Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 3, 1998
A woman cleans up after Clinton again
The bashful and squeamish among us praise Susan Webber Wright for her profile in courage, but it looks to a lot of people like a profile of another woman on her knees in Little Rock.
Not necessarily fair, because Judge Wright has a reputation for probity and integrity. She's no Henry Woods, the ethically challenged senior federal judge in Little Rock. But it's not a great day for the women of America, either. The reasoning of her decision, if not the decision itself, is a victory only for men who abuse women.
Judge Wright, who has previously shown a certain girls' finishing-school giddiness in the presence of powerful men, has established a remarkably generous standard of behavior for randy men in the throes of lust.
"Even if true," Judge Wright decrees, Bill Clinton's behavior was not outrageous by Arkansas standards. A governor is entitled, so long as he doesn't press the issue, to send a policeman to fetch a woman who strikes his fancy, to drop his drawers, wave the gubernatorial member as if it were a baton and invite her to "kiss it."
Even if true. This is a canard on Arkansas, too, though Bill Clinton has so maligned his native state -- in the way he has destroyed his friends over the years -- that not many people care. They just want Arkansas to go away. Judge Wright no doubt has not carefully considered her words.
The judge has led a relatively sheltered life, having graduated from a private school in Texarkana and having been educated at an expensive and exclusive women's college in Virginia. Neither was a convent, but, despite having worked as a waitress to get through college, she may very well believe the tales she heard about the thrilling lives of the girls in the trailer parks.
The facts, buried under an avalanche of prurient detail of the life of our lowlife president, are of course very different. Such behavior as Paula Jones accuses Bill Clinton of is regarded as worse than outrageous by nearly all of the women of Arkansas, who -- despite Judge Wright's naive view of the culture of the place where she has made her home -- are not taught that trashy behavior is a virtue in their men. If the president of Stephens Inc., or Tyson's Inc., or Wal-Mart Inc. should invite one of the women from the stenographic pool up to his office to see what he looks like naked, he should expect to be bounced out on his ear even before the lawyers and angry fathers, husbands and boyfriends arrive.
Judge Wright, 51, astonished her colleagues, on and off the bench, when she met privately with David Pryor, the former U.S. senator who now fetches for Mr. Clinton in Arkansas, to talk about whether she had been too rough on Susan McDougal, whom she had ordered jailed for refusing to testify to the Little Rock grand jury investigating Whitewater.
This apparently violates professional ethics, even as lawyers define ethics, and the subsequent firestorm grew so intense that Judge Wright issued a public apology. She said the former senator, once an important man in Arkansas, had "flattered" her and she didn't at first think it odd that he wanted to see her about an off-the-record deal for Susan McDougal. It was kind of nice, in fact.
Her husband, Robert Wright, a law school professor, tried to warn her. "She asked me what I thought he wanted," Mr. Wright said. "And I told her he was going to ask her to release [Susan] McDougal before Christmas."
"She said, 'Oh, he wouldn't do that.'"
"I told her, 'I've known David Pryor almost since from the time you were born, and that's what he wants.'"
Mr. Wright, in a lengthy interview with The Washington Post, said -- boasted, actually -- that his wife usually doesn't ignore his advice on the lawsuits before her. Lawyers in Little Rock are sometimes startled to find her husband in chambers when they arrive to discuss pending cases with the judge. He dismisses the observation that this is inappropriate. "No, because I wouldn't talk about it," he says, talking about it.
Mr. Wright, if not necessarily his wife, expresses a genial tolerance of the naughty boy from Hot Springs. "From what I've heard," he told The Post, "a lot of Bill Clinton's women have been satisfied customers." The president, he said in the aftermath of the judge's infamous tete-a-tete with Mr. Pryor, has no legitimate beef: "Clinton should be pretty happy with her."
The actual result of Judge Wright's decision may be the legally correct one -- this could be an otherwise welcome blow for sanity in workplace relations between men and women -- but she has only herself to blame if everyone assumes that this is just more of the way the good ol' boys in Little Rock take care of each other -- and how the good ol' girls of Arkansas continue to clean up after Bill Clinton.Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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