Exploring Clinton’s mind

Bill Clinton shocked and dismayed his friends with his last-minute actions as he left office. The same actions – walking off with $190,000 worth of furniture and other gifts and pardoning scoundrels who had done him favors – delighted his enemies. They saw fresh proof that they had been right in hating him all those years.

That $7,375 set of two end tables and two chairs and the fancy saxophone given him by Denise Rich looked sleazy enough. But they were peanuts alongside what he stands to get for pardoning her former husband, the billionaire fugitive financier Marc Rich. Now we are talking really big money.

The Riches tried to head off a pending tax-fraud criminal indictment in 1983 by offering a settlement of $100 million, according to Morris Weinberg, the relentless federal prosecutor who finally brought Rich to justice. Mr. Weinberg recalled to The Wall Street Journal that he told the Riches’ lawyer: “There is no way we’re doing that. We could never bring another tax case if we allowed people to in essence buy their way out of it.”

Later, their charitable donations of more than $100 million helped persuade the recipients to lobby for the pardon.

Other people who have been lobbied by the Riches know how much they will pay to get what they want. A rough estimate is that they would have offered $30 to $40 million for the pardon. It could show up in, say, a tax-exempt contribution to the Clinton Library in Little Rock.

Why in the world would Bill Clinton leave Americans with such a sorry memory of a president most of them liked and respected despite his atrocious personal misbehavior? Plain old greed may account in part of these last-minute outrages. He has two houses to furnish, he owes millions in legal fees and he is barred for five years from practicing law. He’s not the only ex-president who accepted big farewell gifts. Wealthy friends equipped Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm and bought a $2.5 million house in Bel Air, Calif., for Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy.

Probing more deeply into Mr. Clinton’s thinking, we can speculate that he has been resenting for eight years the drumbeat attacks by the Clinton haters and no longer cares what they say. The Wall Street Journal never missed a chance to assail him, even when its target was Al Gore, saying that he learned bad habits from Mr. Clinton. The New York Times built a Whitewater “scandal” out of nothing much and sold it to the rest of the country until it finally collapsed. A New York tabloid called the Clintons “white trash.” And Mr. Gore kept him in the doghouse throughout his campaign, accepting the big media’s line that Mr. Clinton was too poisonous to help carry New Hampshire and Tennessee and Arkansas.

There’s no excusing his behavior, but could it be that Mr. Clinton finally had had it and decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb? We’ll never know. Keep an eye on those contributions to the Clinton Library.