Blair: Wife saved ‘snippets of everything’

FAYETTEVILLE - A national media flurry started last week after the The Washington Free Beacon posted a story online that was based primarily on notes written in the 1990s by a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The story focused on Clinton’s tough demeanor and her husband’s infidelity. It also addressed her apparent switch in stance from single-payer to managed health care, as well as Bill Clinton’s decision not to appoint an Arkansas judge to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Free Beacon story was based on the Diane Blair Papers, and it got national attention after appearing on the Drudge Report. Blair was a political science professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She and her husband, Jim Blair, a former general counsel for Tyson Foods Inc., were close to the Clintons.

Diane Blair died of lung cancer in 2000. Her husband donated her papers - more than 200,000 pages - to the university in 2005. It took years to archive the collection, which was opened to the public in 2010.

Jim Blair said he gave the papers to the university at his wife’s request.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “That was a deathbed request from her.”

Sixteen of the 109 boxes in the collection are on the Clintons. That translates to about 32,000 pages, but many of those boxes are full of news paper clippings or other published reports.

Many personal items are included in the collection, such as invitations,thank-you notes, the Blairs’ wedding vows - Bill Clinton officiated - and scraps of Christmas wrapping paper with gift notes attached - “To: Jim (who will find good use for it), From: Bill & Hillary.”

The more scintillating information for the national press was in the notes Diane Blair took after visiting with the Clintons. In them, she was often recalling a conversation she’d had with the first lady a few days earlier. Some of those notes have been typed up. Others are handwritten, and some appear to be in shorthand.

The collection sat in boxes, seldom opened, for four years.

But once the Free Beacon story broke, The New York Times followed with an article of its own. And within days, national television news journalists were rushing to Northwest Arkansas to scour the documents.

Jim Blair said he thought the Free Beacon, a conservative news website, had presented some things out of context. The Free Beacon used tidbits from the notes, included Hillary Clinton referring to Monica Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon” and to the media as having “big egos and no brains.”

“I thought that they carefully cherry-picked things totally out of context,” said Jim Blair, who splits his time between Northwest Arkansas and southern Florida. “Diane was a researcher. She saved snippets of everything. She did keep a lot of notes that she would have put in context had she lived.

“I think if you go through there and find a small part of a note about something and pick it out, it’s not an attempt to drill down and find reality. It’s a distortion of what reality is or was. So I thought it was unfortunate. But that’s the way the game is played these days.”

The reporter who wrote the story, Alana Goodman, declined to comment.

But the Free Beacon has posted a statement by Editor in-Chief Matthew Continetti defending Goodman’s work: “The piece was scrupulously fact-checked. All of the documents we cited were loaded onto the Internet. Every effort was made to present as straightforwardly as possible the contents of the papers, which show Hillary Clinton as hardheaded, calculating,and, yes, ruthless.”

Jim Blair said his wife thought the world of the Clintons.

“It was a genuine friendship, and those are hard to come by in their world,” he said, referring to the political world.

The Blairs got a lot of media attention during the Clinton administration. Their house on Beaver Lake was a vacation spot for the first family. But Jim Blair said he’s had enough of the limelight.

“I told somebody I had my 15 minutes of fame long ago, and I don’t need a five-minute extension,” he said.