-Caveat Lector-
http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2001/6/17/213955
NewsMax
Sunday, June 17, 2001 10:38 p.m. EDT
Presidential Biographer Details Clinton Cocaine Use and Violence
Even before ex-President Bill Clinton lost the Arkansas governorship in
1980, he was a recreational user of cocaine. But the defeat after just
two years in office sent him into a real tailspin, prompting the future
president to commence a cocaine habit of significant proportions.
More shocking still is the element of violence - whether realized or merely
threatened - that has played a consistent role in Bill Clinton's political
campaigns going back to 1974.
Those were the blockbuster allegations leveled Saturday night by noted
historian and award-winning presidential biographer Roger Morris, whose
1996 best seller Partners in Power remains perhaps the best account of
Bill Clinton's formative years and early political career in Arkansas.
Prompted by front page coverage of breaking developments in the Roger
Clinton Pardongate investigation, Morris granted a rare radio interview to
WABC radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander, where he detailed the dark
side of the Clinton brothers' chaotic upbringing and rise to power.
No member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Morris was a former aide to
President Johnson who resigned from the Nixon adminstration in protest over
the Vietnam War. Years later, he would pen a scathing biography of the
37th president.
But like few others of his craft, Morris covered the Clintons by actually
burrowing into the Arkansas trenches and chasing down the rumors that most
reporters bent over backward to ignore. What he got was one hair-raising
account of corruption, brutality and debauchery after another.
Partners offered the first mention of a violent rape allegation against
the future president. And though Morris protected the woman's identity,
her account sounded strikingly similar to rape charges that Arkansas
businesswoman Juanita Broaddrick would make against Clinton years later.
Subsequently, both Broaddrick and Morris personally assured NewsMax.com
that the woman in question was someone else - making hers the second
outstanding on-the-record rape charge against the ex-president.
But on Saturday Morris discussed a different topic, one equally verboten in
establishment press circles: allegations that the last president of the
United States was once a heavy cocaine user who had his career protected
and enhanced through a level of mob-style thuggery never before seen in any
previous White House occupant.
Here's the exchange between the noted author and WABC's Batchelor and
Alexander:
ALEXANDER: When did Roger Clinton first develop a drug problem? Do you
know?
MORRIS: I had stories that put the beginning of Roger's drug problem in
high school, although it didn't really become serious until later years.
And it became an extremely serious habit. He almost killed himself on
various occasions. He overdosed several times. And when he finally went
for help and when he was arrested he was in a major habit.
ALEXANDER: Can you remind us about Bill Clinton's involvement with drug
use?
MORRIS: It was clear that Bill was a recreational user, at least of
cocaine. It began in the most significant proportions after his defeat in
1980. He went into a real tailspin then. But he had been using with his
brother socially before the 1980 defeat and certainly used considerably
after that, in the early 1980s.
And, of course, into the mid-1980s [Clinton used cocaine] with his friend
Dan Lasater, the famous bond dealer in Little Rock, who was the bond daddy,
who was later, of course, convicted of drug dealing.
ALEXANDER: Remind our audience of what became known as the Lasater gang.
MORRIS: Lasater was a very interesting character. He had made his money in
the old Ponderosa steak houses - came out of nowhere in the Midwest in the
1960s. And there were organized crime connections that went back to
Indiana and Illinois in those years.
He sold out rather early, became a thoroughbred farm-gentry character in
Florida. He had something called Lasater Farms, which raced very few
thoroughbreds, but law enforcement officials suspected laundered a lot of
money in Florida.
The race track industry, and thoroughbred racing in general, is one of
those shadowy areas of American sports where organized crime has always
been very prominent.
Lasater was quite successful. He decided to open a bond business in Little
Rock in the late 1970s, early 1980s. He was a friend of powerful
politicians: Gov. John Y. Brown in Kentucky, Bill Clinton in Arkansas and
others - and a big contributor, of course. [He was] a philanthropist who
was fond of contributing to Toys for Tots at Christmastime as well as to
politicians of every party.
ALEXANDER: And what was the Clinton connection to the Lasater gang - all of
them, Bill, Hillary, Roger, all of them? How were they connected to the
Lasater gang?
MORRIS:
