More Follies on the Sidelines

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"It's difficult to defend the White House as much as we'd like," sighs a Democratic congressional leader. "Every day it's something else making them look as if they don't know what they're doing." Two Arkansan cases in point: William H. Kennedy III and Patsy Thomasson.

Kennedy should have learned something about Washington ways while serving on the staffs of two Arkansas Senators in the 1970s before becoming a partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock. But as associate White House counsel, he has shown mainly a talent for getting in trouble. He drew a reprimand from the White House last summer for appearing to make political use of the FBI by calling in the G-men to investigate the White House travel office. He has been taking heavy flak for the strange anomaly of a White House staff peopled largely by aides whose legal right to roam its corridors is questionable. A third of the 1,044 employees have never received permanent passes attesting that they have passed security clearances -- largely, higher officials say, because Kennedy has failed to forward FBI background checks to the Secret Service for final approval.

Last week came the semifinal straw. One of Kennedy's duties was to look into the records of potential Administration appointees and advise the White House of any ethical problems, such as failure to pay taxes. But, it developed, he came to Washington with a tax problem of his own: like Zoe Baird, Clinton's failed first choice for Attorney General, Kennedy had not paid required Social Security taxes on the wages of a nanny. In February 1993, Kennedy did pay $1,352.52 to settle the 1992 bill -- but he did it with a cashier's check supposedly drawn by "Leslie Gail McRae" -- his wife's maiden name (they are engaged in what a friend calls "bitter" divorce proceedings).

Kennedy denied he had tried to deceive anyone, but it hardly mattered; he also failed to pay nanny taxes for 1991, and forked over $700 only three weeks ago. When that became public, the White House frostily announced Kennedy would no longer run background checks on potential appointees but would perform less . demanding -- and unspecified -- duties. The betting is that he'll go back to Arkansas as soon as he can resign inconspicuously.

Patsy Thomasson, once Arkansas highway commissioner and now director of the White House Office of Administration, has also managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Kennedy, she was involved in the travel-office affair. A Little Rock investment group she headed has been caught up in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into a run-up in the price of the stock of a fisheries company just before it was acquired by Tyson Foods of Arkansas; Thomasson says she did no trading in the shares.

Further, Thomasson joined ex-White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff Margaret Williams in entering the office of Vincent Foster Jr. the night of his suicide last July, and neither she nor the other two have ever explained what they were doing in there. Last week a crowd of reporters who did not even recognize Thomasson nonetheless turned up when she testified at a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, but learned next to nothing. She would love to relate what happened that night, Thomasson told Congress, but felt she should talk first only to special counsel Robert Fiske. Questioned about those White House passes, she gave a tantalizing quote. "We don't think we have any Aldrich Ameses in the White House," said Thomasson, "but we certainly could." Oh?

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Nina Burleigh/Washington