A Vast Conspiracy (25 page)

In the days leading up to the meeting, Bennett had brought the results of his informal survey back to his client with a simple message: Settle for under $1 million and put the case behind you. The president—as well as his wife—were reluctant. They had been battered by these sorts of allegations for years, and they found that the only way to respond to them was to fight them. If you settled, according to Clinton’s reckoning, you just encouraged more of these people to come forward.

The recklessness of Clinton’s approach, especially at this moment, is breathtaking. In May he had finally ended his sexual relationship with Lewinsky (though their phone sex would continue into November), but she kept pressuring him for a job back at the White House. On July 3, she had written him a starchy letter—“Dear Sir,” it began—complaining about the lack of progress in her job hunt, and warning that she would “need to explain to my parents exactly why that wasn’t happening.” A day later, Clinton
met with her and scolded, “It’s illegal to threaten the president of the United States.” Their meeting ended on a happier note, but Lewinsky’s job situation, not to mention her equilibrium, remained unsettled. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the Jones lawyers could send out subpoenas to anyone they chose. Clinton also knew that Lewinsky worked with Linda Tripp, who was talking to Isikoff about Kathleen Willey. In the summer of 1997, in short, Lewinsky’s name could have surfaced at any moment. Still, Clinton wanted to fight the lawsuit, if only, he said, to avoid embarrassing his wife. Bennett, however, talked him into a more conciliatory position. For less than $1 million—but with no apology!—Clinton would settle the case.

In the formal complaint, Jones had demanded $700,000. In the conversation with Davis and Cammarata, Bennett said there was a possibility that the president could agree to that figure. Both in public and in private, Bennett had said that he would never agree to a settlement that the president would have to pay out of his own pocket. But Bill Clinton owned a pair of general-liability insurance policies—one with a subsidiary of Chubb and the other with State Farm—and Chubb had implied that it would pay as much as $350,000, as half of any settlement, to resolve the case. State Farm was balking at paying anything, but Bennett thought he might find a way to fund the other half. (Bennett had explored the possibility of raising money for a settlement with a close friend of the president’s—Vernon Jordan.)

But there was one more thing. In her complaint, Jones had asserted that she had seen “distinguishing characteristics in Clinton’s genital area” when he purportedly exposed himself to her. Jones had signed a secret affidavit describing the characteristics. As the meeting wound down, Bennett told his adversaries, “I gotta have the affidavit. I think it’s horseshit, and I want it.” Bennett felt that if he could discredit the accusation about Clinton’s anatomy—a subject that had drawn a great deal of amused public attention—he could cast doubt on Jones’s entire case. He believed that if he could prove that there were no “characteristics” he could deny that his client had admitted anything by settling.

Bennett subsequently tried an enticement for his adversaries to produce the affidavit. “We’ll show you our best evidence,” he promised. Bennett was talking about the blow-job boys. He figured if Jones knew that he had unearthed Dennis Kirkland and his friends, that would spur her to settle. Bennett thought of the sex evidence as a kind of nuclear deterrent. The potential effect of its disclosure on both sides would lead both of them to
the bargaining table. In a narrow sense, Bennett’s strategy was sound, and it appeared to work. But in the history of the American presidency, the moment when Bill Clinton’s lawyer threatened this young woman with the public airing of her alleged serial fellatio with strangers will surely rank among the less admirable chapters.

Davis said it sounded as if they were making progress. Cammarata—wiry, intense, the younger and more detail-oriented of the lawyers for Jones—said there were other conditions that had to be satisfied. Jones, he said, still wanted an apology from the president for his behavior in 1991. Never, Bennett said: “If you want ten dollars and an apology, you’re not going to get it.” Jones’s lawyers said that they would have to check with their client but thought they might have the outline of a deal: a $700,000 payment, and a statement in which Clinton acknowledged no improper conduct by Jones, giving her a chance to accomplish her stated goal of “clearing her name.”

Cammarata and Ettinger went downstairs to Ettinger’s office, where they sat at his word processor and typed up the mutually acceptable language for the statement. In the key passage, the settlement said that “the parties agree that Paula Corbin Jones did not engage in any improper or sexual conduct on May 8, 1991, and that the allegations and the inferences about her published in … the American Spectator are false and their adverse effects on her character and reputation regrettable.” The statement said Jones had done nothing wrong; thus, by omission, the lawyers fudged the issue of what Clinton had done on that day. At Ettinger’s insistence, the statement also noted pointedly that “the insurers for President Clinton” would be paying the money. Close to midnight, the four men reconvened and agreed that progress had been made. Cammarata and Davis said they would call Jones for her approval in the morning.

The Jones lawyers left Bennett’s office thinking the case was as good as over. They had not figured on Paula Jones’s new best friend.

As their case made its way through the courts, Paula and Stephen Jones lived a secluded and lonely existence on the other side of the country from their lawyers. On most mornings, Steve took the one family car from their home in Long Beach to his job behind the Northwest Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport. Paula spent most days alone in their one-bedroom apartment with their two young sons. Now and then
she would take the boys to a local playground. She was lonely for home in Arkansas.

Not long after the case was filed, Cindy Hays tried to get a California-based antiabortion activist named Jane Chastain to attend an event with Paula. Chastain couldn’t make it, so she invited a friend of hers to take her place: Susan Carpenter-McMillan.

McMillan had a grand helmet of immobile blond hair, a bombastic manner, and a life story that seemed like a petri dish of California eccentricity. She had been born approximately fifty years before she met Paula, into the family of a Los Angeles land developer. Both her mother and her grandmother were ordained ministers in the church of Aimee Semple McPherson, the charismatic revivalist (and huckster) of prewar Southern California. McMillan had become a public figure largely though the route of confessions about her own traumas. For example, she had announced that when she was six she was sexually molested by a gang member who was staying with her parents. A longtime antiabortion crusader, McMillan also disclosed in a tearful interview with the
Los Angeles Times
that she had had an abortion when she was twenty-one and was a student at the University of Southern California. (A clip of the news story hung framed above her desk.) She also had another abortion many years later.

Starting in about 1980, McMillan helped to create a new form of political activism. According to her business card, she was the “Media Spokes Woman” of “The Women’s Coalition,” which consisted entirely of herself. Her labors were underwritten by her husband, Bill McMillan, a personal-injury attorney, and she used their palatial home, in the Republican stronghold of San Marino, as her base of operations. In earlier days, political leaders came to prominence because of their leadership of or affiliations with organizations—political parties, say, or churches or labor unions. McMillan, in contrast, took a postmodern approach to political influence and her own celebrity. Solely because she was energetic and effective on television, and because her name appeared on the Rolodexes of talk-show bookers, McMillan became a prominent public voice on such issues as abortion, chemical castration for child molesters, and conservative causes generally. Her métier was speaking, not doing. She simply had opinions on things, and she was skilled at expressing them. (The Reverend Al Sharpton, in New York, posed an ideological contrast to McMillan, but they developed similar styles of media ambulance-chasing.) McMillan kept a yellow Post-it note near the glass door to her office so that she could tell visitors
when she was not to be disturbed. “I am on the air,” the note said. Thanks to the Jones case, she was on the air a lot.

Each room of the McMillan manse was decorated in a different color scheme: peach living room, white dining room, green den, and a hand-carved mahogany study for Bill. Statues of cherubs abounded. To be sure, it was a long way from Paula and Steve’s one-bedroom in Long Beach, and after their victory in the Supreme Court, McMillan more or less adopted the couple and their two boys. McMillan wrested control of the legal fund from Cindy Hays, and she used it to start paying personal expenses for Paula and Steve—airplane tickets, boarding for their dog. McMillan got the legal fund to pay for a cellular phone for Paula, and the two women spoke up to a dozen times a day. I spent time with McMillan during this period in 1997, and I overheard her side of many of her conversations with Paula. McMillan often spoke to Jones in baby talk. “Hi, my Paula-poo,” she would begin in a singsong voice, and she would conclude the chats with the recitation “I dub-boo, I dub-boo, I dub-boo.” She called Paula “the little sister I never had.”

McMillan reveled in her role as Jones’s “Media Spokes Woman,” and she realized that the key to her survival in that role was keeping Steve as well as Paula happy. (Davis and Cammarata, who did their best with the uphill task of portraying their case as nonpolitical, regarded McMillan as a menace. But they were thousands of miles away, and McMillan ignored them.) For McMillan, Paula was never a problem. The phone calls and occasional shopping trips met all of her needs. But Steve had a different agenda. He wanted money. In the summer of 1997, McMillan had an answer for him—a book deal.

Through a friendly Hollywood producer, McMillan made contact with Adrian Zackheim, an editor at HarperCollins in New York. Without telling Davis or Cammarata, McMillan invited Zackheim to meet with Paula and Steve in the restaurant of the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. On the appointed day, Zackheim arrived at the hotel, and McMillan introduced them to the couple. Paula, however, simply said hello, indicated that McMillan was authorized to speak on her behalf, and excused herself to the other room of the restaurant for the duration of Zackheim’s meeting with McMillan and Steve Jones. (This peculiar arrangement was McMillan’s attempt to allow Paula to answer in a deposition that she had never talked to a publisher about a book deal.) Zackheim then had the experience of listening to McMillan and Steve rage about Clinton for about three hours—without
hearing a word from the putative author of the book. Not surprisingly, Zackheim and HarperCollins passed on the project.

McMillan realized that she had to put together a more polished presentation if she was going to deliver for Paula and especially Steve Jones. So she spoke to Gary Thomas, a well-known ghostwriter in the Christian book market who also ran the Center for Evangelical Spirituality, in Washington State. Thomas and McMillan knew each other from their work in the pro-life movement. (He had just completed Norma McCorvey’s book, a chronicle of the born-again experience of “Jane Roe” of
Roe v. Wade
.) After speaking with McMillan, Thomas produced a full-fledged proposal for a book to be entitled
Still Standing: The Inside Story of Paula Jones
.

“Paula Corbin Jones,” the proposal began. “Polls show that over 90% of the public recognize her name, but this book will provide the first true and detailed account of how a young, unknown woman from Arkansas was humiliated and abused.… It will be an inspiring message which leaves the reader with admiration for the grit, tenacity and perseverance of a modern-day Joan of Arc.” Over the nine double-spaced pages in the proposal, Thomas did his best to mine a book’s worth of material out of a ten-minute encounter in a hotel six years earlier. (“Chapter Two will take the reader, second by second, through Paula’s meeting with then-Governor Clinton. With candid yet respectful language, Paula will explain the governor’s conduct.”) McMillan loved the proposal and called Thomas’s literary agent in New York to talk strategy.

The whole book project underlined just how much Paula was a spectator to the tumult that her case produced. Steve wanted the book more than she did. McMillan wanted the case to go on more than she did. Behind Paula’s back, McMillan could be withering about her. She told Thomas’s literary agent, “This is not a smart cookie. There is not much going on upstairs.” But smart cookie or not, McMillan told the agent that Paula had real news to disclose in the book: “We know what it looks like,” McMillan said.

What what looks like? the agent replied.

The president’s penis! At first McMillan wouldn’t tell the agent precisely about the famous distinguishing characteristic, but at last she explained, “Well, you know, his penis isn’t necessarily straight.” With this kind of material, McMillan and the agent agreed that they should shoot for a $1 million advance. (Notably, many of Clinton’s enemies were obsessed with the appearance of his penis. Right around this time, the elf George
Conway, who had tipped Matt Drudge to the Willey story, sent an e-mail message to Drudge saying that “the distinguishing physical characteristic that Paula Jones says she believes she saw is that Clinton’s penis is curved when it is erect.” Drudge didn’t use the item.)