What Was The Whitewater Property Business of the 1980s All About?

 So this Whitewater developmental scheme revolved around a fairly rural area of north Arkansas.....near Flippin (yeah, I doubt you've heard of the town).  For reference, out of Little Rock, it's about 90 miles straight north, and about 15 miles shy of the Missouri border.  

How you got to the property from Little Rock?  Well....you drove up highway 65.  It's about a 2.5 hour drive.  So you couldn't live there?  Yeah....this was a vacation or weekend-getaway development.

What was the other gimmick to the property deal? It was within 30 minutes of Branson, Missouri.  

Fairly wooded and remote?  Yes.

This whole agenda started out in 1979....to just be  a vacation 'playground'.  You'd put up a vacation cabin/house, and if you bought property.....you were there as your weekend place.

Somewhere around 1978, friends of Bill Clinton talked up this idea of buying 230 acres just on the south part of the White River.  Amount involved?  $203,000.  

The basic start-up idea?  They would buy the property, hold for several years, and some 'deal' would come up where you'd sell the property.

Did the property have any true value?  In 1978?  This is before the boom on RV travel, camping, and weekend getaways.  I've been of the mind that you were just paying twice what the actual property was valued, and it would be curious to bring the original owner into the picture.....asking them when they bought the property and how long they held it.

So, I need to tell this one odd part of the story.  Remember....all this chatter to get hyped up....was 1978.  Things went south in 1979....with interest rates bumping a couple of percent....so the general bank loan business was set to around 11.2-percent (yeah, hefty).

Bill and his friend....were screwed on timing.

Adding to this....over the next three years....the rate continued to climb.  At some point, it bumped up to 20-percent on bank rates.  No one....was buying.

To make any recovery, Bill and the friend decided that a model home needed to be built.  If people could just see the house/landscape....they'd overlook the bank issue (at least in their mind).

So you come to 1980, and Bill lost the campaign effort...leaving the governor's job.  

Four years would pass, and Bill would come back.

Whitewater?  It was mostly a failed land deal with bad timing.  But the bigger issue that was laying there....there's a sum of money involved and it's never clear where the money from.  Money-laundering?  

Well....here's the thing, at this point in the early 1980s....the Contra business was starting up, and cocaine was being flown into northern Arkansas.  There was tons of money being pushed around the region.  Banks were overflowing with cash, and it sorta needed money-laundering operations to occur.  So as deep as the bank interest problem had dragged the Whitewater mess into stagnation.....there's some pretty good odds that various people were begging for ways to launder their money.  

It's funny now to review the story....because in the 1990s....nothing seemed to fit or be understood.  Without the Contras, the Cocaine or the interest rate mess...Bill would have sold his property legally, and probably pocketed $100k for his efforts.