A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  So Jackson called Bill Rempel, the reporter who had covered the draft story for the Los Angeles Times. Would he be interested in talking to the troopers? In the first week of August, Rempel flew to Little Rock to meet with the troopers. Jackson told the reporter to check in at a suite at a resort on Lake Hamilton, outside the town of Hot Springs, and the troopers would be delivered to him. The next morning, Jackson and Lynn Davis—accompanied by three grim-faced strangers—knocked on his door. The three men introduced themselves.

  “I’m Bubba number one,” the first one said.

  “Bubba number two,” said the second.

  “Bubba three,” said the last.

  They explained that they feared for their lives if it became known that they were cooperating with the story, so they preferred not to tell Rempel their names for the time being. (The three were Patterson, Perry, and Anderson; Ferguson did not participate in this first meeting.)

  Over the years, many of Clinton’s enemies shared this melodramatic fear of physical reprisal, even though there never appeared to be any basis for it. Despite rumors to the contrary, all of Clinton’s major critics over the years enjoy robust good health. Jackson claimed that when Davis first approached him about representing the troopers, they were “under surveillance” at a McDonald’s in Little Rock. In an interview with Laura Blumenfeld of The Washington Post, after the trooper story broke, Jackson refused to disclose the town or even the county where he lived. He said he had run a check on the license plates of a van that he thought was following him. “Not on file,” he told Blumenfeld. “That means federal undercover enforcement.” These persecution fantasies allowed Jackson and the others to justify virtually anything they did, because they weren’t just bringing down Clinton, they were fighting for their lives.

  Rempel listened to the troopers’ tales with interest, but he told them from the start that there was no way he was going to write a story of this kind based on anonymous sources. He would consider writing it only if the troopers spoke on the record. When Jackson mentioned the possibility that Rempel might join the troopers in their book project, the reporter recoiled. There could be no business dealings between them. The meeting ended with considerable uncertainty that Rempel would pursue the story at all.

  Dismayed by Rempel’s hard line, Jackson decided to hedge his bets. He knew that the troopers’ tale bore almost no relation to Clinton’s duties as governor—or as president, for that matter. It was a story about Clinton’s sex life. Even with the expanding definitions of “character” that were circulating in the press at the time, Jackson could not be sure that a major newspaper like the Los Angeles Times would ever publish the story. So Jackson needed a sure thing—a publication, and a reporter, that would be certain to publish the troopers’ stories about Clinton and maybe help his clients write their book in the bargain.

  Jackson’s contacts were primarily in the mainstream news media, so he called a friend for advice about the conservative press. A year earlier, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Peter W. Smith, an investment banker from Chicago and a major contributor to Newt Gingrich’s political action committee, had spent about $40,000 on public relations assistance in an attempt to persuade reporters to write stories about Clinton’s personal life—especially the allegation that he had fathered a child with a black prostitute. At the time, Smith had tried to hire Jackson as the lawyer for the prostitute. That deal had gone nowhere, but the two men had kept in touch. In 1992, Smith had contacted David Brock, a conservative writer who wrote The Real Anita Hill, a bestseller that included many purported details about Hill’s sex life. After a meeting in Washington in which Smith had the Globe, a supermarket tabloid, open in front of him, Brock declined to pursue the black prostitute story. But when Jackson called about the troopers in 1993, Smith thought Brock might be interested this time.

  Brock was—though he needed a little persuasion. Smith paid Brock $5,000 for expenses, and the young author traveled to Little Rock to meet with the troopers, even though Jackson told him that he had promised the first exclusive on their stories to Bill Rempel. In August, Jackson persuaded the troopers to speak on the record to both Rempel and Brock, and the reporters took turns debriefing them in Arkansas hotel rooms. According to Brock, Jackson told the troopers they could each make a million dollars from a book on Clinton’s sex life. Fresh from the success with his Anita Hill book, Brock was the perfect candidate to serve as ghostwriter. Anderson recalled in his affidavit, “Mr. Davis and Mr. Jackson introduced David Brock to us as a prospective author for our book.” But Brock knew that if the troopers had been paid, that would discredit their story, so he limited himself to writing the article for The American Spectator. Rempel, too, worried about the troopers’ profiting from their tale, so he received an assurance from Jackson that the bodyguards had come forward, as he ultimately wrote in his story, “without a promise of financial reward.” (In fact, Smith eventually paid the troopers about $25,000 for their information—but after the stories about them were published. Smith also paid Jackson $5,000 in legal fees.)

  Brock started his reporting by meeting Jackson and two of the troopers—Anderson and Perry—in a hotel near the Little Rock airport. As it turned out, this was a gathering of some historical importance—the first interviews for an article that would lead to the impeachment of a president. Fortunately, this first meeting was tape-recorded, and the audio record illustrated the nature of Brock’s inquiry and the demeanor of his principal subjects.

  “Okay, yeah,” the tape began with Brock’s voice. “We can go from your categories. Why don’t we talk about the sleaze department first, the state of their marriage. What are we talking about—an open marriage?”

  What followed was nearly three hours of the most vile gossip that can be imagined. The transcript of this noxious session stripped the “character issue” bare of its pretensions. The interview included the troopers’ pointless rambling (“Chelsea is allergic to cats. I don’t know why they got their cat in the first place”) and their random conclusions (“She wouldn’t divorce him if that sumbitch did it right in front of her. She wants the power”), but it consisted mostly of the troopers’ recounting what they believed were Bill and Hillary’s sexual antics. At first Anderson contributed a good deal to the conversation, including passing along rumors of an affair between Hillary and her law partner, Vince Foster. “It was just one of the known deals out there that every time Bill left, Vince would come over to the [governor’s] mansion,” he said. But by far the lead role went to Roger Perry, who, among other things, recounted how he heard Hillary scream at Bill one night, “I need to be fucked more than twice a year!” At another point, Perry said, “Bill Clinton was infatuated with the black women. He loved black women.” Amid the giggling and cackling, Jackson limited himself to gentle admonitions to the troopers. “Stay on your topic of talking about sleaze,” he said at one point. At another he asked, “Is this good stuff, David?” Later on, Jackson inquired, “Is this enough to give you a flavor?” Brock answered, “Give me a couple more”—and everyone laughed.

  Through the fall of 1993, Jackson monitored the troopers’ cooperation with Rempel and Brock. He pestered Rempel, who was later joined by his colleague Douglas Frantz, to move faster, but they encountered some resistance from their editors in Los Angeles, who were not yet persuaded that the stories amounted to relevant news about the president. Jackson also had a problem with the troopers. Jackson had promised the troopers that neither the Los Angeles Times nor the Spectator would publish their stories without a release from them. Anderson had never given one. Then, according to Anderson, one day in the late fall, Roger Perry called Anderson at home “asking me to attend a meeting at Mr. Jackson’s office in Little Rock. He characterized the situation as one involving ‘life and death.’ I reluctantly agreed to attend.”

  Jackson assembled the same troopers as in the “three Bubbas” meeting—that is, all but Ferguson. This time, Jackson had another contract for the troopers to read, but
not to sign. “In return for authorization to release the stories that had been provided regarding President Clinton,” Anderson recalled, “the troopers were promised jobs for seven years at an annual salary of $100,000. The only limitation mentioned was that we would have to accept these jobs in a state other than Arkansas.” Acting mysteriously, Jackson wouldn’t say who would provide the jobs, only that they came from his Republican connections. The troopers were skeptical. How did Cliff know these offers were real?

  If the troopers didn’t believe him, Jackson replied, they could speak to “a high-ranking official in the Republican Party.” Jackson had spoken to the guy himself.

  Who’s that? the troopers challenged.

  “Bob Dole,” he said.

  None of the troopers followed up on Jackson’s offer to contact Dole, but Perry and Patterson did sign the contract. Anderson declined. Jackson subsequently denied that he had offered the troopers a precise salary for seven years or that he brokered a meeting with Dole, but Anderson’s version can be partly corroborated in an unusual way.

  In that fall of 1993—as Brock and Rempel prepared their stories—Trooper Danny Ferguson grew nervous about the project, and he reached out to the president to discuss it. In a clear lapse of judgment, Clinton spoke twice to his former bodyguard, and the president took handwritten notes of the conversations with Ferguson. Clinton’s scrawl shows that Ferguson and Anderson were saying much the same thing. “Troopers being talked to by lawyer—offered big $,” Clinton wrote. “He says GOP in on—now talking about 100G/7 years—job and whatever get from book.… [H]e and R. Anderson know it’s wrong, they don’t know anything, all rumors not good for their families or mine.”

  Reluctantly, the Los Angeles Times reporters found themselves in a race with David Brock to be first into print with the trooper stories. Rempel and Frantz grew frustrated as the editors in Los Angeles agonized about how, or if, to publish the story. Finally, though, Clinton himself sealed the Times’s decision to publish. The reporters learned that the president had called the troopers’ former supervisor, Buddy Young, and asked him to talk to the former members of the security detail about their decision to cooperate with the reporters. Clinton even called one of the troopers, Danny Ferguson, directly. There was no evidence that Clinton made any threats against the troopers—though there did appear to be a suggestion that the president might provide federal jobs if the troopers kept quiet. Still, the president’s direct involvement gave the Times the hook it needed.

  Notwithstanding Jackson’s promise to the Times, the Spectator story actually hit the newsstands first, on Friday, December 18, 1993, and the Times published on Tuesday, December 21. The timing turned out to be fortuitous for the White House. Because the Spectator published first, the troopers’ tales became associated with Brock and his magazine’s clear anti-Clinton agenda. Clinton’s aides could thus lump the two stories together as part of a single right-wing hatchet job. And though the Times story was phrased more neutrally, both publications offered much the same rationale for publishing the troopers’ accusations—the character issue.

  The Times’s story sought to portray Rempel and Frantz’s work as the modern model of political reportage. “Allegations about the personal lives of Presidents are not new,” they noted, citing Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, and “the sexual conquests of John F. Kennedy. For most of this century, propriety generally required such matters be discussed only after the individual leaders were no longer alive. In recent years, however, those standards have been changing—propelling politicians, the public and the news media onto uncertain ground.

  “Today,” Rempel and Frantz continued, “the question of what inference should be drawn from a particular example of private conduct remains a matter of intense debate, influenced in part by a widening belief that personal character may be as important to a leader’s performance as political party or ideology.”

  From there, it was on to the allegations—the “new details about extramarital affairs.” The troopers said they “were often called upon to act as intermediaries to arrange and conceal his extramarital encounters” and they “shielded his infidelities” from Hillary Rodham Clinton. As for Gennifer Flowers, the Times report suggested that by denying Flowers’s accusations about their relationship in an interview on 60 Minutes, Clinton had made the Flowers affair a legitimate story to pursue. This was, of course, the classic bootstrapping formulation that reporters often used. It may not be a legitimate subject to ask about, but once Clinton answered, the issue became his lying rather than the underlying conduct. Trooper Larry Patterson said he had never seen Clinton engaged in sexual activity with Flowers, but he had heard phone calls between them. In addition, Patterson said, following the governor’s visits to her apartment building, “Bill would come back in a half-hour or so smelling like perfume.”

  In The American Spectator, Brock employed a different tone from that of the Times’s reporters, but his conclusion on the legitimacy of the subject was the same. Press coverage of the Flowers case, Brock wrote, “quickly devolved into a tortured colloquium on whether or not infidelity was a Legitimate Issue.… Though opinion polls showed that 14 percent of the electorate would not vote for an adulterer, the indifferent public response to the Flowers story may have convinced many in the media that the public desire for ‘change’ outweighed any concerns about Clinton’s character.” There was nothing “tortured” about Brock’s interest in adultery and infidelity. In one passage that later drew a great deal of notice, Brock quoted Patterson as saying Clinton had said “he had researched the subject in the Bible and oral sex isn’t considered adultery.” (Perry actually mentioned this point in the original taped interview.)

  In fact, Brock wasted little time on his rationale and devoted most of his energy simply to trying to humiliate the president and first lady, who, the author asserted, had “an inadequate sex life” with each other. “Listening to the audio monitor at the rear porch of the main house,” Brock wrote, in a passage also drawn from the first interview, “Patterson said he sat in the guard house and heard Hillary tell Bill, ‘I need to be f—ed more than twice a year.’ ” In another passage, “Clinton evidently couldn’t resist bragging about his sexual exploits. On one occasion, Perry recalled, Clinton said that Gennifer Flowers ‘could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose.’ ”

  It was, of course, the obscure section of the Spectator story about “Paula” that prompted Danny Traylor to call Cliff Jackson. But when Traylor called him, Jackson at first brushed him off. For one thing, Jackson didn’t even represent Trooper Ferguson. For another, he had heard Ferguson tell the story to Brock, and he knew that the reporter had given an accurate account in the Spectator article. Traylor then recounted his client’s version of the incident at the Excelsior Hotel. This interested Jackson a great deal. In a flash, Jackson could see that Paula Jones was not a putative adversary but rather a potential friend.

  The appeal for Jackson was obvious. Instead of troopers passing along rumors and circumstantial evidence of sexual misconduct by Clinton, Paula Jones could provide firsthand testimony. Jackson asked to meet Jones, and Traylor—desperate for allies anywhere he could find them—agreed. Traylor had access to a shared suite of lawyers’ offices in the First Commercial Building, one of the handful of office towers that dot the skyline of Little Rock. Lynn Davis, Debbie Ballentine, and Jackson joined Traylor and Jones around a desk and heard her repeat her story. As Jackson remembered it, there were tears in the young woman’s eyes as she reached the end of her story. “I will never forget it as long as I live,” she said. “His face was blood red, and his penis was bright red and curved.”

  At this point, though Traylor remained Jones’s attorney in name, Jackson basically took over the representation. Jackson showed Traylor a copy of the original agreement he had signed with the troopers, and together they modified it into a six-page “Agreement for Legal Services” to cover Traylor’s representation of J
ones. It began with sixteen paragraphs summarizing the facts of the case to this point, each beginning with “WHEREAS.” The provisions included:

  WHEREAS, the inaccurate published report [in The American Spectator] has caused Client great mental anguish, embarrassment, and distress in that it erroneously implies a consummated and satisfying sexual encounter with Bill Clinton, as well as Client’s willingness to continue a sexual relationship with him; and,

  WHEREAS, Client, in order to clear her good name and to set the record straight, has decided to go public with the details of this encounter with Bill Clinton; and,

  WHEREAS, Client, as a proponent of women’s rights and workplace security believes that all persons, have a right to security in the workplace from unwelcome sexual harassment and intimidation, especially from employers …

  The contract then went on to describe the obligations of Traylor and Jones. Jones “will not accept any ‘hush money,’ jobs or other inducement from Bill Clinton, his supporters or anyone else to cease and desist in their present effort to bring her unique information and perspective to the American people.… [Jones] will not be intimidated from the present course of action by threat or coercion of any kind.” The agreement went on to empower Traylor to “negotiate and arrange … the timing, manner and terms in which her story is brought to the attention of the American people.” It also allowed Traylor to arrange “any and all television, radio or movie contracts” and entitled the lawyer to one-third of all of Jones’s earnings from such ventures. The contract was signed and dated on February 7, 1994. (Traylor left a copy of the agreement lying around the lawyers’ suite he sometimes used, and the occupants of the suite passed it around, to much hilarity.)