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SCMP Reporter

IT IS PROVING a most bizarre and less-than-pretty spectacle. Both First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Bill Clinton have moved into full damage control mode to deny a claim that she once, years ago, called a campaign worker a 'xxxxxxx Jew bastard'.

The slur is contained in a book soon to be released on the Clintons' troubled marriage by investigative reporter Jerry Oppenheimer.

In State of a Union, Oppenheimer quotes three people on the record about a 1974 night in Arkansas when tempers flared as a young Bill Clinton lost his first race for the US Congress. Hillary, then his girlfriend, allegedly launched a tirade at the top of her lungs at Paul Fray, his campaign manager.

The couple have long proved adept at refusing to give various rumours about the Arkansas years the dignity of public response, cunningly cutting off the oxygen of publicity to many a potential scandal.

Not this time, however.

With Ms Clinton now deep into her campaign to win a seat in the US Senate for New York, any hint of anti-Semitism is potentially explosive, given the city's large and diverse Jewish population.

Oppenheimer's claim first surfaced on the Internet over the weekend, and quickly moved on to the front pages of New York's pugnacious tabloids, the Hillary-hating New York Post and the slightly more liberal Daily News.

Without consulting his own array of aides, Mr Clinton took the rarest of steps as the story hit the streets on Sunday.

He left the Middle East peace talks and phoned the owner and then the editor of the Daily News with an exclusive interview.

He said he had been present on the night in question and denied the claims, suggesting that Ms Clinton may have used considerable profanity towards Mr Fray, but never an ethnic slur.

Ms Clinton, meanwhile, seemed on the verge of tears as she spoke outside her new home in Chappaqua, New York. 'I don't know the reason behind [the allegation]. It did not happen. I've never said anything like this in my entire life,' she said.

'It runs against my entire life . . . to try to stand against bigotry and prejudice of any kind.' With this sort of publicity, the whole of New York seems to be talking about the story.

The venerable New York Times seemed a little more uncertain about the reliability of the story, tucking it deep within its Metro section and noting prominently that Oppenheimer once worked for the National Enquirer - a lowly supermarket tabloid. It has also noted soberly that the original claims are so old that the exact details may never emerge.

With the Clintons backing off their long-held head-in-the-sand approach to scandal, this is one that does not seem ready to die.

Disgraced former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris - forced to resign from his White House position for his own sex scandal - has suggested that Ms Clinton expressed similar racist sentiments on a number of other occasions.

Even as America's more dour publications skirt the actual news of the slur, their opinion pages are brimming with comment. One from a prominent Jewish Republican in yesterday's Wall Street Journal used the issue to attack liberals, but not the First Lady. Dennis Prager said he personally believed Ms Clinton may have used such anti-Semitic language but wanted to defend the First Lady.

'We must cease this moral idiocy on judging people on their private comments . . . it is highly misleading to probe private comments for evidence of anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry and sexism. The present trend emanates from a lethal combination - the totalitarian temptation inherent in contemporary liberalism, and the media's sensationalism.' Such an ironic line is likely to count for little on the streets of the 'Big Apple', where the final and most damaging judgments of Ms Clinton will be made at the ballot box.

Already the debate is well under way. On Monday, a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis and Jewish political figures held a press conference outside Ms Clinton's New York headquarters.

They stressed calm, warning that they could not yet know for sure whether she had in fact insulted Jews in the past - and then proceeded to excoriate her anyway.

Her ties to the Palestine liberation movement have often caused unease in New York.  Other more moderate Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Community, have issued statements supporting the First Lady.

Sitting happily in the middle, refusing to take a stance but quietly keeping the flames alive, is her Republican opponent for the Senate, Rick Lazio.

'Ms Clinton has denied the allegation. I don't know who to believe,' he said. 'I don't know if New Yorkers know who to believe. And therein lies a good deal of the problem.' A problem, of course, for everyone but Mr Lazio.

Greg Torode (torode@scmp.com) is the Post's Washington correspondent 



'Jew' row during Arkansas years haunts Hillary