund.
Today, the administration remains very protective where WHCA and WHMO are concerned. In March of 1994, Congress asked the General Accounting Office to look into the agency’s management and finances. Although the GAO’s preliminary inquiries raised concerns about, among other issues, WHCA’s budgeting policies, investigators were barred from pursuing the matter by the White House. As the GAO’s Assistant Comptroller Henry L. Hinton Jr. later told the House subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice “On three occasions in May, June, and August 1994, DoD representatives advised us that the White House had prohibited DoD contact with GAO or release of DoD data.” The GAO pursued the matter, said Hinton, and “during a January 1995 meeting with DoD and White House staff, White House Counsel staff indicated that we would not be provided the information needed to further pursue these issues.” The White House explained that its denial of the GAO’s request was because WHCA operations involved matters of “presidential protection.”
In February 1995, an agreement was finally reached whereby the Defense Department’s Inspector General would conduct an audit of WHCA. But even then, the White House kept an eye on the proceedings. In the 1996 follow-up hearings, the House Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice requested testimony from the head of WHMO, presidential appointee Alan Sullivan. The White House Counsel’s office wrote a letter seeking to block Sullivan’s appearance. In Sullivan’s place they sent WHCA Commander Col. Joseph Simmons.
But even Simmons’ testimony proved controversial. Simmons first submitted a prepared statement indicating that “WHMO provides operational direction and control to the WHCA. Simmons then submitted a second statement from which this reference to the White House’s oversight role had been deleted. The change had been made upon recommendation from someone who had reviewed the document, Simmons told the subcommittee, although he could not say precisely whom. Democrats chalked the incident up to a simple editing decision. Republicans saw it as the White House’s attempts to distance itself from the agency.
The administration’s apparent evasions on WHCA, along with the nature and history of the agency, bring up the very real possibility that the White House is not at all ignorant of the agency’s operations.
Congressional Republicans certainly suspect as much, and the recent videotape fiasco has spurred a movement to launch hearings by early spring into the perceived abuses of WHCA. But the public shouldn’t expect too much from a congressional inquiry. WHCA has made a career of operating under the radar, and Congress will be hard-pressed to breach the walls of “presidential security” surrounding the agency. As Congressman Souder admits, right around the time last year that House members were hearing testimony on the appropriateness of WHCA’s oversight and operations, WHCA video crews were—unbeknownst to the subcommittee—busy working the coffee/fund-raiser circuit.
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