It was a story that had been around Arkansas since 1980. Juanita Broaddrick told close friends what had happened and she told her second husband. She and her husband ran into Bill Clinton one day and her husband grabbed him by the hand and said, “Stay away from my wife and stay away from Brownwood Manor [her nursing home].” In 1980, a man running for governor against Clinton went to see her and asked her to go public with her story. She refused. She didn’t want trouble, and she’d heard too many nasty stories on the grapevine about what had supposedly happened to those who had somehow crossed Bill Clinton. She was scared.
In 1984, she got a congratulatory note from him when her nursing home was judged the best in the state. “I admire you very much,” he had handwritten on the bottom. In 1991, she was called out of a meeting on state nursing standards. Bill Clinton waited for her in a stairwell. He said he was a “changed man,” took her hands, apologized, and asked if he could do anything to make it up to her. She told him to go to hell and walked away.
Shortly afterward, she read in the newspaper that he was going to run for president. In 1992, a former business associate publicly told the story he had heard from her privately and urged her to come forward. She refused. When the Paula Jones attorneys approached her about the story they had heard, she made out an affidavit saying it was all untrue. Her attorney prepared the affidavit with the help of White House counsel Bruce Lindsey.
But when Kenneth W. Starr’s FBI men came around, her twenty-eight-year-old son, a lawyer, told her, “ ‘This is another whole level.’ She knew it was one thing to lie in a civil trial so she could get away from all this, but another to lie to federal agents and federal prosecutors and possibly a grand jury.”
Now, as Bill Clinton’s Senate trial approached, a tabloid wrote a story about her and said that she and her husband had both been paid off to keep quiet. She and her husband were hardworking, honorable people who lived on a hilly forty acres filled with horses and cows. Juanita Broaddrick was fifty-six years old and looked like the sort of mother or grandmother everyone wanted. She loathed Bill Clinton and loathed what the tabloids had written about her and her husband. She thought, for the first time, about going public.
And what effect would it have on the Senate trial, Tom DeLay and his Clinton-hating fellow Republicans wondered, if Juanita Broaddrick’s story became public? What effect would charges of rape have even on Democratic, pro-Clinton senators with strong female constituencies? The American people, as the midterm elections showed, had gotten over the blow jobs and the cigar . . . but could they get over a rape? Could they look the other way? Or would Juanita Broaddrick be the final straw . . . after Jones, after Willey, after Lewinsky . . . that would remove Bill Clinton from office? If only somehow this story could get out there.
Juanita Broaddrick’s phone was ringing off the hook with interview requests. A Fox News crew chased her down the highway as she sped away. Time magazine sent reporters, who claimed they were there to cover a tennis benefit. ABC wanted to fly her to New York to talk to Barbara Walters.
She had read about Kathleen Willey and liked her on television. She found Willey’s story to be believable. She called Willey in Virginia and asked her for advice: “It just helped me to be able to talk to her, someone who had been through an interview that was so uncomfortable. She told me that, yes, she would do it again.” Willey told her to “be calm and tell the truth.” Willey even offered to fly to Arkansas to help her.
Juanita Broaddrick decided she was ready to go public. She agreed to speak to Lisa Myers of NBC News. Myers was there the next day, January 20, right in the middle of Bill Clinton’s Senate trial. Broaddrick was videotaped from midmorning until evening. She told Lisa Myers everything.
She was told NBC would run the interview on January 29 on Dateline, during the Senate trial. It didn’t run on the twenty-ninth. The Senate vote on impeachment was quickly approaching. It was scheduled to take place on February 12.
News of the Myers interview with Broaddrick was all over the Internet. Drudge not only had Lisa Myers’s details; he hammered away at NBC for not airing the story as the Senate clock ran down. He said NBC News president Andy Lack “stood by as the White House manipulated NBC owner General Electric.” He quoted an unnamed NBC source as saying “Andy Lack should resign. Resign now. We have to save our face.”
He wrote, “It’s not clear if White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart has been in touch with NBC news.” No one knew what that meant. Either Lockhart was or wasn’t in touch with NBC News. If Drudge didn’t know that Lockhart had been in touch, he had no business throwing it onto the Internet as a possibility.
An NBC spokesman said the Broaddrick interview was still “a work in progress.” The network said it had to cross-check dates and speak to others to make it, as Lack said, “a rock-solid report.”
Broaddrick said she felt “so betrayed” by NBC for not running the story. “I honestly don’t know why they haven’t run it,” Broaddrick said. “But one has to wonder, considering that I gave the interview as the Senate trial was going on.”
The Reverend Jerry Falwell asked his followers to “inundate” the producer of NBC’s nightly news for not running the story, and NBC was bombarded with phone calls and E-mail. Republican trial manager, Representative Chris Cannon of Utah, told MSNBC: “Everybody knows in Washington that your colleague Lisa Myers has Jane Doe #5 on videotape and you haven’t broken the story.” Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News anchor Brit Hume wore a button on the air that said FREE LISA MYERS! The Washington Post reported that Myers and Washington Bureau chief Tim Russert were “frustrated by their inability to get the story on the air. They and other advocates believe that each time they come up with further corroboration, NBC management raises the evidentiary bar a little higher.”
An NBC source said that one of the reasons the network was hesitating was that the father of the chief corroborative witness, the woman who’d found Broaddrick after Clinton allegedly raped her, was murdered and Clinton had pardoned the murderer. The rape had taken place in 1978 and the pardon in 1980. The witness hadn’t said anything corroborating Broaddrick until after 1980, the year her father’s murderer was pardoned.
Sure, many countered, but Broaddrick didn’t say anything publicly until after 1980, either—so how could the witness’s corroboration be suspect?
As hard as Drudge tried, hammering away at NBC, this one didn’t work like Lewinsky had. With Lewinsky, he broke the story and the media felt forced to follow him. But this was an old story and the same ploy was ineffective: The major news media did not feel compelled to write about Broaddrick just because Drudge had stolen Lisa Myers’s details. They were waiting for NBC.
They were still waiting on February 12 when the Senate voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office. NBC was still researching the story and a lot of people were saying the story would never run. The impeachment crisis was over. America was finally free of its blow job and cigar noose. Would Americans now want to contemplate ripped panty hose and a bitten lip?
Dorothy Rabinowitz was known among her friends in the media as “a right-wing ideologue.” Her employer, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, as opposed to its news section, was known as a right-wing sheet that, according to Vince Foster’s note, had driven him to suicide.
The editorial page had treated seriously not only allegations that Bill Clinton was a big-time coke dealer involved with the Colombian cartel but that he had been involved with the murder of dozens of people. The editorial page was a journalistic haunted house—while the rest of the paper was well balanced. For the editorial page, every day was Halloween.
Now, with the Senate trial over, Dorothy Rabinowitz went to see Juanita Broaddrick at her small-town Arkansas home . . . in a limousine. And Juanita Broaddrick told her everything. And the Wall Street Journal published a very long news story about her allegations, not in the news pages, where it belonged, but on its right-wing editorial page. And, now that it was out and everybody was talking about it and this
was, after all, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times published their own stories.
It was the Drudge ploy all over again, as executed by Rabinowitz. And now that the Post and the Times had provided the details of Juanita Broaddrick’s story, NBC aired Lisa Myers’s interview . . . now that the Senate trial was over and Bill Clinton hadn’t been removed from office.
Broaddrick was as believable as anyone I’d ever seen on television. She told the details and more. She described Bill Clinton at the moment of the rape as “a vicious, awful person.” She said, “My hatred for him is overwhelming.” She said she came forward because “I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.” She said she didn’t want her granddaughter to ask, “Why didn’t you tell what this man did to you?” She said she wasn’t interested in a book deal or a lawsuit, but that “all of these stories were floating around . . . and I was tired of everybody putting their own spin on it.” She said, “I do not have an agenda. I want to put all of these stories to rest.”
She said, “I just told him—‘No.’ You know, ‘Please don’t do that.’ Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip. He starts to bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed, and I just was very frightened. And I tried to get away from him. I told him ‘No!’ because I don’t want this to happen, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
Asked about Broaddrick’s allegation, President Clinton said, “Well, my counsel has made a statement about the issue . . . and I have nothing to add to it.” The president’s counsel, David Kendall, called the charge “absolutely false.”
Those who defended Bill Clinton pointed out that:
There was no physical evidence.
No one else was present.
She didn’t remember the date or the month that it allegedly happened.
She never screamed.
She went to a Clinton campaign fund-raiser three weeks after she was allegedly raped.
The year after she was allegedly raped, she accepted a Clinton appointment to a nonpaying post on a state advisory board.
She denied the rape under oath in an affidavit for Paula Jones’s lawyers.
She conferred with Kathleen Willey, who had been embarrassed by the White House release of her letters to Bill Clinton, before her interview with Lisa Myers.
As former White House counsel Lanny Davis said, “It is not corroboration because her girlfriend said she had a swollen lip. That doesn’t make the charge of rape a fact . . . . How do we know that she didn’t lie to all her friends? We know that, voluntarily, without anyone influencing her, she swore out an affidavit that she now says she lied about.”
And yet, a poll taken a week after her interview with Lisa Myers showed that 84 percent of Americans believed Juanita Broaddrick . . . believed that the president of the United States was a rapist.
It didn’t matter. We were a tired people, tired of pornographic imagery on the evening news, tired of feeling we were mired in filth. This was the worst . . . and we didn’t want to hear it.
It was like the reaction to the Starr Report when it was released. The details themselves came to Bill Clinton’s defense. Our heads had been forced into the mud for over a year and we wanted to free ourselves. To countenance that this was the president of the United States, our man in the White House, this person who put his shades on and said, “You’d better put some ice on that,” was too much to ask of us.
Bill Bennett had it right: “Judging from most of the media and most of the public reaction, the silence on Capitol Hill, most people are just too tired to inquire into the question as to whether the President of the United States committed rape.” The managing editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, said, “Legally it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Congress isn’t going to impeach him again. And, frankly, we’ve all got a bit of scandal fatigue.”
As the Washington Post wrote, “Had NBC aired the interview during the Senate impeachment trial and the furor over Monica S. Lewinsky, it might have had a significant impact on the national climate.” NBC had acted either ethically, nailing down the details of a complex and incendiary story, or had, cynically and corruptly, made a decision for its own reasons to protect the president of the United States.
In either case, NBC News president Andy Lack or his superiors or General Electric had saved Bill Clinton from removal from office . . . as surely as Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt had.
The day after the Lisa Myers interview with Broaddrick aired, Bill Clinton was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a speech about saving Social Security and Medicare. He spent more than fifteen minutes in an auditorium greeting well-wishers as Bachman-Turner Overdrive blasted “Taking Care of Business” from the speakers. He received kisses and hugs from several women at the front of the crowd. A small group of protesters stood outside the auditorium with placards that said I BELIEVE JUANITA, PAULA, AND KATHLEEN . . . MR. CLINTON, DID JUANITA BROADDRICK CONSENT? . . . JAIL TO THE CHIEF! . . . GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE! . . . STAY AWAY FROM OUR DAUGHTERS! . . . RAPIST!
On Matt Drudge’s TV show, after the Broaddrick interview on NBC aired, Drudge said, “There’s all this talk behind the scenes in the media that a second woman has made sexual claims against Bill Clinton. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s out there.” Dick Morris said, “People don’t rape once.” Lucianne Goldberg said, “The new allegation is assault, not rape. It occurred after he became president and comes from someone who cannot be faulted. I expect her to come forward in the next month.” No one came forward.
In his new book, published shortly after Broaddrick’s interview, Michael Isikoff quoted Elizabeth Ward Gracen, a former Miss America, as telling a friend she had “rough sex” with Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. Isikoff wrote, “Clinton got so carried away that he bit her lip.”
He was still in office, but the party was over. You could hear the fat lady singing for him across the land. People didn’t want to look at him anymore. Playing with your willard, accepting homage to your willard, was one thing . . . this was another. Yeah, rock and roll, gotta put the shades on, dude, before you walk out the door . . . when she’s bruised, sobbing, paralyzed on the bed.
Revulsion. That was the word. There he was on TV, smiling, taking care of business, but it didn’t work anymore. Juanita Broaddrick had shown us more than we ever wanted to see. He had come into our homes, where we welcomed him. He was cool. We thought he was one of us. The first rock and roll president of the United States. The first black president of the United States. The first playboy president of the United States. We had welcomed him into our homes . . . and he had befouled our walls. Maybe some of us thought we’d smelled something, but Juanita Broaddrick took us there and pointed to it: He had befouled our walls! We couldn’t wait to get the smell off. The election campaign of 2000 began the instant we shut the set off when Juanita Broaddrick’s interview ended on NBC.
The Washington Post reported that before Broaddrick went public, she “talked and exchanged E-mail with scandal impresario Lucianne Goldberg.”
Oh no, I thought, not again. In the right place at the right time . . . Please God, not again! She had told Tripp to tape Monica. She had made sure Drudge leaked the Lewinsky story so the rest of the media would follow. Now Drudge had leaked the first Broaddrick details to the world. Drudge had revealed NBC’s reluctance to run the interview. The Wall Street Journal had followed Drudge. And all this time, Lucianne Goldberg had been talking to Broaddrick?
Sweet Jesus, I thought, was it possible that a cackling, chain-smoking, croak-voiced sixty-something Bag Lady of Sleaze diagrammed all, or at least most, of these plays? And was it possible that, through Juanita Broaddrick, Lucianne Goldberg had accomplished what she had set out to do—the assassination of the president of the United States?
Lord, I thought. Bill Clinton . . . as slick as he was, as sick as he was, as smart as he was, as dumb as he was . . . never had a chance. Ric
hard Nixon, the Night Creature who’d created Lucianne Goldberg, had exacted his infernal, Machiavellian revenge.
[9]
John Wayne McCain Chickens Out
I let you down, pal. No, not by making that speech about the Ayatollahs Robertson and Falwell. No, not by saying the Crown Prince twists the truth like Bill Clinton. And no, not by showing up at the big California debate on the monkey screen instead of in person.
But by being the good soldier that I am and have always been.
I listened to Bob Dole, my friend, my fellow war hero, my fellow Republican. Bob Dole did to me what those gooks couldn’t do in Hanoi. He talked me into quitting. He talked me into giving up.
Hey, you want straight talk, my friend? I could’ve been the president of the United States. But I chickened out.
Me! The Punk, McNasty, John Wayne McCain, the White Tornado, Luke Skywalker, heir to Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat, friend to Ronald Reagan. I didn’t have the balls.
How’s that for straight talk? Are you any less heartbroken yet?
Okay, so I said to my fellow Republicans, come on, guys, let’s stop sipping the Kool Aid with Jim Jones. Let’s appeal to the real Americans and not the anti-abortion fanatics and the southern Grand Dragons and the gay-bashing, Jew-hating, nigger-lynching holy-holies.
And my fellow Republicans said to me: John, we’ve respected you until this moment for being a tough guy with those Commie cocksuckers in Hanoi, but now we see that the middle finger you jabbed at them was an act, a part of your programming as the Manchurian Candidate. John, goddamn it, you’re a Commie cocksucker, too, even though you became one against your will.
Then they tarred and feathered me, screwed me, and lynched me while they glugged down their Jim Jones Kool Aid.
. . .
And that’s when Bob Dole convinced me not to belly up to the table and put it up there to see whose was the biggest. Jesse Ventura was begging me to do it. Two polls showed me only a few points down behind Gore and the Crown Prince.
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