Presidential Biographer Details Clinton Cocaine Use and Violence
NewsMax.com
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/cocaine.htm

Sunday, June 17, 2001 10:38 p.m. EDT

Even before ex-President Bill Clinton lost the Arkansas governorship in 1980, he was a "recreational user" of cocaine. But the defeat after just two years in office sent him into a "real tailspin," prompting the future president to commence a cocaine habit of "significant proportions."

More shocking still is the element of violence - whether realized or merely threatened - that has played a consistent role in Bill Clinton's political campaigns going back to 1974.

Those were the blockbuster allegations leveled Saturday night by noted historian and award-winning presidential biographer Roger Morris, whose 1996 best seller "Partners in Power" remains perhaps the best account of Bill Clinton's formative years and early political career in Arkansas.

Prompted by front page coverage of breaking developments in the Roger Clinton Pardongate investigation, Morris granted a rare radio interview to WABC radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander, where he detailed the dark side of the Clinton brothers' chaotic upbringing and rise to power.

No member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Morris was a former aide to President Johnson who resigned from the Nixon adminstration in protest over the Vietnam War. Years later, he would pen a scathing biography of the 37th president.

But like few others of his craft, Morris covered the Clintons by actually burrowing into the Arkansas trenches and chasing down the rumors that most reporters bent over backward to ignore. What he got was one hair-raising account of corruption, brutality and debauchery after another.

"Partners" offered the first mention of a violent rape allegation against the future president. And though Morris protected the woman's identity, her account sounded strikingly similar to rape charges that Arkansas businesswoman Juanita Broaddrick would make against Clinton years later.

Subsequently, both Broaddrick and Morris personally assured NewsMax.com that the woman in question was someone else - making hers the second outstanding on-the-record rape charge against the ex-president.

But on Saturday Morris discussed a different topic, one equally verboten in establishment press circles: allegations that the last president of the United States was once a heavy cocaine user who had his career protected and enhanced through a level of mob-style thuggery never before seen in any previous White House occupant.

Here's the exchange between the noted author and WABC's Batchelor and Alexander:

ALEXANDER: When did Roger Clinton first develop a drug problem? Do you know?

MORRIS: I had stories that put the beginning of Roger's drug problem in high school, although it didn't really become serious until later years. And it became an extremely serious habit. He almost killed himself on various occasions. He overdosed several times. And when he finally went for help and when he was arrested he was in a major habit.

ALEXANDER: Can you remind us about Bill Clinton's involvement with drug use?

MORRIS: It was clear that Bill was a recreational user, at least of cocaine. It began in the most significant proportions after his defeat in 1980. He went into a real tailspin then. But he had been using with his brother socially before the 1980 defeat and certainly used considerably after that, in the early 1980s.

And, of course, into the mid-1980s [Clinton used cocaine] with his friend Dan Lasater, the famous bond dealer in Little Rock, who was the bond daddy, who was later, of course, convicted of drug dealing.

ALEXANDER: Remind our audience of what became known as the Lasater gang.

MORRIS: Lasater was a very interesting character. He had made his money in the old Ponderosa steak houses - came out of nowhere in the Midwest in the 1960s. And there were organized crime connections that went back to Indiana and Illinois in those years.

He sold out rather early, became a thoroughbred farm-gentry character in Florida. He had something called Lasater Farms, which raced very few thoroughbreds, but law enforcement officials suspected laundered a lot of money in Florida.

The race track industry, and thoroughbred racing in general, is one of those shadowy areas of American sports where organized crime has always been very prominent.

Lasater was quite successful. He decided to open a bond business in Little Rock in the late 1970s, early 1980s. He was a friend of powerful politicians: Gov. John Y. Brown in Kentucky, Bill Clinton in Arkansas and others - and a big contributor, of course. [He was] a philanthropist who was fond of contributing to Toys for Tots at Christmastime as well as to politicians of every party.

ALEXANDER: And what was the Clinton connection to the Lasater gang - all of them, Bill, Hillary, Roger, all of them? How were they connected to the Lasater gang?

MORRIS: Well, they were very close socially. The Clintons were close socially to Lasater and his wife and flew often on Lasater's private Lear jet. They went to the Kentucky Derby. And these are flights that we later had testimony from state troopers and others that cocaine was available in ashtrays and literally at every seat on the private jet - as well as in the box at Churchill Downs.

They socialized a great deal. Lasater was one of those who had direct access to the governor's mansion in Little Rock. He could come in the side door without any questions asked and did at all hours of the day and night.

Bill would drop by at random at the Lasaster bond office at Little Rock. I talked to his state police chauffeurs and bodyguards who said he would be in with Lasater at Lasater's private office for hours on end and come out pretty heavily stoned.

This was a very close, intimate personal relationship and when Roger Clinton gets in trouble in the mid-1980s with law enforcement and with debts that he can't pay - I think money that he owed the mob and drug distributors and so on - Bill Clinton gets his half-brother, his little brother, a job with Dan Lasater down at Lasater Farms in Florida.

ALEXANDER: Now, John and I have painted this picture over the last several weeks here on WABC of what we call the Roger Clinton gang - which is Clinton, Locke, Dickie Morton in Arkansas.

BATCHELOR: George Locke was involved with Lasater.

ALEXANDER: Can you explain how we go from the Lasater gang to the Roger Clinton gang? It's not a big leap - is it?

MORRIS: No, it's not. And it's important to remember that Roger was always something of an independent operator. Here's a kid who's trying his best to rival in some way or to play the big shot next to his very, very successful older brother, who is, after all, a major politician and the governor of the state and all the rest.

But Roger had his own connections with the Colombian cartel. The [1985] drug indictment and conviction turned up all sorts of evidence of Roger's business connections all over the United States with the underworld. He certainly had his own contacts. And he had his own contacts in Arkansas.

This was a kid who was selling influence with his brother, who was fond of holding out deals. I mean, this latest stuff [Pardongate] is absolutely of a kind, completely consistent with what he did in Arkansas in the 1980s.

ALEXANDER: That's the point I want to make. ... That what we're seeing on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, it grows exactly out of what you're talking about. And you're one of the writers who best describes that.

MORRIS: Well, you know, the whole business of buying - we'll see in this Times piece tomorrow, $30,000 for diplomatic passports and a pardon and all that. I mean, this was the kind of influence peddling that Roger had been doing in Arkansas. And sometimes it was just very trivial stuff, sometimes it was just favors with the highway department or access to the governor or money from one of the governor's contributors.

In other cases it was zoning changes and favors from the state government that might have meant millions of dollars for those who were on the receiving end. So it ran the gamut. This was an extraordinarily corrupt little society in Little Rock and Roger Clinton was one of those purveyors of influence.

But you know, none of this would have been possible, Roger Clinton would never have had the credibility, he would have been dismissed as just a southern phony, as there are so many in Arkansas - if Bill Clinton had not been known to be corrupt himself.

People who were seeking Roger's access and were willing to pay for it knew that they had a governor in Arkansas - and later, of course, a president - who could be had.

ALEXANDER: And when someone would pay Roger for whatever it was, would Bill Clinton deliver?

MORRIS: Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no. And this caused enormous tensions between the brothers, as you might imagine. I mean, Roger Clinton occasionally had his life threatened because his brother didn't produce on some of this stuff. And Bill was, I think, rather capricious about that.

ALEXANDER: Can you give us an example of that?

MORRIS: There was one instance in which Roger Clinton needed some money to pay a drug debt and asked his brother to get the money from contributors, including Lasater. And Bill Clinton refused, initially.

And Roger had to come back and say to him, "Look, it isn't just my life that's being threatened. It may be Mother's life, it may be Virginia Clinton's life and it may be yours - because the guys I'm dealing with are capable of that kind of retribution." And only then did Bill scrounge up the money. ...

(Commercial break ends with audio of Hillary Clinton complaining that the Rev. Jerry Falwell had accused her husband of murder.)

BATCHELOR: Now, listen, these are violent people. That's why I played the Falwell thing. She jokes about it but she knows they're violent. She knows this.

MORRIS: Well, she knows this because there was a culture of violence that underlay their political rise in Arkansas. There's always the implicit threat, the subtext here, of violent retribution of some kind. And, as we all know, I think now, who've dealt with the Clintons over the last 10 years or more, there's a very long list of suspect deaths - the famous and the not-so-famous. It will be, I think, one of the more disgraceful lists in American history.

BATCHELOR: Can you please help our audience understand that Roger, the little brother, the half-brother - we've heard him on the police surveillance tape, I'm sure you probably heard that tape - that suggests to me, if that was a movie, I'd say this man is completely out of control and capable of slaughtering anybody in the next moment.

MORRIS: Roger is the classic weak character who is capable of violence because he's always, in a certain sense, in a desperate situation. He's desperate almost from the time he's a little boy, certainly into his adulthood, because of the inequities of stature and standing vis a vis his older brother, the envy and all the sibling rivalry.

I mean, my God, this is a family drama and a personal emotional drama as well as a political one. It's just being acted out, and was acted out for eight years at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

So he is, I think, capable of that violence. And as we were saying in the earlier segment, he's connected. He's connected to people in Arkansas who deal in that currency.

ALEXANDER: Is Bill capable of creating a situation where someone can be harmed?

MORRIS: You know, I think there's no question that people have been harmed who have crossed the Clintons in one way or another. Certainly people have been threatened. We're talking about political opponents. We're talking about ex-girlfriends who threatened embarrassing revelations. We're talking about people who had been close and intimate supporters, financial and otherwise, who bailed out, who became dissident, who left the camp.

Absolutely, there's no question about it. The threat of violence is always there and the reason the threat is credible is because it has happened, it's happened to people. And people knew that in Arkansas and I think people know that in Washington.

ALEXANDER: Well, earlier in the show we were talking to the Lincecum family. Garland Lincecum, who was a prisoner in Texas at the time - he felt as if his life had been threatened. And his family has come forward to describe how they've given this money for a pardon that they didn't get. And here he is, we're nearing the end of the Clinton presidency, and Garland Lincecum is threatened. Does that fit into the pattern of behavior that you've seen through the years?

MORRIS: Absolutely. It started way back in 1974 when Bill Clinton first ran for Congress. As an American historian and a presidential biographer, you try to look at these things in context. And, as disgraceful as Richard Nixon was in a lot of ways, as shoddy as many presidents are in the way they conduct their politics and the way they deal with people and all the rest - whether they're Democrats or Republicans - you know, you just can't find this kind of genealogy, this kind of prominence in modern American history.

You don't find this kind of pall surrounding Dwight Eisenhower or even - I mean, Lyndon Johnson, for all the known corruption in Texas, the stealing of elections and all the rest - and some of the allegations of strong-arm tactics - nothing can match in sheer quantity the Clinton record. And that's true of every other politician. Harry Truman and his machine origins in Kansas City or Jimmy Carter and his seedy friends in Georgia - there's just nothing like this in modern American political history.

ALEXANDER: So when Garland Lincecum was threatened, that family should have taken that threat seriously?

MORRIS: Oh, absolutely. You know, people in Arkansas I talked to who were frightened - I talked to them in 1993, in '94, in '95 - you know, after Clinton was in the White House, I talked to some very scared people who knew that; here was a man at the pinnacle of the U.S. government but he had been willing to use those tactics and those methods as governor of Arkansas, as attorney general of Arkansas, as an aspiring young politician, as a congressional candidate. They knew full well what they were dealing with.

ALEXANDER: I'm speechless.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Clinton Scandals
Pardongate