The Political Interest: How the Chicken Got Loose

The first crisis for Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture came on the day of his swearing in, Jan. 22, 1993. A child died after eating government- inspected meat at a Seattle-area Jack in the Box restaurant. Two more died and hundreds of other Westerners fell ill from the contaminated food; some of them developed a life-threatening kidney syndrome. The new President, in office for only two days, expressed his shock. The Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy, ordered an investigation to trace the outbreak's cause, a mystery never conclusively solved. In the midst of that emergency, Espy found time to intervene in an obscure Puerto Rico dispute of great concern to the U.S. poultry industry, and especially to Tyson Foods, the world's largest chicken producer and the No. 1 poultry exporter to the island commonwealth.

The story of Espy's role in the Puerto Rico issue, which TIME has assembled from dozens of interviews and documents, emerges at a time when the White House has been struggling to refute allegations that Tyson enjoys undue influence with Clinton and his staff. As Arkansas' Governor, Clinton had close ties with Tyson, the state's largest employer. Several company executives helped finance Clinton's many campaigns. Tyson general counsel Jim Blair guided Hillary Clinton's fabulously successful commodities trades. Tyson was also the second largest contributor to a $220,000 fund Clinton used to pursue his Arkansas political agenda, an enterprise uncovered last week by the Associated Press.

Espy, too, was intimately familiar with the poultry industry from his days as a Mississippi Congressman. The Justice Department and Congress are currently investigating Espy's association with Tyson, prompted by accusations that he accepted plane trips and football tickets from the chicken producer. (He later reimbursed the company.) The Agriculture Secretary's intervention in the Puerto Rican matter offers a vivid example of how Tyson benefits from its historic connections to Clinton. The case illustrates that such influence is best wielded subtly, and better still when third parties can front as the ones seeking favors and getting them.