A Vast Conspiracy (13 page)

As the sun moves across the Arkansas sky, the shadows from the huge concrete towers of the Lonoke grain-drying cooperative stretch out along the town’s main drag. On some days, a visitor might be forgiven for thinking the shadows move faster than anything else in Lonoke. The railroad tracks that once ran up the grassy median strip of Front Street are gone, and these
days only a few cars stop at the handful of surviving businesses in town. Pedestrians are few. Now and then, someone walks into Blackard’s Dry Cleaners, which is run by the family of the woman who was sitting next to Paula at the registration desk at the Excelsior. The big business in town is minnows. Since the sixties the locals have been replacing their rice farms with ponds, where they raise Lonoke’s gift to America’s bait shops. Around city hall, they even call Lonoke the minnow capital of the world.

Today, of course, Lonoke is best known as the hometown of Paula Jones. (It’s not far from Cabot, which nurtured Dennis Kirkland.) In a case filled with authentic pornography, there may be at least a moral obscenity in applying microscopic biographical attention to Paula Corbin Jones. Until the moment she took on Bill Clinton, her life was mostly sad, mostly ordinary, and entirely alien to the world of government and law. She must be the only significant political figure of the century who could say, as she once did to me, “The Republicans? Are they the good ’uns or the bad ’uns?” After Paula became famous, friendship with her became a kind of industry, as acquaintances, boyfriends, and even relatives cashed in on her notoriety. To the extent possible, it is important to try to separate truth from financially induced exaggeration. The life of Paula Jones does contain some clues to what happened between her and the governor in 1991—and to why, years later, her case spiraled into history.

Paula Corbin was born on September 17, 1967, the last of Bobby and Delmer Corbin’s three daughters. The lives of Paula and her sisters were dominated by the harsh tenets of the First Church of the Nazarene, where the family worshipped and her father sometimes preached. It was part-time, unpaid work, and Bobby Corbin supported the family as a pattern maker in a local mill where they made dresses for Sears. The three Corbin girls dressed in clothes that Delmer Corbin made from the scraps of fabric Bobby brought home from work. Nazarene prohibitions defined the girls’ lives. They couldn’t drink, dance, wear pants or makeup, roller-skate, watch television, or even visit friends’ houses. Paula wore thick glasses, and her hair flowed down her back. Early family pictures from Paula’s girlhood show all three girls with long hair, because haircuts were also prohibited by the family’s rules. Their isolation was intense. Delmer even fetched the girls from school so they could eat lunch at home.

When Paula became a teenager, the family’s life, never easy, turned even more troubled. While Bobby was on a disability leave, he was laid off from
the mill, just short of the time needed to qualify for a pension. Two years later, in 1984, he died of heart failure while playing gospel music on the piano at a senior citizen’s home. Paula’s sisters dropped out of high school and married. Paula struggled on at Lonoke High and then transferred to neighboring Carlisle High because it required fewer credits for graduation.

As the girls hit their teenage years, their parents’ control over them dwindled. By the time of Bobby’s death, Paula was in full-scale revolt against the rules of her childhood. It is this period of her life—from about 1984 until she met Steve Jones in 1989, from age seventeen to twenty-two—that drew most of the attention after she filed her case against the president. For a while, she commuted the thirty-five miles to Little Rock, first to secretarial school (from which she dropped out), then to a series of retail sales jobs, from which she was invariably fired because of tardiness, absenteeism, or inattention to her work (she worked at a pest control company, sold Swatch watches at a department store, and did clerical work for Hertz and a trucking company—where she was reprimanded for her provocative dress). In 1988, the small family home on Front Street burned down—the family had no insurance—and Paula lacked a permanent place to live for a while. During this time, she dated a fellow named Mike Turner for a few months, and he arranged for them to be photographed together in nearly naked embraces. (Both wore skimpy bikini bottoms.) In other words, the rumor that both Pat Mahoney and Bob Bennett had heard about photographs was true.

After Paula became famous, Turner sold the photographs to
Penthouse
. Turner had kept not only the pictures of his long-ago girlfriend but a handful of notes that Paula had written to him. The tone of the letters differed considerably from what one might expect from the horrified ingenue who recoiled in horror from Bill Clinton’s pass. In one note to Turner, for example, Paula wrote, “I miss every inch of you … but I miss some inches more than others,” and, in another, “Your [
sic
] great in bed.” Paula’s brother-in-law Mark Brown said Paula told him that by the time she was seventeen, she had had sex with fifteen men. (Paula’s arrival in the public spotlight brought to the surface splits in her family that had simmered for years. Charlotte and Mark Brown denounced Paula as a fabricator and fortune-hunter; her other sister, Lydia Cathey, stood by Paula.)

Certainly there was no shortage of men in Little Rock who claimed to have been involved with her during this period. Certainly, too, there was little doubt that Paula’s life began to change when she met Steve Jones in
1989 at BJ’s Star-Studded Honky Tonk in Little Rock. Unlike her previous boyfriends, Steve was conservative and controlling, and Paula tamed her free-spirited ways when they were together. Jobs came and went; she had never held a job for longer than four months. Then her old friend Pam Blackard suggested she apply for work with Pam’s employer, the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. It took two tries, but finally Paula obtained work as a documents examiner for $6.35 an hour. Her duties at the AIDC never amounted to much more than making delivery runs to other government offices and typing employment applications into a database. These limited duties were not entirely surprising, because she typed only twenty-four words a minute. (In an employment test for alphabetizing, she got only twenty-three out of thirty-four answers correct.)

Still, she made an impression on her coworkers, who nicknamed her Minnie Mouse because of her tight dresses, hair bows, and peripatetic manner. In the early nineties, the Arkansas legislative session used to feature parties for legislators and lobbyists nearly every night of the week. Paula went to so many that the fellows in payroll never learned her name; they just called her “party girl.” Her good-natured spaciness made her something of a legend around the office long before she became famous. Once, in an oft-repeated tale, a coworker asked her to cash a check for him. Hours later, he asked Paula about his money. She put her hands on her hips, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know where that is!”

In the months leading up to the conference at the Excelsior, it was possible to see that two sides of her character—her wild past and staid present, her flirtatious history and hopeful future with Steve—remained close to the surface. She had worked at AIDC for only two months when her boss, Clydine Pennington, asked her if she wanted to work at the registration desk at the Governor’s Quality Management Conference on May 8, 1991. It was far from an ordinary assignment for Paula. Pennington remembered her bubbling excitement as she reported for work that morning, before she headed over to the hotel. She had dressed for the occasion—short culottes, black hose, high heels, and a big bow in her hair. Just before she left for the short drive to the hotel, Paula asked Pennington, “Do you think this skirt is too short?”

Pennington didn’t lie. “Actually, I do, Paula, but I guess there’s nothing you can do about it now.”

Paula smiled and said, “I’ll just stay behind the table.” Then she was gone.

In the spring of 1994, the events that took place at the Excelsior prompted Paula Jones to file a lawsuit against the president of the United States. The case—a private action against a sitting president for actions taken before he was elected—was often described as unprecedented, but that wasn’t exactly true. A few days before John F. Kennedy was elected president, several disgruntled delegates who had attended the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against him. The delegates had been standing in front of a hotel trying to flag down a taxi to go to a party given by the famous Washington hostess Perle Mesta. Kennedy saw them waiting and offered them his car and driver, which they accepted. Kennedy was not a passenger. During the subsequent ride, the car collided with another, and that accident became the basis for the suit. In a foreshadowing of the Jones case, the plaintiffs in
Bailey v. Kennedy
used the discovery process to try to obtain embarrassing information about the Kennedy family finances in interrogatories sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Rather than answer such questions, the Kennedys settled the case for $17,750, a considerable sum in 1963.

But though there had almost never been a case like
Jones v. Clinton
, presidential power has been one of the most controversial areas of constitutional law over the past several decades. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court was asked to weigh how and whether the laws that govern other citizens apply to the president. The most famous of these cases arose out of Watergate. In
United States v. Nixon
, the Court upheld Judge John Sirica’s subpoena of the White House tapes in the criminal trial against those charged in the Watergate cover-up. Because the subpoena was narrowly drawn and the material sought was indispensable to a fair trial, the Court unanimously ruled that Nixon had to produce the tapes. To rule otherwise, the Court held, would place the president above the law.

It was a less-known case that created the real ideological divide over presidential power and immunity from court processes. In 1970, an Air Force management analyst named A. Ernest Fitzgerald had been fired after he gave testimony before Congress about cost overruns on Air Force projects. Fitzgerald sued President Nixon, and the case reached the Supreme Court in 1982. A bitterly divided Court ruled, five to four, that Fitzgerald had no right to bring his case.

According to Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion for the Court, the president
enjoyed absolute immunity from liability for acts within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties. “Because of the singular importance of the President’s duties,” he wrote, the “diversion of his energies by concern with private lawsuits would raise unique risks to the functioning of government.… The sheer prominence of the President’s office” would make him “an easily identifiable target for suits for civil damages. Cognizance of this personal vulnerability frequently could distract a President from his official duties, to the detriment of not only the President and his office but also the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.” In a dissenting opinion in which he was joined by the Court’s liberal wing, Justice Byron White thundered that the court’s decision “places the President above the law … [and] is a reversion to the notion that the King can do no wrong.”

The Fitzgerald case—and cases like it—defined the terms of the debate over presidential power for a generation, with conservatives seeking the protection of the president from the distractions of litigation and liberals believing that the chief executive should be treated more like an ordinary citizen. As a legal matter, the Paula Jones case followed in this tradition—posing the question of whether a sitting president should be forced to defend a private lawsuit. Of course, the analogy between the Jones case and that of Fitzgerald was close but not exact; the Pentagon employee’s civil suit against the president was based on Nixon’s official, not private, actions. Still, in the Jones case, if liberals and conservatives had stuck to their principles, the liberals would have supported Jones’s right to sue and the conservatives would have backed the president’s claim of immunity.

Just the opposite occurred. In another example of how law and politics polluted each other in the course of this case, the Jones lawsuit found liberals feeling a president’s pain and conservatives speaking out for a lowly citizen. This hypocrisy was on vivid display in the genteel forum of the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
for May 24, 1994. Lloyd Cutler, the White House counsel and a stalwart Democrat, envisioned a legal quagmire for the president if the Jones case was allowed to proceed. “Suppose there were twenty libel suits filed against the president,” Cutler said. “Would he have to defend all those libel suits?”

The conservative who embraced Paula Jones’s cause on the program could scarcely bring himself to pay lip service to Clinton’s obligations as president. “I think the dignity of the presidency and the rightful conduct of that office is of paramount importance and justifies protecting the president against the kinds of lawsuits that history tells us presidents are subjected
to.” (
Rightful
conduct—an important qualification.) But this case—and this president—was something altogether different. “This is a novel situation, which suggests to me that we elect as president of the United States not perfect individuals but people who have conducted themselves in a way that at least thus far in our history has not given rise to private civil litigation against them.” It was a difficult sentence to parse, but the implication seemed to be that other presidents may not have been “perfect” but the Paula Jones case potentially represented a new and unprecedented level of presidential misfeasance. It was a thought that the spokesman for Paula Jones’s position on the program, a former Republican official named Kenneth W. Starr, would have ample opportunity to reflect upon in the months to come.