XTRA: Babbitt's Department of Ulterior

Babbitt's Department of Ulterior

The two Arizona boys went to Harvard law together, took the bar together, and set up their careers together at the Phoenix law firm of Brown and Bain. When Babbitt ran for office, Eckstein managed the campaign, then served as part of Babbitt’s kitchen cabinet.
Yet when Eckstein went to Washington to plead on behalf of a casino for the poor Chippewas, he discovered that his friend, the secretary of the Interior, was about to release the order denying the request.
Recounting the July 1995 meeting, Eckstein told the Senate that when he pleaded for time, Babbitt responded by saying that “Harold Ickes had directed him [Babbitt] to issue the decision that day.”
Eckstein added that Babbitt followed that untoward remark with a troubling question:
“Do you have any idea of how much these Indians with gaming contracts have given to Democrats?”
Eckstein did not, but Babbitt knew.
“He said a half-million dollars,” Eckstein testified.
This was the sort of conversation one had with cabinet officials in the Warren Harding administration.
Eckstein left Babbitt’s office, repeated the comments to his clients and departed Washington, heartsick.
When these remarks eventually surfaced in legal proceedings, Babbitt quickly denied them.
The floundering secretary then slipped into a concrete life jacket by changing his story, not once, but twice.
The press in Arizona was dumbfounded.
Reporters remembered Babbitt’s candor and honesty as much as his clean and progressive gubernatorial administrations.
These same reporters were often represented by Eckstein, Arizona’s premier media attorney and a man universally recognized for his rectitude.
Who was telling the truth?
Rather than investigate this difficult question, Arizona reporters served up a series of nostalgia pieces about Babbitt and Eckstein. When not hiking down memory lane, readers consumed talking-head articles of the sort where one side asserts and the other denies, the kind of journalism that obscures reality rather than illuminating it.
There exists a parallel universe where documents, facts and research supplant celebrity gawking. It’s a universe where papers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Washington Post and the Associated Press have all labored in an effort to understand the events at the Department of the Interior.
There are six distinct legal proceedings--and a seventh is pending--that swirl around Interior’s decision on the Hudson, Wisconsin, casino.
Everywhere I looked I found moldy breadcrumbs marking a trail to the Interior Department, enough breadcrumbs to stuff Babbitt’s holiday goose. And I wasn’t alone.
A small army of lawyers has been badgering each other and endlessly nagging witnesses. There are thousands of pages of testimony and all of it is aimed at getting to the truth behind Babbitt’s decisions at Interior.
The litigators are focused upon a narrow issue, a single decision involving Indian tribes whose names most of us cannot pronounce.
Overlaying these parochial concerns like an American flag on our national coffin is a stark question: Is the Clinton administration for sale?
Those who doubt whether Attorney General Janet Reno is capable of an investigation of Babbitt and Clinton devoid of partisan considerations will feel confirmed in their cynicism when they learn that not one of the attorneys in the Midwest has been contacted about his cases by Justice Department investigators.
--Lacey