President Clinton's new lawyer took to the airwaves Sunday to put his calm, soothing coat around the Whitewater scandal - something the boss seems no longer able to do.
White House counsel Lloyd Cutler said the president wants to ensure "everything we do within the White House justifies public confidence in the openness and integrity of his administration."
Cutler, 76, former counselor to President Carter, appeared on all three network interview shows. "It will turn out, at least as far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady . . . to be nothing at all," he said.
Cutler made the prediction noting he was "somewhat fuzzy" on details because it's his first week on the job. "I have no independent knowledge of my own other than what is in the newspapers."
The president assured him he did nothing wrong "and I believe that," Cutler said.
Clinton, meanwhile, appears fed up with reporters' obsession with the Whitewater case.
In New York Thursday to promote a program to hire youths as police aides, Clinton drifted into an attack on his inquisitors. He said Republicans and reporters take what he says and does and "twist it like taffy to the Nth degree."
On Saturday, Clinton wagged his finger at two Knight-Ridder reporters who asked about Whitewater during an interview on his jobs program.
"I've never been in an environment in my life where you were presumed guilty until you were proved innocent," Clinton said angrily. "There has been a convergence of the way the press has handled this and the way the Republicans have tried to manipulate it."
The reporters said Clinton, jaw clenched, abruptly ended an interview, walked past the visitors without a handshake.
The picture of reporters and Republicans in cahoots mirrored charges of a GOP president 20 years ago. Republicans suggest Clinton doth protest too much - that he's offering bluster instead of explanations.
"I think that we ought to start the hearings, get everything out there," Sen. Robert Dole, R-Kan., said on This Week With David Brinkley.
The White House hopes Whitewater - a complex series of financial transactions by the Clintons in Arkansas, followed by a series of missteps by their White House - will fade from public interest.
The investigation, however, will drag on. Special counsel Robert Fiske has said his work will carry into next year.
Among the things Fiske wants to know is whether officials tried to sway the Resolution Trust Corp. inquiry. Newsweek reported this week that RTC investigator Jean Lewis was removed from the Madison Savings & Loan case after the White House briefings.
U.S. News & World Report this week quotes David Kendall, the Clintons' private attorney, as saying the investigations may show the president and first lady have some tax liability - but that's all.
