A Vast Conspiracy (4 page)

This fixation on the personal amounted to a tremendous gift to the news media, which were experiencing their own transformations during this period. In the early 1960s, when reporters heard tales of the voracious sexual appetite of President John F. Kennedy, they kept the information to themselves. Public disclosure of such matters was literally unthinkable; that is, it wasn’t even considered. But feminists and evangelicals gave journalists the permission—the pretext—to go into areas that they wanted to examine anyway. The press could define tawdry voyeurism as the study of “character,” but the labeling couldn’t obscure the true nature of this new kind of reporting. In an ever more competitive market for journalists and journalism, a high-minded rationale for covering the sex lives of famous people was much appreciated. Some reporters took to the task with gusto. And this hunger for sleaze extended beyond the journalists who covered the stories for newspapers, magazines, and television. The book business—a critical part of this story—fed and exploited this trend as well.

And so the forces were arrayed. Politicians shunning policy for cultural warfare. The media using sex to sell. And all of it destined to wind up in court.

Viewed in this way, the process that led to the impeachment of President Clinton can seem almost inevitable—the by-product of large forces in the sweep of history. But that, of course, is not the case. For while the Jones and Lewinsky stories did reflect their times, they also evolved out of a strange mixture of accident, coincidence, fate, and a bizarre cast of personalities. The peculiar population of this saga spanned a broad range in ideology and temperament, but its members did have some traits in common. Chief among them was the narrow pursuit of self-interest. No other major political controversy in American history produced as few heroes as this one. Instead of nobility, there was selfishness; instead of concern for the long-term good of all, there was the assiduous pursuit of immediate gratification—political, financial, sexual.

Chief among the antiheroes was the president of the United States. He believed, in an undoubtedly sincere way, that his private life was his own business, and that it had no impact on how he performed his public duties. In this, ironically, he may have been right. For all the piety of the authoritarians of the left and right about the importance of sexual fidelity of public persons, there remains no proof that monogamous presidents do better
jobs than adulterous ones. (The evidence is actually somewhat to the contrary.) But Bill Clinton knew the implicit promises he had made about his own behavior. He thought he could get away with breaking them, and he couldn’t. And when Clinton was caught in that most clichéd of dilemmas—a menopausal man having an affair with a young woman from the office—he reacted not with candor and grace, but rather with the dishonesty and self-pity that are among the touchstones of his character.

Yet the most astonishing fact in this story may be this one: in spite of his consistently reprehensible behavior, Clinton was, by comparison, the good guy in this struggle. The president’s adversaries appeared literally consumed with hatred for him; the bigger the stakes, the smaller they acted. They were willing to trample all standards of fairness—not to mention the Constitution—in their effort to drive him from office. They ranged from one-case-only zealots in the cause of fighting sexual harassment to one-defendant-only federal prosecutors, and they shared only a willingness to misuse the law and the courts in their effort to destroy Bill Clinton.

But Clinton’s enemies were not propelled only by political opportunism. There was greed, too. Several of his primary pursuers—each of whom played an essential role in the events leading to his impeachment—were motivated by their desire to write books about the president’s sex life. Such incentives did not even exist a generation ago. But the transformed business of publishing prompted his former bodyguards in Arkansas, the journalist Michael Isikoff, Linda Tripp, and Paula and Stephen Jones to act as they did. Only one of this group actually wound up writing such a book (so far), but their plans to do so altered the course of events at several significant moments in this story. Indeed, at times in the Clinton scandals, commercial considerations even trumped political motives.

The Clinton scandals—using that term to define the events that led to his impeachment—consisted of three intertwined narratives. One of these stories, the Paula Jones case, occurred mostly in public; the second, Kenneth Starr’s investigation, occurred mostly in private; and the third, the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, occurred almost entirely in secret. No single person knew the details of all three narratives as they were happening, and the stories unfolded at the same time as one another. When the president’s relationship with Lewinsky became public in January 1998, the three strands merged into a single cataclysmic drama. But these crashing cymbals of constitutional portent could scarcely be imagined when Danny Traylor answered the telephone on his birthday.

1

What the Bubbas Wrought

T
he story that Paula Jones told Danny Traylor was a simple one—at first. She said the magazine article did refer to an actual incident. But, she explained, Brock had it all wrong.

During Clinton’s last term as governor, Jones was twenty-four years old and working as a clerk at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. One day—she later determined it was May 8, 1991—Jones and a colleague named Pamela Blackard were working behind the registration desk at an AIDC conference at a Little Rock hotel called the Excelsior. After the governor and his security detail arrived, a trooper named Danny Ferguson stopped to chat with Blackard and Jones, whose last name was then Corbin. A little while later, Ferguson said that the governor, whom she had never met before, wanted to meet her in a room upstairs at the hotel. She agreed, and the trooper escorted her to the suite. The governor greeted her, made small talk for a few moments, and then began touching her. Jones rebuffed him and moved to sit down on the sofa. Clinton followed her there, then exposed himself and asked her to perform oral sex. She immediately jumped up, told him, “I’m not that kind of girl,” and left the room. In the intervening almost three years, Jones said, she had told only a handful of
people about the incident—her two sisters and her husband, as well as Blackard and Ballentine, both close friends.

Traylor and Jones spoke for only a few minutes in that initial conversation, and then she put her husband, Stephen Jones, on the telephone. For Traylor, the contrast between husband and wife was dramatic. Paula was hesitant, nervous, still embarrassed about the whole situation, and conspicuously uninformed about politics or the law. Steve, on the other hand, was enraged—at Clinton, at the troopers, and, it seemed to Traylor, at life in general.

Steve was thirty-three at the time, and he had just moved Paula and their son, Madison, to Long Beach, California, so he could pursue a career in show business. He had tried to make it as an actor in Little Rock, but there wasn’t much of a market for his talents. He had basically had only a single small role—as the ghost of Elvis in Jim Jarmusch’s quirky independent film
Mystery Train
. Like Elvis, Steve hailed from Memphis and had a soft Southern accent and sleepy good looks. For years, he had made a living as a ticket agent for Northwest Airlines, first at the Little Rock airport and now at Los Angeles International. Colleagues remembered him as quiet and a little sullen. When he did talk, it was often about sex. He’d probe coworkers—men and women—about the state of their sex lives, and he’d display photographs of his girlfriend Paula in skimpy costumes—garter belts, stockings, and the like.

Steve Jones also despised the governor. Even during his governorship, Clinton had an unusual ability to generate passionate hostility, feelings that often transcended mere political differences. Indeed, one cannot understand the long siege of his presidency without weighing the depth and breadth of these emotions. Clinton haters were sometimes so obsessed by their feelings that they acted against their own political or financial self-interest. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Steve had posted Bush/Quayle bumper stickers on his locker at the airport and had even worn a campaign button until his supervisors told him to remove it. But politics only began to explain the depth of Jones’s feelings. There would come to be a personal dimension to Steve’s feelings as well.

For his part, Traylor did a little legal research and made a revealing discovery. If he were to sue anyone on Jones’s behalf, she would have a better
chance of winning a case against the president of the United States than against a small magazine. The power of the news media had manifested itself in the legal world. Public figures like the president enjoyed no legal protections comparable to those erected, on First Amendment grounds, to benefit the press. For Paula Jones, it would be almost impossible to file a libel suit and win. (This was especially true because the
Spectator
identified Jones only by her first name; most readers could not have known that the story referred to her, so it could scarcely have damaged her reputation.) In most circumstances, that would be the end of the matter. A nasty story in a magazine generates either a libel suit or nothing. But at this early moment in the case, the fundamentally political nature of the dispute first revealed itself. Traylor was far from a sophisticated man, but he knew the only potential leverage he had in the situation was against Clinton. The
Spectator
would likely just ignore the threat of a lawsuit. But if Paula Jones pursued the matter against the president, it might embarrass him—and Clinton might pay something to avoid that fate. Besides, Steve Jones had never shown any inclination to take on the
Spectator;
Paula’s husband, who was the driving force in the matter from the very beginning, wanted to go after Clinton.

In truth, Traylor never wanted to go to court at all. He made his modest living doing real estate closings and small commercial deals. The last thing he needed was to embark on a massive lawsuit. To assuage Steve, and to a lesser extent Paula, Traylor proposed that he try to “finesse” the situation. He thought he might be able to persuade Clinton to make a public statement about Paula—at best an apology but at least a statement clearing her of any improper conduct. Traylor might also win a small financial settlement. Traylor didn’t know Clinton or anyone who worked for him; in a city and state full of people with connections to the president, this fact alone demonstrated just how obscure his law practice was. But Traylor made a few calls and figured he’d found the right man to use as an emissary to the White House.

A few days later, Traylor met George Cook after work around one of the battered linoleum tables at the Sports Page, a seedy bar downtown. By Arkansas standards, Cook, a real estate developer who had raised money for some of Clinton’s campaigns, ranked as only a peripheral friend of the president’s. But when Traylor called him to set up the meeting, Cook said that he could, if necessary, pass a message to the president’s people in Washington.