Whitewater’s wake

Independent Counsel Robert Ray announced Wednesday he was closing the Whitewater investigation. Though no fault of Mr. Ray’s, it is a closing without any hint of closure.

Mr. Ray found “the evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that either President or Mrs. Clinton knowingly participated in any criminal conduct” involving Whitewater or Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan or alleged related cover-ups. Would that the only damage done by that inconclusive conclusion was to disgruntled investors in a failed Arkansas real-estate deal.

The land deal was a minor issue during the 1992 presidential campaign. It grew to middling-issue status during Mr. Clinton’s first year in office and quickly erupted into a mountain of loosely related scandals – including, but not limited to, the White House travel office, missing FBI files and, of course, Monica Lewinsky – that consumed a two-term presidency, opened a partisan rift in Congress that likely will persist for years, gave birth to an entire industry devoted to conspiracy theories and, worst of all, created in the public a deep and unhealthy disgust of government.

For this, there is plenty of blame to go around, but pin most of it on the president. His agonizing obfuscations, hair-splitting, denials and outright lies gave this scandal a longevity it hardly deserved. Pin the next biggest handful on the president’s opponents in Congress for using the scandal as an impediment to the cooperation and compromise legislating requires. This is a “do-nothing” Congress not because of laziness, but out of spite. The squandered opportunities Gov. Bush refers to in his assessment of the administration he hopes to succeed is an accurate assessment that, in fairness, should be expanded to include two of the three branches of government. The scandal exposed a serious flaw in the independent counsel law, that there was no statutory limit on how far an investigation could expand beyond its original purpose. Under Mr. Ray’s predecessor, Kenneth Starr, that flaw was exploited to allow the counsel’s office to become a dumping ground for all manner of baseless accusations. Worse, the leaked rumors, speculations and gossip that poured from Mr. Starr’s office seriously damaged the integrity of the investigation.

And, worst of all, proved fatal to the office itself. Congress, rather than finding the courage to revise the independent counsel law, allowed it to lapse. The Whitewater investigation may have pried out of the White House more ugly details than the public really wanted to know, but an excess of bad news is preferable to no news at all, which is what the public is likely to get in the future as administrations are allowed to police themselves. Like the evidence against the Clintons, this is insufficient.