A Vast Conspiracy (26 page)

Cammarata and Davis knew nothing of the negotiations for a book by their client, and they were astonished when Paula rejected the settlement offer they had extracted from Bennett and Ettinger. Actually, Steve did most of the talking to the lawyers—and McMillan orchestrated his response. The money was acceptable, Steve said, but the language in the proposed settlement agreement was not. Steve and McMillan had two objections to the “stipulation of settlement” that Cammarata and Ettinger had written out on August 5. First, it did not include an “explicit” admission by Clinton that he was in the room with Paula at the Excelsior. Second, the settlement did not include an “explicit” admission that he did what Paula said he did—that is, drop his pants and ask her to “kiss it.”

Cammarata and Davis were apoplectic. In a series of phone calls over the next week, they made the same points over and over to Paula and Steve. The settlement was a victory for her. She would receive the full amount for which she had sued. Her demands were unreasonable. Clinton would never apologize—and there was a good chance that if the case went to trial, she would lose. Paula, Steve, and especially Susan Carpenter-McMillan wouldn’t budge.

Finally, in desperation, on August 19, the two lawyers wrote an extraordinary twelve-page, single-spaced letter begging their client to accept the settlement. “We firmly believe it is the best we can ever obtain,” Davis and Cammarata wrote, “and delay in acceptance will be very harmful to your interests.… 
It is a complete victory for the interests you seek which are the redemption of your character and reputation.”
The lawyers spoke with extraordinary candor about the weaknesses of her case—“Bear in mind defendant Clinton has persuaded millions of voters he is credible”—and about the real motivations behind the case.

“You will lose all prospect of selling your sealed affidavit once that affidavit is disclosed, as it must be, to our opponents,” the letter stated. (Davis and Cammarata knew that Paula and Steve wanted to sell their story—and especially Paula’s assessment of the president’s penis—but they didn’t know the negotiations were ongoing.) “You will recall they seek its production
from you now,” the letter went on, “and we believe they will be successful in getting it. Once disclosed to our opponents, it is more likely to become a matter of public knowledge.” In touting the secret about the president’s penis to the literary agent, McMillan had demonstrated her lack of understanding of the legal process. The Jones team would have to disclose it if the case went to trial. But McMillan was right about the book’s prospects if the case was settled. The market for a book from Paula would disappear—as would demand for McMillan herself on the talk-show circuit. As Davis and Cammarata were candid enough to admit, their fees already amounted to $759,870.40—more than the amount Clinton was prepared to pay. The lawyers would certainly discount their final bill, but still, the $700,000 was going to look a lot smaller after the lawyers took their cut. Not so a book deal—and that would vanish altogether if the case were to settle.

Davis and Cammarata made a canny observation toward the end of their letter. Over three years, Paula had never before asked for an apology from Clinton. “Your focus has changed from proving that you are a good person, to proving Clinton is a bad person. That was never your objective in filing suit.” That was true. But destroying Clinton (and promoting herself) was Susan Carpenter-McMillan’s objective from the start. In a way, the two lawyers had isolated the difference between cases based on law and those based on politics. An apology wouldn’t help clear Paula’s name—it would only damage Clinton’s. But that was now the objective for the case.

In the midst of these tense negotiations between the lawyers and their client, on August 22, both sides had to appear in front of Judge Wright in Little Rock. (Ironically, even though the lawsuit was ultimately pending for more than four years, this brief conference would be the only public court session before her in the entire matter.) Signs of tension between Jones and her lawyers were evident in the courtroom. Moments before Judge Wright took the bench, Jones was still seated in the second row of spectators, wedged between her husband and McMillan. The parties in civil cases rarely attend pretrial proceedings, especially routine conferences like this one, but the Joneses and McMillan had flown across the country from their homes for the forty-minute court session. McMillan said later that she had brought Paula and Steve to Little Rock as a signal that they, not the lawyers, were running the plaintiff’s case. McMillan also wanted the lawyers to know that she remained Paula’s closest adviser. When Davis and Cammarata
took their seats at the counsel table, McMillan had to nudge Paula to go sit with them.

Wright ran the conference with relaxed confidence as she ticked off the matters that needed to be resolved before trial. In a written ruling issued that day, in response to a motion by the defense to throw the case out, Wright had dismissed only one of Jones’s counts. The judge ruled that the trial would go forward on Jones’s claim of conspiracy to deprive her of civil rights and on her claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but she dismissed Jones’s claim that Clinton had defamed her. Wright also let stand Jones’s defamation case against Danny Ferguson. Now, the judge asked, what about a schedule for trial?

Bennett asked for an early trial date—in January 1998—as if to prove that Clinton had nothing to fear. The judge consulted her calendar and found that she wouldn’t have time for the trial until May. Looking morose and saying little, Cammarata consented. The defense asked for a jury of twelve, not six. A unanimous jury was required in cases such as this, and Bennett assumed that it would be difficult to put together a jury of a dozen Arkansans willing to rule against their most celebrated native son. When the hearing ended, Jones ignored her lawyers and rushed back to join her husband and McMillan.

Even before the courtroom cleared, Cammarata approached Mitch Ettinger with an urgent question: “Is the insurance gone? Is it gone?” Clinton’s lawyers said that it probably was. Cammarata knew that under the terms of Clinton’s Chubb and State Farm policies the companies were technically obligated to pay for Clinton’s defense only on certain counts against him, and now the judge had dismissed the pertinent part of the case. As Cammarata expected—and as Bennett confirmed with the insurance companies shortly after the hearing—both companies now refused to contribute to a settlement, or even to pay Bennett’s future fees. Bennett would later persuade the insurance companies to remain in the case, but Wright’s order only dimmed whatever lingering chance of a settlement had remained.

After the hearing, Davis and Cammarata made several more fruitless phone calls to Paula and Steve, asking them to reconsider their opposition to the settlement. On August 29, the two lawyers sent another long and detailed letter to Jones. It began by noting that “serious differences have arisen between us” and announced that “we believe these differences are so
basic as to make it necessary for us to withdraw as your counsel as a consequence of your refusal to agree to a settlement.” They warned that “our opponents may portray your refusal as a money-grubbing attempt to further develop this story for profitable book rights, and portray you as inspired and under the influence of right-wing Clinton-haters.” This, indeed, summed up Davis and Cammarata’s own view of their client at this point. “A perception of greed and hatred on your part will lose the public relations battle for your good name which your lawyers have worked long and hard to build up.”

In September 1997—three years after the case was filed and nine months before it was scheduled to go to trial—Paula Jones had to find herself new lawyers. Susan Carpenter-McMillan took charge of the search.

“Hello?”

Linda Tripp answered the phone at 10:23
P.M
. on September 18, 1997.

“Linda?” asked Lucianne Goldberg.

“Hi.”

“Hi, dear, how are you?”

“Thanks for calling,” said Tripp.

“That’s all right,” Goldberg answered.

“I, uh, number one, didn’t expect you to, necessarily, and I wouldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t.”

“Oh, why not?” the agent asked.

“Oh, I know that it was an awkward situation,” Tripp replied, “and then I, in retrospect, feel very badly about it.”

It had been more than a year since Tripp pulled out of her book project with Goldberg. Tripp had already started taking notes of her conversations with Lewinsky, and she knew what a sensational story she had. Sheepishly, she had approached Tony Snow once again and asked him if Goldberg remained too mad at her to resume their plans for a book. Snow’s call to Goldberg prompted this call to Tripp—which Goldberg taped.

Goldberg and Tripp spoke three times in September 1997—the agent taped two of the calls—and the transcripts rank among the most extraordinary documents in the entire saga of the Clinton scandals. In many ways, these conversations built a template that the rest of the scandal followed.

First, though, Tripp had to explain why she had gotten back in touch. “I wanted to chat with you about something that is—is completely ridiculous,”
Tripp began. “Um, last September, a young lady who shall remain nameless for the time being took me in as her confidante, and, as it turns out, she had been a, quote, ‘girlfriend of the Big Creep.’ ”

“Mmm,” Goldberg purred.

“For—and still is,” Tripp went on.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Uh, she was twenty-one and an intern when it started.”

Tripp then gave a brief summary of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship, noting, “I’ve just written down dates, times, phone calls. He’s heavy into phone sex.” She explained that the pair generally met on Sundays in the White House, after the unnamed woman was cleared in by Clinton’s secretary. (Goldberg was fascinated by the details, saying at one point, “Do you think there’s a taping system in the Oval Office?… The slurping sounds would be deafening.”)

Regarding the former intern, Tripp said, “This is so explosive, it makes the other thing [her previous book idea] pale.”

Goldberg understood the stakes, but she seems to have had a brief pang of conscience, if only for the benefit of her tape recorder. (Much later, Goldberg jauntily dismissed criticism about the ethics of her tape-recording a friend, writing in an article in
Slate
, “Note to anyone who calls me after closing time: Expect to be taped. It’s legal and it saves me pawing around my night table for paper and a pen.” All true—except that it was Goldberg who called Tripp.) “The publicity might destroy her and you,” Goldberg told Tripp. “I mean, I love the idea. I would run with it in a second. But do you want to be the instrument of this kid, really, um—”

The answer was vintage Tripp. “Well, let’s—let me give you some history. She is from Beverly Hills. She, uh, had a very privileged upbringing. She’s not a naïve. I mean, she’s definitely sophisticated. Um, she was not a victim. Um, she’s had affairs with married men before.” In other words, who cared if Lewinsky was destroyed if it would help Tripp’s book project?

For a moment, it seemed, Goldberg forgot that she was a book agent as well as a political provocateur, and she proposed, “Is there any way to have, uh, this Ms. X … shall we say reached by the Paula Jones people?” Even though Tripp hadn’t said anything about sexual harassment, Goldberg knew that “Ms. X” could prove to be an asset to the Jones lawyers. No, Tripp said, Lewinsky wouldn’t agree to help the Jones team, and anyway, Tripp reminded Goldberg to keep her eye on their book project—which was, after all, the reason she had resumed contact in the first place.

“I had just scrubbed my whole Maggie [Gallagher] product and started from scratch and come up with a whole different spin”—this one centered around Lewinsky, Tripp explained. But Goldberg was worried that Tripp would look like a “nut case” if she went public before the unnamed woman did. So she suggested leaking the story to Mike Isikoff and then writing the book.

This was where the stories, in all their gothic complexity, began to merge. Responding to the suggestion that she leak to Isikoff, Tripp said, “Oh, I could do that in a minute.” His story about Willey had just run a few weeks earlier. But there was a problem with this strategy. “But then he’d write the book,” Tripp explained. “He’d write the whole thing.”