After the investigations died, some Democrats in Congress, who had participated in the aborted probes, came under nasty Republican attacks as did journalists who had pursued the stories.
Gonzalez had raised the ire of the first Bush administration by revealing that Bush and other senior Republicans had followed an ill-fated covert policy of coddling Saddam Hussein, disclosures that had rained on Bush's parade after the U.S. military victory over Iraq in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Now, Gonzalez was left looking like a foolish old man, a kind of modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
The same could be said of Lawrence Walsh, a lifelong Republican who crossed his own party by challenging the cover stories that had shielded top Republicans caught up in the Iran-Contra Affair.
In pressing investigations into alleged obstructions of justice, Walsh had found his reputation under ad hominem attacks from The Washington Times and other parts of the conservative news media for petty matters such as ordering room-service meals and flying first class.
Walsh was so stunned by the ferocity of the Republican defensive strategy that he entitled his memoirs Firewall in recognition of the impenetrable barrier that was built to keep the Iran-Contra scandal away from Reagan and Bush.
Walsh, too, was dismissed as a foolish old man, though the literary metaphor for him was Moby Dick's Captain Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale.
But letting the outgoing Reagan-Bush-I team off the hook hadn't
earned the Democrats any measure of bipartisan protection. By spring
1994, Clinton had begun to sense the rising tide of political danger
that the non-stop attacks against him represented. He was looking for
allies and some sympathy.
So, as waiters poured coffee at the East Room reception and Clinton was voicing his frustrations to some of his guests, Stuart Sender saw his chance to ask Clinton why he hadn't pursued leads about the Reagan-Bush-I secret initiatives in the Middle East.
"I had this moment to say to him, "What are you going to do about this? Why aren't you going after them about Iran-Contra and Iraqgate?'" Sender said. "If the shoe were on the other foot, they'd sure be going after our side. " Why don't you go back after them, their high crimes and misdemeanors?"
But Clinton brushed aside the suggestion.
"It was very clear that that wasn't what he had in mind at all," Sender said. "He said he felt that Judge Walsh had been too strident and had probably been a bit too extreme in how he had pursued Iran-Contra. He didn't feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people.
"To me what was amazingly telling was his dig at Walsh, this patrician Republican jurist who had been put in charge of this but even the Democratic President had decided that this was somewhere that he couldn't go. He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise, build working relationships."
Clinton "really did have this idea that he'd be able to work with these guys," Sender recalled with a touch of amazement in his voice. "It seemed even at the time terribly naà ¯ve that these same Republicans were going to work with him if he backed off on congressional hearings or possible independent prosecutor investigations.
"How ironic that he decides he's not going to pursue this when later on they impeach him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal."
False History
Sender, like others who had been in the trenches of the national security scandals of the 1980s, thought the retreat on the investigations by Clinton and the Democrats after they won the 1992 elections was wrong for a host of other reasons, too.
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