She told me it took place in “a work situation,” but after work. She’d been working on his campaign, not in his Arkansas government office. When I asked her “were you interested or were you attracted?” she said definitely not, she already had a man and was on the cusp of marriage. At a party in a campaign supporter’s home they were left alone after the main crowd had departed and he suddenly got very nasty—threw her down, forced her, bit her hard on the mouth and face… She told me she felt more disgraced than violated.
Professional investigators on police rape squads learn to recognize an MO in these matters, and the biting of the lip or the face was also the specialized, distinctive feature in the case of Juanita Broaddrick. It is important to stress, here, that neither Ms. Broaddrick nor the woman in the Morris biography can possibly have known of each other’s existence, or in any way concerted their separate stories, at the time they told them. Here, in its extensively corroborated detail, is the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick:
In the spring of 1978 Juanita Hickey (as she was then known during her first marriage) was a registered nurse running a nursing home in the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. Clinton was the state’s attorney general, and much engaged in his first run for the governorship. Impressed by his candidacy, Juanita (as I’ll now call her) volunteered to hand out bumper stickers and signs, and first met the aspiring governor when he made a campaign stop at her nursing home. “While he was there visiting, he said, ‘If you’re ever in the Little Rock area, please drop by our campaign office… be sure and call me when you come in.’ ” (A photograph of this first meeting exists: it shows a personable Juanita and a young Clinton looking like someone auditioning for a Bee Gees look-a-like contest.) On 25 April 1978 Juanita was in Little Rock for a nursing home convention held at the Camelot Hotel, and she did call him. He said that after all he wouldn’t be at the campaign office so “Why don’t I just meet you for coffee in the Camelot coffee shop?” She agreed to this, and also to a later call from him which proposed, since he said there were reporters in the coffee shop, that they meet instead in her hotel room.
I had coffee sitting on a little table over there by the window. And it was a real pretty window view that looked down at the river. And he came around me and sort of put his arm over my shoulder to point to this little building. And he said that he was real interested, if he became governor, to restore that little building, and then all of a sudden, he turned me around and started kissing me… I first pushed him away… Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip… He starts to bite on my top lip, and I try to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened… It was a real panicky, panicky situation. And I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to—you know—to please stop. But that’s when he would press down on my right shoulder and he would bite on my lip.
Her skirt was torn at the waist, her pantyhose ripped at the crotch, and the attorney general of Arkansas forced an entry.
When everything was over with and he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says “You’d better get some ice on that.” And he turned and went out the door.
The advice about ice turned out to be sound, according to Juanita’s friend Norma Kelsey who had come along for the trip, who knew that a meeting with Clinton was planned, and who found Juanita in tears with a badly swollen lip and ripped pantyhose. She is one of five real-time witnesses to whom Juanita told the story while her injuries were still visible, the others (all of whom have testified to this effect) being Susan Lewis, Louise Mah, Jean Darby (the sister of Norma Kelsey) and her husband-to-be, David Broaddrick. At the time, it is important to mention, she was carrying on a love affair with Mr. Broaddrick and hoped to escape her first marriage and become his wife. This supplied (a.) a disincentive for casual dalliance with the candidate, of the sort his less tasteful supporters have been known to suggest, and (b.) an additional incentive to keep quiet and avoid scandal. All of her friends also urged her to maintain silence because nobody, in the Arkansas of the time, would believe her.
NBC News possesses great fact-checking resources, and did not air its interview with the highly-convincing Juanita until after an exhaustive process of inquiry. It established her whereabouts on the day in question, even confirming that the view from the hotel bedroom would have been as she described it. There should have been no difficulty in establishing the whereabouts of a state attorney general on any given day: records and appointment books are kept and of course the presumption of innocence suggests that a politician will be eager to help establish an alibi. But according to Lisa Myers, the much-respected correspondent on the story:
Was Bill Clinton even in Little Rock on April 25, 1978? Despite our repeated requests, the White House would not answer that question and declined to release any information about his schedule. So we checked 45 Arkansas newspapers and talked to a dozen former Clinton staffers. We found no evidence that Clinton had any public appearances on the morning in question. Articles in Arkansas newspapers suggest he was in Little Rock that day. (Italics added.)
There’s one grace-note, to set beside the biting as a kind of Clintonian signature. In 1991, Juanita was at another nursing-home meeting in Little Rock, and was suddenly called out into the hallway to meet the Governor. At least one witness remembers seeing them together, and wondering what they could be talking about. According to Juanita:
He immediately began this profuse apology, saying “Juanita, I’m so sorry for what I did.” He would say things like “I’m not the man that I used to be. Can you ever forgive me? What can I do to make things up to you?” And I’m standing there in absolute shock and I told him to go to hell and I walked off.
She wondered why he had made this clumsy bid for contrition, until, a short while afterward, she heard him announce publicly that he was beginning a campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. For this, of course, and on many future occasions, a “new Clinton” would be required.
By the time that NBC aired its Broaddrick interview—which it withheld until the impeachment trial was over—the President’s defenders had become hardened to dealing with accusations from outraged females. They were usually able to imply either that the woman in question was an ally of the political Right, or on a gold-digging expedition, or a slut of low character who had probably asked for it, or eager to cash in on a memoir. None of these tactics would work with Juanita, because she had been a political supporter of Clinton’s, had not asked for or received any money for her story, did not wish to market a book and had, since her divorce and remarriage, lived a highly respectable life owning and operating a horse-farm with her husband. Indeed, she had not in the ordinary sense “gone public” at all. Rather, she had been “outed” by one of the very few people she had told who was a Republican. Having at one point gone to the length of denying the story under oath in order to protect her privacy and that of her new family, she saw that this was futile and determined that if the story were to be told it should be told fully and by her. (The lie under oath resulted from a subpoena from Paula Jones’s lawyers, in a case in which she did not wish to involve herself.)
No forensic or medical or contemporary evidence exists and there were no direct witnesses, even though the number of immediate aftermath witnesses is impressive and their evidence consistent. This does not mean that the matter dissolves into the traditional moral neutrality of “he said, she said.” For one thing, “she” did not wish to say anything. For another—and here again we are in the eerie territory of the Clintonian psyche—“he” has not denied it. I repeat for emphasis; the President of the United States, plausibly accused of rape by a reputable woman whose story has been minutely scrutinized by a skeptical television network, offers no denial. His private lawyer David Kendall, a man who did not even know Clinton at the ti
me (and a man who had publicly denied that fellatio is a sexual act) issued the following statement on 19 February 1999:
Any allegation that the President assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than twenty years ago is absolutely false. Beyond that, we’re not going to go.
And beyond that, they haven’t gone. Of course the statement is open to Clintonian parsing. Any allegation? Oh, you mean this allegation? In 1978 the President was Jimmy Carter, who certainly didn’t “assault” any woman that year. And in 1978, Juanita was Mrs. Hickey. So—did Bill Clinton rape Mrs. Hickey that year? The question, under White House rules of evidence, has not even been posed yet. (The President has since paid a fine of $90,000 for lying under oath in a Federal Court, and made a payment of $850,000 to settle an allegation of sexual harassment, and has been cited by a DC judge for a criminal violation of the Privacy Act in the matter of Kathleen Willey, so the “he said” element would be weaker than usual in any event.)
The next month, on 19 March, Sam Donaldson of ABC News raised the matter at a press conference and was referred by Clinton to the above lawyer’s statement. The President would not even deny the allegation in the first person, or in his own voice. “Can you not simply deny it, sir?” asked Donaldson plaintively. And answer came there none.
It is just possible that the Broaddrick scandal, despite having been dropped by a generally compliant press, is not yet over. On 16 December 1999, Lanny Davis, one of the President’s more sinuous apologists, was asked on an MSNBC chat show to address the issue and replied that Ms. Broaddrick had been adjudged unreliable by the FBI. “How do you know, Lanny?” he was asked, and had no immediately very convincing answer, since her FBI file, if any, would be none of his business. On 20 December, Juanita Broaddrick filed a suit in Federal District Court seeking any files on her kept by the White House or the Justice Department. The White House responds that “there will be no comment” from them on this legal initiative by a private citizen who might be said to have suffered enough.
If Juanita Broaddrick is not telling the truth, then she is either an especially cruel and malicious liar, who should at a minimum be sued for defamation, or a delusional woman who should be seeking professional help. Nobody who has met or spoken with her believes that these necessary corollaries obtain even in the slightest way. And on this occasion, we can’t just lazily say that it’s her (not unsupported) word against that of a proven liar, because the proven liar hasn’t even cared, or do I mean dared, to open his mouth.
For mentioning this squalid subject on TV and radio, I have once or twice been accused of being “obsessed” by Clinton’s rape victims. That’s neat of course, and typical of his political bodyguards; in their minds nothing is his fault and it’s only his accusers who have any explaining to do. But in the third case I know about, which is so far unpublished anywhere, the story came to me without my asking, let alone soliciting. I was in San Francisco, and got a call and later a visit from a very well-known Bay Area journalist and editor. He’s a veteran radical and was once quite a Clinton fan; we’d argued about the man before. He wanted, he said, to disburden himself of the following information.
He (I can’t give his name without identifying her) had once employed a young female assistant. In the early 1970s, Bill Clinton had come out to the Bay Area to see his fiancée, Hillary, who was then working, for some other friends of mine as it happens, as a legal intern in Oakland. An introduction occurred between young Bill and my friend’s aforementioned assistant. He asked her out for lunch; she accepted. He proposed a walk in Golden Gate Park; she accepted that too. He made a lunge at her; she declined the advance and was rammed, very hard indeed, against a tree trunk before being rolled in the bushes and badly set-upon. She’s a tall and strong woman, and got away without submitting. She told my friend the same day, and he’d kept the secret for almost thirty years. In those days, girls on the Left were proud of being the equals of men, and took the rough, so to speak, with the smooth. It wasn’t done to whine or complain, let alone to go to the forces of law and order, or of repression as they were then known.
Years later, the woman was sitting at her desk when she got a telephone call from Brooke Shearer, who is also Mrs. Strobe Talbott and a veteran of the Clinton kitchen-cabinet. “Bill is thinking of running for office,” said Ms. Shearer. “He wanted to know if that was all right with you.” My subject was annoyed, but she had retained her old liberal allegiances. She also—see how this keeps coming up?—was thinking of getting engaged and becoming a mother. She replied that she wouldn’t stand in the way of a Clinton candidacy. But I have since talked to two further very respectable San Francisco citizens, who have heard her relate the identical story at their own dinner table, and who have neither met nor heard of my original informant (nor he of them). I know the woman’s name; I know that she has married well; I know her maiden name at the time of the assault; I know the high-powered Bay Area foundation where she works on good causes; I have communicated with her by Federal Express and by voicemail. I have excellent witnesses who have heard her say that if the story ever breaks she’ll deny it under oath. I don’t blame her—though in our present unshockable moral atmosphere it’s very unlikely that reporters, let alone prosecutors, would even turn over in bed before consigning the whole thing to the memory hole. It is time, as we keep hearing, to put the country behind us and move this forward. (At least, I think I’ve got that right.)
There are several other documented or partly-sourced allegations of rape against this President, and many more allegations of biting and of brutish sexual conduct. Some of these seem to me to be scurrilous, and some that are not scurrilous could be the result of copycat publicity. But the three stories above are untainted in this way, and they seem to leave Juanita Broaddrick, for the moment, with a very strong prima facie case.
Circumstantial evidence, as Justice Holmes once phrased it, is often very powerful (and can be used for an indictment or a conviction) precisely because it is the hardest to arrange. What are the chances that three socially and personally respectable women, all three of them political supporters of Mr. Clinton and none of them known to each other, would confect or invent almost identical experiences which they did not desire to make public? And how possible would it be for a network of anti-Clinton rumor-mongers to create, let alone ventilate, such a coincidence? The odds that any of these ladies is lying seem to me to approach zero; their reasons for reticence are all perfectly intelligible.
Reticence and feminine discretion, sometimes used to discredit women who don’t come forward in time, or at all, are in fact the ally of the perp, as the feminist movement used to instruct us. Indeed, voting against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, Senator Albert Gore said with almost pompous gravity: “Every woman who has ever struggled to be heard over a society that too often ignores even their most painful calls for justice—we simply cannot take for granted that the victim, or the woman, is always wrong.” Even their most painful? Judge Thomas’s accuser said that he had talked dirty to her; no more, even while (if you remember) she’d continued to work for and support him. That didn’t stop then-Governor Clinton from denouncing President Bush as “anti-woman” for his disbelief in Professor Hill’s charges.
If it was “time to speak out” then, as Hillary Clinton said in presenting Anita Hill with an award, then it’s time to speak out now. The same Al Gore has been unable to repress a feeling that there might be something in what Juanita Broaddrick told us. And she tells me that she still cries every time she sees Clinton’s gloating face on the TV. The official feminist leadership has forgotten what it used to affirm—which is how seldom decent women lie about rape and how often they bite their lips and keep silent for fear of being defamed or disbelieved. Biting their own lips is still better than having them furiously and lovelessly bitten; is our society so dulled that we simply pass the ice-bag and turn to other things?
Taken together with his silence on the legal lynching of Rickey Ray Rector, and the
numb acceptance of the criminal Strangelove bombings of Sudan and Iraq, the mute reception of Juanita Broaddrick’s charges illuminates the expiring, decadent phase of American liberalism.
SEVEN
The Shadow of the Con Man
Rodham’s Last Hurrah
“When you come right down to it, there are only two points that really count.”
“Such as?”
Skeffington held up two fingers. “One,” he said, ticking the first, “all Ireland must be free. Two,” he said, ticking the second, “Trieste belongs to Italy.” They count. At the moment the first counts more than the second, but that’s only because the Italians were a little slow in getting to the boat.”
—Edwin O’Connor, The Last Hurrah
CYRIL: Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.
VIVIAN: I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won’t do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members. Their feigned ardors and unreal rhetoric are delightful.
—Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Two full terms of Clintonism and of “triangulation,” and of loveless but dogged bipartisanship, reduced the American scene to the point where politicians had become to politics what lawyers had become to the law: professionalized parasites battening on an exhausted system that had lost any relationship to its original purpose (democracy or popular sovereignty in the first instance; justice or equity in the second). The permanent political class and its ancillaries held all the cards by the 2000 campaign, controlled all the money, decided on all the predigested questions in all the manipulated polls. They did their job almost too well, leaving insufficient room for illusion and inadequate grounds for maintaining any steady or principled party allegiance. As a result, the only realists were the cynics. And this in turn permitted some alarming honesties to be committed in public.