Like a number of other people in Washington, I had heard a third-hand version of her tale during the election of 1992. In the briefly famous documentary The War Room, which hymns the spinning skills of thugs like James Carville, George Stephanopoulos can be seen “live” on the telephone, deftly fending off a nutcase Ross Perot supporter who has called in about the “bastard.” The caller may not have said “black bastard,” but one didn’t have to be unduly tender-minded to notice that Clinton—however much he had tried to charm and woo them—still had enemies on the Right. Some of these enemies had allowed themselves to become infected, or were infected already, with the filthy taint of racism. That seemed an additional reason for maintaining a certain… reserve. I wasn’t to know that, by the middle of 1998, Clinton’s hacks would be using the bigotry of some of his critics, in the same way that Johnnie Cochran had employed the sick racist cop Mark Fuhrman, to change the subject and to “whiten” the sepulcher.
Just as the Republican case against the president seemed to be lapsing into incoherence, in the first days of 1999, Matt Drudge uncorked the black baby again. Indeed, he curtain-raised this nonexclusive at the annual gathering of the cultural and political Right, held in San Diego as a rival attraction to the pulverizing tedium and self-regard of the Clintonian “Renaissance Weekend” at Hilton Head. Once put to the most perfunctory forensic test, the whole story collapsed within the space of twenty-four hours. Mr. Clinton’s DNA—famously found dabbled on the costly Gap garment of a credulous intern—was sufficiently knowable from the indices of the Starr Report for a preliminary finding to be possible. There was nothing like a “match” between the two genetic attributes. Once again, and for reasons of professional rather than political feeling, I felt glad that Graydon Carter and I had put privacy (and scruples that arose partly from the fatherhood of our own daughters) ahead of sensation all those years ago.
Still, I couldn’t help but notice that White House spokesmen, when bluntly asked about the Drudge story by reporters, reacted as if it could be true. There was nothing about their Leader, they seemed to convey by the etiolated remains of their body language, that might not one day need a “privacy” defense, however hastily or wildly concocted. It turned out, however, that Mr. Drudge had done them another unintended favor. Nothing is more helpful, to a person with a record of economizing with the truth, than a false and malicious and disprovable allegation. And Drudge—whose want of discrimination in this respect is almost a trademark—openly says that he’ll print anything and let the customers decide what’s actually kosher. This form of pretended “consumer sovereignty” is fraudulent in the same way that its analogues are. (It means, for one thing, that you have no right to claim that you were correct, or truthful, or brave. All you did was pass it on, like a leaker or some other kind of conduit. The death of any intelligent or principled journalism is foreshadowed by such promiscuity.) In the old days, true enough, the Washington press corps was a megaphone for “official sources.” Now, it’s a megaphone for official sources and traders from the toilet.
Just such a symbiosis—comparable to his affectless equidistance between Left and Right, Republican and Democrat, white-collar crime and blue-collar crime, true and false, sacred and profane, bought and paid for, public and private, quid and quo—happened to serve Mr. Clinton well on the day in January 1998 that his presidency went into eclipse, or seemed about to do so. He made the most ample possible use of the natural reticence and decency that is felt by people who open a bedroom or bathroom door without knocking. (And this, even though he was the occupant of said bathroom and bedroom.) He also made a masterly use of the apparent contrast between the trivial and the serious. But on this occasion, and having watched it for some years, I felt confident that I could see through his shell game. On the first day, and in the presence of witnesses, I said: “This time he’s going to be impeached.” And, in support of my own much underrated and even mocked prescience, I will quote what the Los Angeles Times was kind enough to print under my name on January 28, 1998:
Montesquieu remarked that if a great city or a great state should fall as the result of an apparent “accident,” then there would be a general reason why it required only an accident to make it fall. This may appear to be a tautology, but it actually holds up very well as a means of analyzing what we lazily refer to as a “sex scandal.”
If a rust-free zipper were enough on its own to cripple a politician, then quite clearly Bill Clinton would be remembered, if at all, as a mediocre Governor of the great state of Arkansas. It is therefore silly to describe the present unseemly furor as a prurient outburst over one man’s apparently self-destructive sexual compulsions.
Until recently, this same man was fairly successfully fighting a delaying action against two long-standing complaints. The first was that he had imported unsavory Arkansas business practices to Washington, along with some of the unsavory practitioners like the disgraced Webster Hubbell. The second was that he viewed stray women employees as spoils along the trail.
Think of these two strands as wires, neither of them especially “live.” (Everybody knew something about both, and few people believed that there was no substance to either story, but a fairly general benefit of the doubt was still being awarded.) Now the two wires have touched, and crossed, and crackled. Vernon Jordan’s fellow board-members at Revlon gave a suspiciously large “consultancy” contract to Hubbell at just the moment when his usefulness as anybody’s attorney had come to an end. (He was, after all, not just quitting the Department of Justice but going straight to jail.) And now this same well of Revlon is revisited by the busy Mr. Jordan when it comes time to furnish Monica Lewinsky with a soft landing. So, does this represent a Clinton machine modus operandi when it comes to potentially embarrassing witnesses? Kenneth Starr would be failing in his mandate as Independent Counsel if he did not put the question, and press hard for an answer. Even more to the point, so would we. This was all waiting to happen….
Or consider Dick Morris, Clinton’s other best friend. The tarts from the “escort service” we could have—with a slight shudder—overlooked. But Morris’s carryings-on in the Jefferson Hotel were an allegory of the way business was being conducted at the Democratic National Committee and even in the franchising of the Lincoln Bedroom. His exorbitant political bills necessitated the debauching, not just of himself, but of a whole presidential election. So that dirty little story served to illuminate the dirty big story. As does this one….
Had Clinton begun by saying: “Yes, I did love Gennifer, but that’s my business,” many of us would have rejoiced and defended him. Instead, he disowned and insulted her and said he’d been innocent of that adultery, and treated the voters as if they were saps. Having apparently put Ms. Lewinsky into the quick-fix world of Jordan and Morris, he is in no position to claim that it’s a private emotional matter, and has no right to confuse his business with that of the country’s. Which is why he has a scandal on “his” hands, and is also why we need feel no pang when he falsely claims that the press and public are wasting his valuable time, when the truth is exactly the other way about.
I sat back after writing that, and sat back rather pleased with myself after reading it in print, and thought that some people would take my point even if they didn’t agree with it, and then went through a year in which, not once but several times every day, I was informed that Clinton had lied only to protect his wife and daughter (and, OK, himself) from shame! In the course of that same year, his wife and daughter were exposed by Clinton to repeated shame and humiliation. Dick Morris emerged as the only person to whom Clinton told the truth. Vernon Jordan emerged as the crucial witness in a matter of obstruction of justice. “Notice how they always trash the accusers,” said Erik Tarloff to me one day. Erik has contributed to speeches for Clinton and Gore and is married to Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chair of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. “They destroy their reputations. If Monica hadn’t had that blue dress, they were getting ready to port
ray her as a fantasist and an erotomaniac. Imagine what we’d all be thinking of her now.” Nor was this an exaggeration. In parallel with its Robert Rubin/Alan Greenspan presentation of bankerly orthodoxy and unshakable respectability, the Clinton administration always had its banana republic side. For all the talk about historic presidential “philandering,” it is hard to recall any other White House which has had to maintain a quasi-governmental or para-state division devoted exclusively to the bullying and defamation of women. Like my old friend, there were many who “didn’t like to think about it.” Even Clinton’s best friend, the notably unfastidious Dick Morris, once told CNBC:
Under Betsey Wright’s supervision in the 1992 Clinton campaign, there was an entire operation funded with over $100,000 of campaign money, which included federal matching funds, to hire private detectives to go into the personal lives of women who were alleged to have had sex with Bill Clinton. To develop compromising material—black-mailing information, basically—to coerce them into signing affidavits saying they did not have sex with Bill Clinton.
“Having sex” was the most fragrant and presentable way of describing the experience of certain women, like the Arkansas nursing-home supervisor Juanita Broaddrick, who was raped by Clinton while he was state attorney general in 1978. [See Chapter Six.] Even as the 1999 impeachment trial was in progress, NBC was withholding a long interview with this extremely credible and principled lady, whose affidavit sat in the “evidence room” at the House of Representatives. No Democrat ever went to look at the evidence, and this was not because of its presumed untruth. (By then, the use of the mantra “consensual sex” had become part of consensual, or consensus, politics.) And women who told the truth were accused, at best, of trying to lure a sitting president into a “perjury trap.” As if it were necessary to trick Clinton into telling a lie….
Of course, in a time of “sexual McCarthyism” there’s probably some advantage in being prudent. Take this little item, which appeared deadpan on page A10 of the Washington Post on January 30, 1999. It concerned the testimony of an “investigator” who had been hired to keep an eye on Ms. Kathleen Willey. Ms. Willey, some may recall, had been an admirer of President Clinton, had been the wife of a Democratic fund-raiser, had been a volunteer worker at the White House, had suddenly become a widow, had gone in distress to the Oval Office for comfort and for a discussion about the possibility of a paying job, and had been rewarded with a crushing embrace, some clichéd words of bar-room courtship, and the guiding by the presidential mitt of her own hand onto his distended penis. (That is, if you believe her story. It could all have been channeled into her mind by the Christian Coalition or the Aryan Nations, who then manipulated this staunch Democratic liberal into confessing her embarrassment on 60 Minutes.) Whatever the truth of her story—and smoking guns should perhaps not be mentioned right away—she found her life altered once she had gone public. Her car tires ruined… her cat gone missing… some unexpected attention from a major Clinton fund-raising crony named Nathan Landow… nothing you could quite put a name to. As the Washington Post unsensationally put it:
Jarrett Stern, a private investigator, told ABC News in an interview broadcast last night that he was hired for an unspecified project by Landow, a wealthy Maryland developer who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton-Gore campaigns. Stern’s lawyer, Edouard Bouquet of Bethesda, told the network his client felt uneasy about what he was asked to do and called Willey, using an alias, to warn her someone was out to do her harm…
Stern declined to detail what he had been asked to do in connection with Willey, but he told ABC that he “wholeheartedly” believes that Willey was approached with a menacing message by a stranger jogging near her Richmond home two days before her [Paula] Jones case testimony. Willey has said the man inquired about her children by name, about her missing cat and about whether she’d gotten the tires on her car repaired after they were mysteriously vandalized by someone who drove masses of nails into all four of them. “Don’t you get the message?” she has said the man asked.
I. F. Stone once observed that the Washington Post was a great newspaper, because you never knew on what page you would find the Page One story. This tale made page ten on the Saturday before the United States Senate called its first witness. Let us imagine and even believe that Ms. Willey and M. Bouquet and Mr. Stern all conspired to tell a lie. You will still have to notice that it is they—lacking state power, or police power, or public-opinion power if it comes to that—who are the “sexual McCarthyites.” They are McCarthyites by virtue of having made an allegation. The potential culprits—Mr. Landow or the most powerful man in the world, for whom he raised untold money—are the hapless victims. The charge of McCarthyism aimed at Ms. Willey and her unexpected corroborators could easily have been avoided. They could, after all, have kept quiet. And I almost wish that they had, because then I would not have been told by Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and many others that it was Clinton who dared not move outside or even inside his secure executive mansion, for fear of the female stalkers and lynchers and inquisitors who dogged his every step. And outlets like The Nation would not have dishonored the memory of McCarthy’s victims—many of them men and women of principle who were persecuted for their principles and not for their deeds—by comparing their experience to the contemptible evasions of a cheap crook. Mr. Nate Landow also tried to follow the “McCarthyite” script as much as it lay within his power. Confronted with questions about his leaning on an inconvenient and vulnerable witness, he eagerly sought the protection of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. This and other legal stratagems were not strange to him. Note what Dick Morris said earlier: that when Clinton is in trouble he resorts to the world of soft money for allies. (It is this fact alone that destroys his claim to “privacy,” and ties together his public affluence and private squalor.) Nathan Landow is the personification of that shady and manipulative world. He paid a small fortune to have Kathleen Willey flown by private jet from Richmond to his mansion on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he “pressed her” about her deposition in the Paula Jones case. His fund-raising organization, IMPAC, was and remains a core group in the “money primary” to which Democratic aspirants must submit. (He himself probably prefers Gore to Clinton.) In 1996, he provided a microcosm of the soft-money world in action.
The Cheyenne-Arapaho peoples of Oklahoma have been attempting for years to regain land that was illegally seized from them by the federal government in 1869. Democratic Party fund-raisers persuaded the tribes that an ideal means of gaining attention would be to donate $107,000 to the Clinton-Gore campaign. This contribution secured them a small place at a large lunch with other Clinton donors, but no action. According to the Washington Post, a Democratic political operative named Michael Copperthite then petitioned Landow to take up their cause. Landow first required them to register with the consulting firm of Peter Knight, who is Al Gore’s chief moneyman and promoter, for a $100,000 retainer and a fee of $10,000 per month. Then he demanded that the Cheyenne-Arapaho sign a development deal with him, handing over 10 percent of all income produced on the recovered land, including the revenues from oil and gas. When news of this nasty deal—which was rejected by the tribes—became public, the Democratic National Committee was forced to return the money and the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs issued a report describing the “fleecing” of the Indians by “a series of Democratic operators, who attempted to pick their pockets for legal fees, land development and additional contributions.”
These are the sort of “Democratic operators” to whom Clinton turns when he needs someone to take care of business. And, of course, Mr. Landow’s daughter works at the White House, causing nobody to ask how she got her job. In Clinton’s Washington there is always affirmative action for such people.
In the same week as the Landow-Willey revelations, the Court of Appeals decisively reinstated Judge Kenneth Starr’s case against Webster Hubbell, his wife, and their two “advisers?
?? for tax evasion. It might be said—probably was said—that when it comes to lying about taxes, “everybody does it.” However, Mr. Hubbell’s seeming motive in concealing a large tranche of income was not the wish to enjoy its fruits while free of tax. It was—how can one phrase this without sounding like the frightful Inspector Javert?—because he would have had difficulty explaining how he came by the money in the first place. The money, to which I had tried to call attention in my Los Angeles Times article a year previously, had been given him by Revlon and other normally tightfisted corporations not unconnected to the soft-money universe inhabited by Clinton. In their reinstatement of the suit, the majority on the Court of Appeals used the dread phrase “hush money” in a rather suggestive, albeit prima facie, manner. Many past presidents have appointed sordid underlings at the Department of Justice. One thinks of Bobby Kennedy; one thinks of Edwin Meese. This time, however, almost nobody came forward to say that “they all do it.” Perhaps this alibi had become subject, after a grueling workout, to a law that nobody can break with impunity: the law of diminishing returns. There was no sex involved, so Judge Starr was spared the routine yells about his pornographic and prurient obsessions. I continued to chant the slogan I had minted a year previously: “It’s not the lipstick traces, stupid. It’s the Revlon Connection.”