Over the gunwales

     Bill Clinton, who continues to insist he's "fully cooperating" with all prosecutorial and congressional inquiries into the compost heap of strange dealings known as "Whitewater," now says he is ever-so-reluctantly appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to overturn an 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the White House must turn over lawyers' notes on discussions with Mrs. Clinton.
      Why does Mr. Clinton fight this fight, much as he would love to cooperate? Why, simply to preserve the vital constitutional safeguard of lawyer-client confidentiality, of course.
      Never mind that the lawyers in question were tax-paid government attorneys, and thus cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered to have been the private counsel of Mrs. Clinton, who neither is nor was a government official of any kind.
      The notes which the "cooperative" White House now struggles so mightily to keep secret -- it seems to have forgotten this important principle when many similar sets of notes were earlier turned over without protest -- were taken during breaks in the first lady's 1996 grand jury testimony on the reappearance of her Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House sewing room. In addition, some of the notes were taken during earlier meetings concerning Mrs. Clinton's activities in the immediate aftermath of the death of her close personal friend, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster.
      Meantime, it turns out another former Clinton intimate, Webster Hubbell, had at least twice as many meetings with White House insiders -- including one with Mrs. Clinton herself -- in the period after Tyson Foods general counsel Jim Blair (he of the miraculous Hillary cattle futures trades) now testifies that he came to the White House to warn the Clintons that Mr. Hubbell was likely to be convicted of billing fraud, and "needed to resign as quickly as possible."
      The Clintons insist they had no idea their close associates were arranging lucrative financial opportunities for Hubbell -- or even how much trouble Hubbell was in -- around the time when Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr found defendant Hubbell growing suddenly more reluctant to cooperate. The Kansas City Star last week reported yet another such deal set up to benefit the big Arkansas lawyer during the period in question -- $90,000 to lobby for Sprint on behalf of a single European venture.
      Mr. Starr apparently wonders if such financial largesse to a man who faced felony charges -- and who knew where all the Clintons' bodies were buried -- might not have the reek of "obstruction of justice."
      And now, even those solidest of sandbags in the dike against Whitewater no longer seem so secure. The Washington Post has raised questions about the Hubbell arrangements, and on Tuesday the influential A.M. Rosenthal of The New York Times wrote that May 5 was the day he could no longer bring himself to believe the Clintons were being entirely truthful on matters relating to Whitewater.
      "It would not take a particularly suspicious mind -- let alone a prosecutor's -- to see high-paying jobs as hush money to keep a defendant silent," Mr. Rosenthal opines. Well, well.
      If the Timesmen have truly believed the Clintons to be innocent lambs for the past four years, we cringe to think of the wailing that's likely to arise just west of Broadway when they find out the bad news about the Easter Bunny.
      But the point is that even some of this administration's most ardent defenders, who have crossed their fingers for four years and hoped the Little Rock gang would survive to hand the paddles to Mr. Gore or Mr. Gephardt, are now pulling on their Mae Wests and testing the temperature of the water over the side, as they prepare to swim for it.
      Buckle up, Mr. Clinton. It looks like it's going to be a bumpy ride.