Many observers rated Clinton's negative comparison of Bush to his father as Bush's worst moment in the debate. An unsettled Bush didn't regain the initiative for the remainder of the evening.
Czech-ing on Bill
Still, the Republicans didn't give up on the idea of smearing Clinton by highlighting his association with college friends in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, both communist countries in 1970.
Another GOP pre-election ploy was to have Czech newspapers run stories about the communist affiliations of Clinton's hosts -- and then try to blow back those stories to the U.S. news media. Three Czech papers carried such stories on Oct. 24, 1992. The headline in the Cesky Denik newspaper read: "Bill Was With Communists."
President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997.
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However, without today's Internet to spread the word and with the right-wing U.S. news media not nearly as large as it is today -- Fox News didn't launch until 1996 -- the Czech stories didn't get the attention that some in the Bush campaign had hoped.
More than a year into Clinton's presidency, in January 1994, the Czech news media reported that the Czech secret police, the Federal Security and Information Service (FBIS), had collaborated with the Bush reelection campaign to dig up dirt on Clinton's student trip to Prague. The centrist newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes reported that during the 1992 campaign, FBIS gave the Republicans internal data about Clinton's Moscow-Prague trips and supplied background material about Clinton's "connections" inside Czechoslovakia.
In fall 1992, the Bush administration's nighttime search of Clinton's passport file had other repercussions. The State Department's inspector general sought a special prosecutor investigation for a scandal that became known as Passportgate, which wasn't resolved until after Bush lost to Clinton.
In the end, George H.W. Bush escaped any legal consequences from the passport gambit in large part because a Republican attorney, Joseph diGenova, was named to serve as special prosecutor. DiGenova's investigation cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing, saying the probe "found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter."
FBI documents that I reviewed at the Archives, however, presented a more complicated picture. Speaking to diGenova and his investigators in fall 1993, former President George H.W. Bush said he had encouraged then-White House chief of staff James Baker and other aides to investigate Clinton and to make sure the information got out.
"Although he [Bush] did not recall tasking Baker to research any particular matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton's demonstrating," said the FBI interview report, dated Oct. 23, 1993.
"The President [Bush] advised that ... he probably would have said, 'Hooray, somebody's going to finally do something about this.' If he had learned that the Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, 'That's good, it's about time.'"
"Based on his 'depth of feeling' on this issue, President Bush responded to a hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it were legal," the FBI wrote in summarizing Bush's statements. "The President added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but just the facts and what was in the files."
Bush also said he understood how his impassioned comments about Clinton's loyalty might have led some members of his staff to conclude that he had "a one-track mind" on the issue. He also expressed disappointment that the Clinton passport search uncovered so little.
"The President described himself as being indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was doing" as a student studying abroad, the FBI report said.
Bush's comments seem to suggest that he had pushed his subordinates into a violation of Clinton's privacy rights. But diGenova, who had worked for the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, already had signaled to Bush that the probe was going nowhere.
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