This short article ran in my local community paper, the then-existent
A related question raised by the item below: has a separate foreign policy been similarly connived at? More later.
O, THE DIFFERENCE A VOWEL MAKES
Back in the fiscally overheated 1990s, the Clinton White House got into trouble when one Winston Wang (spelled WANG, but pronounced “wong”), a wealthy Taiwanese, had coffee at the White House in June, 1995, and allegedly followed up with a promise of a $100,000 contribution to the Democratic National Committee. People wondered, and rightly so, what made a cup of coffee so valuable.
The White House took appropriate political heat. Holders of public office, especially of the highest office, should not stoop to the appearance of trading favors, even absent illegality. In consideration for the public, they should not lend themselves to the appearance of undue influence, and most people would consider $100,000 to be influence.
Fast-forward to 2003, a year that makes the 1990s look tame where spheres of influence are concerned, recently thrusting into the limelight Neil M. Bush, a brother of George W. Bush. Court filings in Bush’s flamboyantly scandal-ridden divorce revealed that Bush received a $2M contract from a large Taiwanese company called Grace Semiconductors. Bush received the contract from company founder Winston Wong (spelled WONG, pronounced the same).
Turns out it’s the same man.
Yes, that’s right: the Winston Wang of Charlie Trie-Clinton-excesses ill fame, and the Winston Wong of Neil Bush-colorful-Taiwanese-favors ill fame, are one and the same. Wang is the son and probable heir of Taiwanese billionaire Y. C. Wang, known as the most powerful businessman in
Enter Neil Bush. In a sterling example of don’t-they-ever-learn, Neil Mallon Bush (named after a founder of Dresser Industries, the Bush-connected company that became a subsidiary of Halliburton) has entered into contract with a man whose coffee with
Wang’s name was overshadowed in news and commentary by that of Charles “Charlie” Trie, the Asian-American owner of a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock frequented by Bill Clinton, who lined up some of the visits. Trie was a lesser figure than any member of the Wang family, but he was a “Friend of Bill” and thus red meat for radio hosts and fodder for many news items. A Lexis search retrieves about 2000 mentions of Trie in transcripts from 1997 through 2000.
None of the news transcripts mention Formosa Plastics or Wang.
Winston Wang’s coffee was only one of several White House visits by Asian businessmen. Still, the scrupulous reticence with which Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer and other corporate rightwingers in the media omitted any mention of Wang or of Formosa Plastics is arresting, since they gave full throat to Charles Trie (always called “Charlie”). Coincidence? Or further indication, as other writers have said, that the big divide in US politics is not “left and right,” but top and bottom?
Perhaps there’s another reason. When Charles Trie testified to Congress on
When I met Winston Wang, he told me he that he had met with President Bush when he was President. Mr. Wang wanted to meet President Clinton as well.
Wang’s meeting with former President Bush seems not to have been news at the time; Lexis turns up no item about it.
Even while investigations of the Clinton White House, Charlie Trie, et al., were at their height, the links between Trie and Winston Wang, and between Wang and the giant conglomerate Formosa Plastics, went almost unmentioned.
Almost. The single news report was an 860-word UPI wire,
This interesting report, apparently never followed up, summarizes an article in a Chinese-language newsweekly printed in
“In its boldest assertion, the magazine charged that [the Taiwanese party’s financial handler] offered to give the U. S. Democratic Party $15 million.”
Maybe someone learned a lesson here, after all. Even an offer of $15 million would have been a scandal exceeding the Indonesian transactions, John Huang, and all the rest. I cannot think offhand of a good political reason why the GOP did not follow up on this hint, true or not, and feed it to its media lineup for good measure. Were friendly relations with
For whatever combination of reasons, we never heard about it. We’re also not hearing currently, at least from the White House, about the appearance of influence trading. In fact, we haven’t even heard that Clinton’s Wang is Neil Bush’s Wong, whose Formosa Plastics company has been embroiled in a series of environmental disputes in Taiwan and in Point Comfort, Texas, where it began significant expansions at its plant, over environmentalists’ objections, in 1988.
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