A Vast Conspiracy (28 page)

Whitehead knew Susan Carpenter-McMillan from the pro-life movement. After he saw the story in the
Post
, he decided to give her a call and tell her he had a lawyer in mind for her case. Like almost every lawyer who represented Paula Jones over her long legal battle, Whitehead had other priorities besides his client—himself, the movement, his press clippings.

When Whitehead called McMillan, he told her the Rutherford Institute would agree to underwrite litigation costs for the lawsuit—lawyer travel, copying, the preparation of deposition transcripts—but would not pay the legal fees themselves. This wouldn’t necessarily pose a problem, because he had some lawyers in mind for Jones who would agree to handle the case on a contingency-fee basis. Like Davis and Cammarata, the new lawyers would not ask for anything up front—and unlike their departed predecessors, they were anxious to wage war on the president no matter what the cost. The new team would be led by a Texas lawyer named Donovan Campbell, Jr. McMillan invited Campbell and a few of his colleagues to come to Los Angeles and meet with Paula and Steve to see if they made a good fit. (The conservative activist and frequent talk-show guest Ann Coulter had volunteered earlier, but she lacked the resources to take on Bob Bennett and his troops at Skadden Arps.) In a press conference in front of Susan Carpenter-McMillan’s home on October 1, it was announced that Paula was now represented by the firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher and Pyke, of Dallas, Texas.

Don Campbell served on the board of directors of the Rutherford Institute, but he could scarcely have differed more from John Whitehead in temperament or disposition. Whereas Whitehead had a laid-back, almost libertarian approach to politics, Campbell practiced a punitive, judgmental brand of law. He was renowned in Dallas for leading a long and successful effort to reinstate the Texas sodomy law after it was found unconstitutional, and for picketing performances of
Torch Song Trilogy
at a local theater. He abhorred homosexuality and adultery—and Bill Clinton.

With discovery deadlines looming, Campbell and his colleagues entered the case just in time. Indeed, for a few harrowing days at the end of September, Jones had had no lawyers at all. So Jones had had to act by herself at one critical moment in the case. “Where is it?” Mitch Ettinger had been demanding of his adversaries for weeks. “We need to see it,” Bob Bennett insisted. In the confusion following Davis and Cammarata’s departure, though, the Jones team had never supplied a piece of evidence that Clinton’s lawyers had been seeking for more than three years.

Then, at 5:55
P.M
. on September 29, 1997, Paula Jones herself had finally answered these demands with a two-page fax sent from her home. The cover page was written in her own flowery hand.

Mr. Robert S. Bennett

Skadden, Arps

fax #202-xxx-xxxx

Dear Mr. Bennett
,

Here is the affidavit you requested. I just received a copy of this today from Mr. Cammarata. Before today, I did not have the original of this copy
.

Paula C. Jones

The second page read as follows:

AFFIDAVIT

State of Virginia;

County of Fairfax, to wit:

I, Paula Corbin Jones, after being duly sworn, state as follows:

1. I am the plaintiff in the case of Paula Corbin Jones versus William Jefferson Clinton and Danny Ferguson, Civil Action No. LR-C-94-290, pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

2. In the Complaint, paragraph 22, in Civil Action No. LR-C-94-290 I allege that there were distinguishing characteristics in William Clinton’s genital area that were obvious to me.

3. I briefly observed the erect penis of William Jefferson Clinton in a hotel suite of the Excelsior Hotel on May 8, 1991. That is the only time I have seen his genital area, and I have never had it described to me by anyone, nor have I read anything on that subject.

4. Mr. Clinton’s penis was circumcised and seemed to me to be rather short and thin. I would describe its appearance as seeming to be five to five and one-half inches, or less, in length, and having a circumference of the approximate size of a quarter, or perhaps very slightly larger.

5. The shaft of the penis was bent or “crooked” from Mr. Clinton’s right to left, or from an observer’s left to right if the observer is facing Mr. Clinton. In other words, the base of Mr. Clinton’s penis, to an observer facing Mr. Clinton, would be further to the left of the observer than the head of the penis.

Paula Corbin Jones

Joe Cammarata had prepared the affidavit with Jones shortly after she filed her lawsuit. Robert C. Lockhart, Jr., a notary public in Cammarata’s law office in northern Virginia, had recorded that the affidavit was signed on May 26, 1994. Perhaps noting the magnitude of the historical moment, the notary had written in the time as well: “10:15 A.M. (EDT).”

Clinton’s lawyers read the document with amusement—how could one not?—but also with relief. Anticipating the release of the affidavit, Bennett had had the surreal experience of questioning the president of the United States about what his erect penis looked like. Counsel had been assured that there was nothing out of the ordinary, and this information had been corroborated by Clinton’s urologist, Dr. Kevin O’Connell, of Bethesda Naval Hospital. But if Jones had made some truly exotic claim, like a distinctive birthmark, it might have led to a great deal of embarrassing litigation on this unseemly topic. The information in the affidavit did not suggest anything terribly out of the ordinary, and Bennett thought that the judge—and even Jones’s new lawyers—would finally leave this doleful subject alone.

But Bob Bennett was wrong about his new adversaries. Don Campbell and company did not wish to let go of the subject of Bill Clinton’s penis—and that foretold a great deal about the future course of the Paula Jones case.

On the very first day that Campbell’s team took over as Jones’s new lawyers, they submitted a new set of interrogatories to the president. These are questions that the defendant is required to answer in writing, under oath. Campbell asked: “Please state the name, address, and telephone number of each and every medical doctor who has performed any surgery or medical procedure on your genitalia at any time after May 8, 1991.”

In other words, the Jones lawyers were suggesting that, as a litigation
tactic in the Jones case, Clinton had undergone surgery to change the appearance of his penis.

Another question demanded, “Please state the name, address, and telephone number of each and every individual (other than Hillary Rodham Clinton) with whom you had sexual relations when you held any of the following positions: a. Attorney General of the State of Arkansas; b. Governor of the State of Arkansas; c. President of the United States.”

Not surprisingly, Clinton refused to answer both questions, replying that the questions had “been propounded solely to harass, embarrass and humiliate the President and the Office he occupies.” Privately, the Clinton team began referring to their new adversaries in Texas as the Branch Davidians.

These intrusive demands for information established the plaintiff’s legal strategy for the remainder of the case. The Dallas lawyers would largely ignore the facts of Paula Jones’s alleged encounter with the president at the Excelsior Hotel. They also ignored the client herself and her meddling husband. Jones’s new lawyers instructed her to drop her book plans, which had been the subject of embarrassing leaks that fall, and simply to remain silent pending the trial. Instead, Campbell’s team decided to focus almost exclusively on Bill Clinton’s sexual history. There was a nominal justification for this strategy—Campbell said at the time, “His custom, pattern, and practice of harassment is clearly relevant to the legal issues in the case.” In fact, the relevance of Clinton’s prior sexual history was a debatable legal point, but at this stage the Jones lawyers had virtual carte blanche to question anyone about almost anything they wanted. It was an opportunity Clinton’s enemies had been seeking for more than a decade—an open-ended fishing expedition, with subpoena power, into every rumor that had ever been told about Bill Clinton.

The Jones lawyers worked, in effect, as the legatees of Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent whose memoir made the cultural critique of the Clinton presidency. The Jones lawsuit was based on the concept of “harassment,” but in the fall of 1997 Campbell made no distinctions between women who were alleged to have had consensual encounters with Clinton and those who charged that he had made unwanted advances. To track down Clinton’s sexual history, the Rader Campbell firm retained Rick and Beverly Lambert, a husband-and-wife team of private investigators. Some, like the singer Gennifer Flowers, whose accusations nearly ended Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and who later wrote two books about her relationship
with him, agreed to testify willingly. So did Dolly Kyle Browning, a Texas woman who wrote a self-published novel based on a purported romance with Clinton. Many more women fought the subpoenas, filing affidavits with Judge Wright saying that they had no information relevant to the case. Kathleen Willey went to court near her home in Virginia in an unsuccessful effort to avoid being ordered to give a deposition. (At the same time, in keeping with the spirit of the case, Willey made her own efforts to retain a literary agent and write a book about her encounter with Clinton. She ultimately demurred on her book project.)

But the Lamberts kept after their sexual investigation of the president, and they made their greatest effort to secure the testimony of a woman named Juanita Broaddrick. Her name had first surfaced in political circles during Clinton’s last Arkansas gubernatorial campaign, in 1990, when there were rumors that she was going to accuse Clinton of raping her in the late 1970s. As of the fall of 1997, though her name had never made it into the respectable press, Broaddrick became a kind of holy grail. True, the alleged assault was so remote in time that Judge Wright would probably never allow the accusation to be aired in court, but if a deposition could be taken and then leaked, the plaintiff’s team could accomplish their goal—damaging Bill Clinton, if not helping Paula Jones.

“Are you Juanita Broaddrick?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ms. Broaddrick, my name is Beverly Lambert. I’m a private investigator. This is Rick. Could we talk to you for a few moments?”

“No, no, you can’t. What’s this about?”

“We’re doing an investigation, working for the attorneys who are representing Paula Jones.”

“That’s what I thought. No, I don’t want to talk to you.”

Shortly after they were retained in the case, the Lamberts made their way to the small town of Van Buren, Arkansas, where Juanita Broaddrick lived. Their initial conversation with her was tape-recorded, and the transcript offers some revealing clues about their approach to their work and a woman who would eventually play a role of considerable importance in the Clinton saga.