A Vast Conspiracy (45 page)

“Now, seated to my right, two chairs down, is Ms. Paula Jones. Do you recall ever having met her before today?”

“No,” Clinton replied. “I’ve said that many times. I don’t.”

The Jones team’s vaunted examination of Clinton’s sex life had produced relatively little except Lewinsky and some old Arkansas gossip. There was, however, proof that Little Rock was a small town. Fisher at one point asked if Clinton had ever bought presents for other women at a store there called Barbara Jean’s.

“Her name is what?” Fisher asked. “The woman that owned it.”

“Barbara—I don’t know,” Clinton said.

At this point, the judge jumped in. “I’m not here to testify. I believe it’s Barbara Baber.”

“I think that’s right,” Clinton said with a smile.

Fisher asked only a few harmless questions about Shelia Lawrence, Beth Coulson, and Marilyn Jo Jenkins. With Gennifer Flowers, Clinton admitted to a single sexual encounter, in 1977. Near the end of the day, Fisher asked two questions to which the judge sustained Bennett’s objections: “Please name every person with whom you had sexual relations when you were either governor of the state of Arkansas or president of the United States” and “Please name every person with whom you sought to have sexual relations when you were governor of the state of Arkansas or president of the
United States.” If Judge Wright had not attended the deposition, Clinton might well have been forced to answer these preposterously broad and invasive inquiries, and his answers would certainly have been fodder for the Starr investigation that was already under way.

Bennett had only a few questions of his own. He showed Lewinsky’s affidavit to Clinton, and he ratified once more its denial of any sexual relationship between the two of them. For his final question, Bennett followed up on something Fisher had asked about why Clinton had run for president in 1992, but not in 1988. The president said that he had been told in both elections that “the press” had decided he had no chance to win. Then he added, with his trademark sense of victimhood, “The press had to have somebody in every election, and I was going to be offered up, and they were so gullible about little states that they’d believe anything they were told about Arkansas, and if I ran, I’d be destroyed. That’s what I was told. And for six years they’ve worked very hard at doing it. But I’m very glad I did it anyway.”

13

The Richard Jewell File

W
ith the president’s deposition completed, the partisans on all sides sought to shape the public’s perception of this consummately political event. The Jones team tried first.

Susan Carpenter-McMillan had waited not so patiently through the six long hours that Clinton was upstairs. She had promised the assembled throng of reporters that Jones would make a statement at the end of the day, but the lawyers hustled Jones back to their hotel. When McMillan tracked down her friend at the Hyatt Regency, she saw why. Jones was crying hysterically—just the weight of the accumulated tensions of the day, she told McMillan.

McMillan didn’t like the image of Jones skulking away from the deposition, so she decided to make her own plan. “I don’t care whether you want to or not, but you are going to dinner,” McMillan told the lawyers. “You’re in my courtroom now.”

She had arranged for a table in the window of the Old Ebbitt Grill, a famous Washington restaurant around the corner from the site of the deposition. McMillan assembled Paula, her husband, Steve, Paula’s hairdresser (who had traveled from California with them), and the legal team to make
a quasi-public celebration of their success at the deposition. In truth, the lawyers were pleased. They had nailed down Clinton’s denials about Lewinsky, and they had succeeded in putting him on the record about the other women as well. As McMillan hoped, news of the Jones dinner party was included in much of the next-day coverage—although one important detail was omitted. None of the reports mentioned the one unfamiliar face at the Jones table. Chris Vlasto, a dogged producer for ABC News, had been pursuing Clinton scandal stories for almost as long as Isikoff. McMillan had invited him along, and he even paid the tab—a wise investment, as it turned out.

Other Clinton enemies weren’t as pleased that Saturday night. After extended deliberations, the
Newsweek
editors decided to withhold Isikoff’s story from the issue that would be released the following day. As a courtesy, Isikoff let Goldberg, Moody, and Conway know that his story had been spiked. (Henceforth, Goldberg would enjoy teasing Isikoff with the nickname “Spikey.”) On that Saturday, Moody took the news with his usual distracted air, but Goldberg and the elves were furious, and they decided to do something about it. Having failed to plant their story in the mainstream press, they decided to go to their favorite journalist of second resort—Matt Drudge.

In the days after the Lewinsky story made him famous, there was much debate about whether thirty-one-year-old Matt Drudge was a “journalist”—as if something of importance turned on whether he deserved that dubious honorific. In truth, Drudge resembled what might be called a metajournalist. He did journalism about journalism. For the most part, he relayed the scraps that were too sordid or too thinly sourced to make it into more conventional distribution channels. He was not always wrong—far from it—but he went faster, and with less compunction, than virtually anyone else with a wide audience. Drudge pushed stories in line with his proudly conservative orientation (at least in his politics), and he established contact early on with the elves and others associated with the pro-Jones and anti-Clinton cause.

Drudge came to stand, for better or worse, as an icon of the Internet age: born to liberal parents outside Washington, D.C.; a news junkie at home, a misfit at school; found work on the swing shift at 7-Eleven. “So,
in the famous words of another newsman, Horace Greeley,” he said in a triumphant speech at the National Press Club, “I, still a young man, went west.” To a dismal apartment in a crime-ridden section of Hollywood, employed folding T-shirts in the gift shop on the CBS lot. His father, in despair about his son’s prospects, bought him a computer in 1994. Matt discovered e-mail, chat rooms, an electronic community. He started sending out news of this and that—ratings, movie grosses, gossip—he had picked up on the lot. (Sometimes literally; that is, by rummaging through the CBS garbage.) He called it the
Drudge Report
and moved it to the infant World Wide Web, including easy-to-use links with scores of other news sources. By 1998, the
Drudge Report
had six million visitors a month.

Drudge always walked the line between fame and notoriety, especially after he lobbed a false accusation of spousal abuse at the White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, in August 1997. But Drudge won a devout following among his own generation of conservatives—people like Ann Coulter and George Conway. In the summer of 1997, when Conway and others had grown frustrated that Isikoff was not reporting the Willey story as quickly as they would have liked, Conway leaked news of the story to Drudge. As was his custom, Drudge reported the Willey story as a press controversy—will
Newsweek
publish Isikoff’s article?—rather than on its own merits—are Willey’s charges true? As Conway had hoped, planting the Willey story with Drudge increased the chances that
Newsweek
would run it, which, of course,
Newsweek
did soon thereafter. Frustrated at the
Newsweek
editors’ refusal to go with the story on January 17, the elves simply tried to run the Willey play once more. Again, it worked.

Drudge had heard rumors about the president and an intern for more than a month. In November 1997, he had received an anonymous e-mail with Lucianne Goldberg’s telephone number, but he had never followed it up. On the night of Saturday, January 17, Drudge woke Goldberg from a deep sleep and read her the item that he had written based on what he had heard from the elves. Goldberg confirmed the story. Then at 2:32
A.M
. on the East Coast (three hours earlier in Los Angeles, where Drudge was composing), Drudge hit the send button on his computer. At that moment, he later said, he had tears in his eyes because of the magnitude of the moment.

NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN

Blockbuster Report: 23-Year-Old, Former White House Intern, Sex Relationship with President

**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the
DRUDGE REPORT
**

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening,
NEWSWEEK
magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The
DRUDGE REPORT
has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top
NEWSWEEK
suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the President’s sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in the White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last week.

The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor to the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry [
sic
], 57.

The
DRUDGE REPORT
has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist.

The relationship between the president and the young woman became strained when the President believed that the young woman was bragging about the affair to others.

In retrospect, several things are notable about Drudge’s report. After the first paragraph, the story is filled with errors. Reports of the relationship had not spread to others at the White House; Lewinsky did not write “long love letters” to Clinton; Lewinsky did not visit Clinton “after midnight”; Clinton did not break off the affair because he feared Lewinsky was bragging. Drudge falsely implies that the “intimate phone conversations” were between Lewinsky and Clinton; the calls were between Lewinsky and
Linda Tripp. Still, the gist was true.
Newsweek
was working on a story about a sexual affair between the president and a former intern.

Drudge’s initial account served as a useful snapshot of what Goldberg and the elves believed was important about the Lewinsky story. Drudge wasn’t told of Lewinsky’s status as a subpoenaed witness in the Jones case or of the unfolding Starr investigation related to her. There was no pretext that the affair between the president and the intern related to Clinton’s truthfulness, his litigation strategy, or a criminal investigation. Drudge only had the sex—but that was enough for him and his sources. They knew the sex would make the story irresistible to the mainstream media. Once Drudge issued his first bulletin, it was foreordained that the story would leak into the political life of the nation.

It took only about eight hours, and the vehicle was a Sunday-morning talk show. Though little watched by most Americans, the network programs serve as useful benchmarks for the political class. Because the incumbent administration and its supporters are expected to put forth a more or less coordinated message each week, the Sunday shows are generally where that position is first made public. By early 1998, Matt Drudge was helping to set the Sunday agenda.

Bill Kristol, the editor of
The Weekly Standard
and a conservative panelist on the ABC News program
This Week
, heard about the Drudge story early on Sunday morning, January 18, and he made an effort to check it out. He spoke to the elf Porter (with whom Kristol had served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle) and satisfied himself that Drudge was on to something real. The former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, at that time still a defender of the president on the program, decided to make a discreet inquiry of his own. On Sunday morning, he called John Podesta, then the White House deputy chief of staff.