The Trouble with Transcripts

By CALVIN TRILLIN

If Webster Hubbell had really said, as Dan Burton's creative transcript had it, "The Riady is just not easy to do business with me while I'm here," what language was he supposed to be speaking? Did people on the staff of Burton's Government Reform and Oversight Committee actually take that to be an English sentence? Do they talk that way themselves? Outside of chairman Burton's earshot, do they say things like "The Burton are just too much of loony to conduct this investigation"?

Or did chairman Burton think that whenever White House people discuss that golden Asian connection to the Clinton-Gore campaign, they lapse into Pidgin English, reminiscent of the language that G.I.s in Korea employed to palaver with shoeshine boys and barmaids? Maybe committee investigators were told to keep their eyes out for a tape on which Bruce Lindsey says to Maria Hsia, a fund raiser prosecutors considered generous to a fault, "Listen, missy, you tell Charlie Trie boss needs money chop-chop."

What Hubbell did say on the telephone from prison, it turns out, was, "The reality is, it's just not easy to do business with me while I'm here." That is an innocuous enough statement, although perhaps overmodest, since, according to the newest indictment, the sort of consulting that brought Hubbell hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from friends of the White House involved so little actual work it could have been done easily from the isolation hole on Devil's Island.

Hubbell knew that conversations on the prison phone would be recorded, but that doesn't mean he knew they would be made public. If he had, he would have presumably studded his conversations with rude jokes about Kenneth Starr and how simple it had been to hoodwink the independent counsel's office on a plea-bargain agreement. He certainly didn't know they would be made public as edited by Burton's chief investigator, David N. Bossie, who presumably picked up his notion of fair play partly from his old colleague Floyd Brown, the creator of the Willie Horton campaign commercial.

All this, of course, revived talk about Burton's idiosyncratic investigatory techniques, the most famous example being his assumption that by shooting at pumpkins in his backyard, he could prove that Vincent Foster was murdered. (Burton did not anticipate that the pumpkin-range episode would make him look ridiculous, some students of his behavior believe, because he failed to realize that in humans other than himself what's inside the head bears no resemblance whatsoever to what's inside a pumpkin.)

By last week Webster Hubbell--a man who admits to having stolen from the law partners and clients who put their trust in him--was beginning to look like a victim, and Dan Burton had tossed David Bossie, his pet viper, overboard in an effort to save himself. Newt Gingrich, trying to figure out how the campaign-finance investigation could be done anywhere other than Burton's committee, may have been wondering if declaring the subject within the purview of, say, the Agriculture subcommittee on livestock, dairy and poultry would be seen as too much of a stretch. The Clinton are just not easy to be caught by a pumpkin head.