A Harvard professor and former aide to President George H.W. Bush says Bill Clinton fabricated a threatening conversation between the two of them in the former president’s newly released memoir.
Roger B. Porter, who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government, was a senior economic and domestic policy adviser in 1992 when Clinton says the conversation took place, the Harvard Crimson newspaper reports.
Clinton says in “My Life” that Porter told him during the election campaign that, unlike other potentional Democratic candidates, he was vulnerable to personal attack, and Republicans would attempt to “take you out.”
“Here’s how Washington works,” Clinton quotes Porter as saying. “The press has to have somebody and we’re going to give them you. … We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we’ll do it early.”
But, according to the Crimson, Porter recalls having only one conversation with Clinton, in 1989 during President Bush’s Education Summit with the Governors.
“We never had any conversation as he has described in his book,” Porter told the campus newspaper. “You don’t remember every conversation in life, but I would certainly remember a conversation like that.”
Porter says the dialogue Clinton uses confirms the account was made up. According to Clinton, Porter broke off the conversation with “Cut the crap, governor,” before the alleged threats.
“That’s not the way I talk,” Porter said, “and anybody who’s been around me knows that’s not the way I talk.”
Porter also insists no one in George H.W. Bush’s administration would make such a call.
“That was not President Bush’s style or that of those who worked for him,” he said.
Porter noted Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward had learned of Clinton’s account but did not think it credible enough to include in his 1994 book “The Agenda.”
“[It] sounds like someone from the Sopranos,” Woodward told the White House Bulletin. “It’s an apocryphal story.”
Porter says the account, which he regards as a smear, will not affect how he treats Clinton in his popular government course, “The American Presidency.”
He acknoweldges, though, “I am disappointed in him.”
“Why he feels the need to just make stuff up escapes me,” Porter told the Crimson.
