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“bow the knee to this new dictatorship”: the many faces of flak
Introduction: Collateral Flak Damage
Before elaborating a theory of flak, I will begin by considering the impact on a person’s life to be implicated in a mediatized flak storm.
As is widely known, President William J. Clinton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, then acquitted by the Senate in 1998–99. The series of events was a spin-off from an affair that he had with an intern that, in turn, was a spin-off of a special counsel’s investigation of an unrelated matter. I posit this tawdry series of episodes that clotted the U.S. political stage during most of the 1990s as flak in search of a real scandal. The investigation originated with the contrived Whitewater investigations of a resort development deal in Arkansas in the late 1970s. Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money as the deal collapsed, in part due to an unscrupulous and erratic business partner (Conason & Lyons, 2000). In turn, their partner James B. MacDougal was later convicted of 18 felonies around his stewardship of a savings and loan institution.
Fast-forwarding to the 1990s, Whitewater hypertrophied into “at least four separate but overlapping federal probes” into the Clintons, at a cost ←23 | 24→of $50 million (Qui, 2015). And the outcome of the high-powered investigatory efforts, contrived by the Republican Party opposition? While the drumbeat of flak insinuation echoed across news cycles for six years, the series of special counsels scrutinizing the Clintons came up empty handed on Whitewater—albeit, not for lack of time and effort. The special counsel’s final report in 2000 “concluded that there was insufficient evidence to show that either President Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had committed any crimes in connection with the Arkansas real estate venture that vexed his presidency through two terms” (Lewis, 2000, para. 1). Indeed, fifteen prosecutions occurred around MacDougal’s savings and loan—against grifters such as MacDougal himself and Clinton accuser/opportunist David Hale—as part of the 1980s deregulation-enabled crime wave in the savings and loan industry (Pizzo, Fricker, & Muolo, 1989); a wave on which the Clintons were not riding, but that crashed on them via the later political flak storm.
The special counsel’s null finding in 2000 against the Clintons was no surprise. By 1996, the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters had “deposed 274 witnesses and held 60 days of public hearings, during which 136 witnesses testified” (Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters, 1996, p. 1). Under the direction of Chair Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, the Committee parsed approximately one million pages of documents submitted by the Clintons, the White House, federal agencies and witnesses. What did this massive sleuthing effort uncover? In a word, nothing: page 466 of the Special Committee’s Final Report pithily concludes, “The evidence demonstrated that no improprieties occurred in connection with any of these areas of inquiry” as concerned Whitewater and the Clintons.1
Investigations into Whitewater and related phantom scandals limped on for several more years after D’Amato’s committee came up with nil. Flaking to pretend a scandal is in motion can almost be as good as the real item; that is, when the charade generates news coverage that flags a “problem” with something as concerns the flak target. Scrutiny into Clinton was a matter of investigating a person to find a wrongdoing—in contrast with the normal procedure of investigating a wrongdoing to find the person (or people) who did it. In any event, the Whitewater pantomimes finally tripped onto the peepshow optics of sex scandal in which the sitting president had inappropriate relations.
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In 2017, following the death of Roger Ailes, Monica Lewinsky described having been dragooned into the 1990s Clinton flak wars. Ailes was the head of the (at the time, fledgling) Fox News network when the scandal exploded in 1998—and he “made certain his anchors hammered” at the sex scandal, “ceaselessly, 24 hours a day” (Lewinsky, 2017, para. 2). At least one Fox executive posits that coverage of whether Lewinsky was a “tramp” heralded the tabloid circus that propelled the network from