Looking for scoops or new angles on Hillary Clinton, who has been pretty well-scooped and angled already, Mother Jones magazine sent a reporter to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to scour potentially relevant archived documents.
Those documents included journals of a sort apparently maintained off and on through the 1980s and early 1990s by former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers. These journals were included in papers the senator donated to the UA.
It was in those journals that Mother Jones struck ... not gold, exactly, nor silver, but maybe bronze. Or most likely an honorable mention for a college try.
It turns out that the man who delivered the famously eloquent closing defense for Bill Clinton against impeachment charges apparently had talked quite badly about Bill and Hillary.
It happened ... let's see, oh, yes, 33 years ago.
These unearthings are from typed pages in files marked "private." On the morning after Mother Jones and this newspaper reported on them, the Bumpers family retrieved those pages for review.
Nobody in the Bumpers camp knew about their existence, apparently.
The documents marked "private" reflect that Bumpers dictated his musings for an aide's subsequent transcription. And they reflect that Bumpers presumably said in a dictating session in 1982 that the Clintons, while possessing good qualities and good intentions, were the most manic and obsessive and self-centered people he had ever known, had engaged in dirty tricks in one or another of the early Arkansas campaigns and probably lacked the character to succeed in office.
I keep saying apparently or presumably because it's always possible the typist made a mistake or made something up.
The first and best question is why Bumpers would record such thoughts in the first place, then include their transcription in official papers donated for public inspection.
Bumpers can't say. He is 89 and burdened with the cognitive decline of advanced age. His longtime secretary and the likely typist is likewise afflicted, according to a home health worker answering the phone at her home.
But friends, aides and family members have pieced together an explanation: The senator had some time on his hands in those days and used some of it to verbalize personal thoughts for transcription--for himself, for history, for some reason--and those files got included in the donation only by some aide's most egregious and regrettable error.
The remarks most at issue were dated June 1982, when Clinton, trying to come back from defeat in 1980 and regain the Arkansas governorship, was beset with voter dislike and scared of further and probably final rejection in a runoff with Joe Purcell.
In the way of like-minded and vainglorious politicians, Bumpers and the younger Clinton were, at once, allies and rivals, and, at once, friends and foes, and, at once, admirers and critics.
As UA political science professor Janine Parry explained, the older guy often critiques the whippersnapper.
Over the years the political rivalry lessened--one man settling in as a president and the other as a senator--and the natural regard that always existed grew.
In Washington in 1993, Bumpers sat in his Senate office and said to me that Clinton, then president, was, for all his flaws, the country's last best hope.
Remember, though, that the real context for Mother Jones' snooping was that Hillary Clinton is primed to be our next president. And the big find of this political excavation is that Bumpers assailed both Clintons.
Hillary comes naturally by the bunker mentality that had her keeping emails off the government server as secretary of state. She has always thought that people, out of jealousy, unload criticisms on Bill and her with a frequency and glee not applied to other politicians.
Thus the important character question: Might Hillary's withdrawn defensiveness--her hostility--bear significantly on her presidency and the welfare of the country during it?
I don't think so, much. But it's a worthy question, infinitely more relevant than what Dale Bumpers mused on the subject of Bill Clinton in the summer of '82.
But don't tell me that these 33-year-old archived remarks, outdated though they be, are irrelevant.
There will be an attack ad in 2016. It will invite us to consider what even Bill Clinton's impeachment defender said about Hillary--that she was manic, obsessive, self-centered, and not to be trusted if elected.
Hillary might shoot back that the impeachment defender said that about Bill, too, and Bill did all right as president except for a little character thing involving a young woman and a deposition.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/22/2015