Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 18

Thursday, April 10, 1997 A19 Even helping a friend is a scandal in Washington Bill Press records and had to quit his job at the Justice Department to sort out his problems. No one knew that Hubbell would later plead guilty or go to prison. It wasn't until late summer 1994 that reports first named Hubbell as subject of a criminal investigation by Starr. Now the facts. McLarty had been Hubbell's friend from Little Rock for more than 20 years.

Kantor had known Hubbell for more than 10 years, since trying insurance cases with him. They and other friends knew that Hubbell, with a big mortgage in Washington, three tuition payments and huge legal bills, was out of a job and broke. They did what their mothers taught them to do: They tried to help a friend, even a friend in trouble. Make no mistake about it. The Webb Hubbell controversy is not about hush money.

It's about a failed Whitewater investigation. For more than three years, Starr has sought to connect Whitewater illegalities to Bill and Hillary because he was paid off. There's no way he can prove it, because it just didn't happen. McLarty and Bowles didn't make calls to interfere with a criminal investigation an investigation that wouldn't even begin until several months later. They made calls to help a friend.

It wasn't conspiracy; it was charity. And that's the real scandal. That friends helping friends should become such a scandal in Washington. Why? Because it's so rare. Now full confession.

When my wife and I moved to Washington last spring and started looking for a place to live, a friend in the Clinton administration said he knew of a great buy in the northwest area: a house that belonged to Webb and Susie Hubbell. Since he was in federal prison, his family really needed the money and Susie, we were told, might be willing to lower the price significantly. We didn't buy the house. Even at a reduced price, it was still too expensive for us. But we did consider it.

Yes, at the suggestion of a Clinton employee, we did actually contemplate putting money into the Hubbell family pockets. Quick, call Kenneth Starr! Arrest me! I'm part of a global conspiracy to help a friend! Evil never dies in Washington. Joe McCarthy returned from the grave this week, this time with a new refrain: "Are you now or have you ever been a friend of Webster Hubbell?" It's character assassination on the Potomac. That's the only fitting word for charges of "hush money" now leveled by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr at Webb Hubbell and friends. The web of supposed intrigue reaches all the way from Washington to the Los Angeles mayor's office.

Starr's theory reported as fact by every major newspaper in the nation, including the Los Angeles Times is that Clinton aides Mack McLarty, Mickey Kantor and Erskine Bowles helped find work for Hubbell when he resigned as deputy attorney general in March 1994, in return for Hubbell's agreement to remain silent and not tell what he knows about Whitewater. Nonsense! Based on the facts and the chronology, Starr's charge is totally without foundation. First, the chronology. Yes, McLarty and Bowles both admit to making calls on Hubbell's behalf; Kantor helped find a job for his son. One call landed Hubbell a consulting contract with the city of Los Angeles.

But those solicitations for legal work for Hubbell all occurred in early Still Working on tte Hubfcell VALUAWEPlfCE I Rodham Clinton. He's failed miserably. He's frustrated. He's in a hurry to get to Malibu. He's running out of steam.

He can't depend on Jim or Susan McDougal, since nobody believes either one of them. Starr's last, feeble hope to make the Clinton connection is to prove that Hubbell shut up ed his law partners and lied to his friends, including the president and first lady, about it. But in March 1994, all anyone knew was that Hubbell was in a dispute with his former law partners over billing spring 1994, months before Hubbell pleaded guilty to defrauding his former Little Rock law partners. In an interview on "60 Minutes," Hubbell admitted he knew even before going to Washington that he had cheat Bill Pret is co-host of CNN's "Crossfire." He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times. Asian Americans want fair treatment during political campaigns Paul Bock juror in the O.J.

Simpson trial an "Asian man." The juror is Asian American. No one would call O.J. Simpson an "African man" or the TV anchor a "European woman." But "Korean" green grocers and "Chinese" gangs are routinely in the news. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, has blamed "the media feeding frenzy" for a "chilling effect on Asian American political participation." She wrote The New York Times recently that "lumping all Asian Americans into a pool of possibly suspect donors is repugnant." In the coming congressional hearings on campaign-finance reforms, elected officials will have an opportunity to treat Asian Americans as Americans rather than as the "unassimilable Chinee." We demand simple fairness.

at all other passersby. By assuming we were foreigners, they barred our political participation while denying their candidate two valid voter signatures. With such internalized anti-Asian bias to overcome, there is little wonder that in Connecticut no Asian American has ever been elected or appointed to a statewide political office. Yet around the turn of the century, two Connecticut U.S. senators, Orville Piatt and Joseph Hawley, fought for more than 20 years against the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent racist acts aimed not only at Chinese immigrants but all Asian immigrants.

"I plant myself here and now, this moment, on the ground of unconditional hostility and denunciation" of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, thundered Hawley from the Senate floor. Later he editorialized his sentiments in The Hartford Courant of which he was also publisher, editor and owner. In Seattle, where I now live, I was dismayed to hear a white TV anchorwoman call the replacement of the "unassimilable Chinee." Nearly a century ago, my father, and later my mother, emigrated to this country despite the racist Chinese Exclusion Act passed by Congress in 1882. That law and succeeding others barred my parents and all Asian immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens until the 1940s.

By disenfranchising Asian immigrants for half a century, America discouraged a political relationship between these nonvoters and the vote-seekers. As a result, generations of politicians rarely perceive American-born "Asian" children and grandchildren as Americans, much less as constituents to be courted or represented. In World War II, the U.S. Navy racially classified me as a "Mongoloid." At about that time, a "restricted" Baltimore neighborhood tried to prevent our family from moving into a brick rowhouse because we were "Chinese." The state of Connecticut, where I lived for 35 years, officially classified me as an "other" American, a garbage-can race designation that state officials obdurately refuse to change. The Bureau of the Census defines me as an "Asian-Pacific Islander." I prefer to be called Asian American or simply American.

In West Hartford, political campaign workers seeking signatures to qualify Lowell P. Weicker Jr. as a third-party gubernatorial candidate in 1992 stiffed my wife and me as they thrust sign-up sheets Don't call me "Asian." I am an American born in Baltimore. I am a World War II Navy veteran. "Asian" is a subtle code word for "foreigner." John Huang, Johnny Chung, Charlie Yah Lin Trie, the Riady family are they Asians or Asian Americans? The news media's obliteration of the distinction has unfairly stereotyped all Asian Americans.

Alone among political contributors, Asian Americans are burdened by ethnic surname surveillance. Millions of dollars of campaign contributions from Asian Americans have been returned by politicians spooked by allegations that some members of this ethnic group may have been acting as agents of the Chinese government. The White House is dropping the appointments of qualified Americans with Asian surnames.The message is clear to Asian Americans: Stay away. We don't want your money. Or you.

Suspected agents of China? Hold your fire. Wait until you see the shape of their eyes as they testify at the upcoming Senate and House hearings on campaign finance reform. Asian Americans are very proud of their ancient heritage and contributions to this country. But we continue to be bedeviled by the 19th-century image Paul Bock is past president of the Asian American Council of Connecticut and a past member of the West Hartford Human Rights Commission. He recently moved to Seattle.

Advertisement dining guide Allen Ginsberg, exhibitionist George F. Will ff 1 ip I TV Allen Ginsberg, symptomatic symbol of the "beat generation" and other intellectual fads, died last Saturday at age 70. He once wrote, "I'm so lucky to be nutty." Actually, his pose of paranoia was not luck, it was a sound career move. It became big box office with his famous declamation of his poem "Howl" in San Francisco in 1955. That was the year "Rock toe a vast throng that had been unable to get in.

They pounded on the doors and milled around. Ticket-holders entered between lines of police." Today no poet could cause such excitement on any campus, or any other American venue, so complete has been the supplanting of words, written and spoken, by music and movies as preferred modes of communication. One of Ginsberg's young acolytes, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, put the dissenting impulse to music as Bob Dylan. Some beats wrote the way some jazz musicians made music, in the heat of chemically assisted improvisation. Truman Capote's famous dismissal of Kerouac's work "That isn't writing at all, it's typing" had a point.

Granted, Kerouac revised "On the Road" for six years before it was published in 1957. However, fueled by Benzedrine, he wrote the first draft of that novel in 1951 in less than three weeks, as one long single-spaced paragraph 120 feet long on 12-foot strips of tracing paper taped together. Here is its beginning: 'If A 1 innovative expansion dmmg tables self-storing leaves that open to seat 4 to 14. A Workbench exclusive, in your choice of 5 sizes and 3 finishes. As shown, SALE $499.

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Ginsberg made the first two his projects. He composed "Howl" with the help of a cocktail of peyote, amphetamines and Dexedrine. Thirty years later his reward for a career "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that every thing was dead." of execrating American values and works was a six-figure contract for a volume of his collected poetry. It is a distinctive American genius, this ability to transmute attempted subversion into a marketable commodity.

The adjective "beat" was appropriated by Jack Kerouac from a drug-ad Does that tone of voice seem familiar? Here is the beginning of a novel pub lished in 1951, the year of Kerouac's typing frenzy: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, dicted Times Square thief and male prostitute, who meant by it the condition of being exhausted by existence. (That man's existence must have been wearying.) Kerouac at- tached the adjective to the noun "gen John Overmyer Allen Ginsberg and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like fusion fare blends qlass and wood. A sleek glass oval tops our exclusive wood base. In cherry, oak, teak or black-stained veneer. As shown, SALE $698.

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Soon Life magazine, happy to find some titillating unhappi- i ness in a decade defined by Eisenhower's smile, was writing about the beats as "The Only Revolu- tion Around." That's entertainment. Back then, poetry commanded crowds. In his book "When the Going Was Good: American Life in the 1950s," Jeffrey Hart, now a professor of English at Dartmouth, wrote: "Robert Frost strode onto the stage at Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation from an overflow house. One night in 1957, T.S. Eliot was reading his poems to an overflow audience in Columbia's McMillin Theater.

Even faculty members had difficulty getting tickets, and people were crowded into the windows and doors, and listening outside to Eliot over loudspeakers. Dylan Thomas stood at the podium his third American tour in two years." When Ginsberg came to Columbia, "there was Top rating by Workbench! Save 20 during the dining and upholstery sale. workbench WEST HARTFORD 29 SO MAIN IN W. HARTFORD CTR. 860-561 5550 WESTPORT 222 POST RD.

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Will is a syndicated Washington columnist..