A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  His editors weren’t interested in the “pattern” evidence. They were skittish enough about getting into the Jones story at all; they didn’t want to start in with other women who had not publicly complained about the president’s behavior. On a day-to-day basis, Isikoff worked for three editors at the Post—Marilyn Thompson and Fred Barbash, from the national desk, and Karen de Young, the assistant managing editor. Concerned about Isikoff’s lack of progress—and his zeal—his editors assigned two other reporters, Sharon LaFraniere and Charles Shepard (who had come to the Post from The Charlotte Observer), to work with him on the Jones story.

  The situation grew so tense that Isikoff began talking to editors in other sections of the paper—the Style section, which mostly did features, or the Sunday Outlook section, which did opinion pieces—about the story. On March 16, Thompson told Barbash (who happened to be standing in de Young’s office) that Isikoff was shopping the Jones piece to other sections and generally driving her crazy. Barbash summoned Isikoff into de Young’s office. In seconds, with Thompson seated on the couch beside them, Barbash and Isikoff were screaming at each other. Isikoff called Barbash a “fucking asshole” and stormed out. Barbash took umbrage and reported the epithet up the chain of command, and Isikoff was suspended without pay for two weeks. (In a preview of a tactic that would become standard in the Clinton scandals, supporters of the Jones story—that is, opponents of the president—leaked news of Isikoff’s suspension to the conservative Washington Times. Other conservative publications picked up the reporter’s saga, which these outlets spun as the Post’s buckling under political pressure from the White House—an interpretation that even Isikoff didn’t believe to be true. But leaking the news of an anti-Clinton work-in-progress in effect dared the publication to run its story—and thus leveraged the investment of placing the story in the first place.)

  Though Isikoff did return to work after the two weeks, he began seeking a job elsewhere. As for his “pattern” evidence against Clinton, Isikoff didn’t want it to go to waste, so he met David Brock for a drink at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. Isikoff’s further research on Clinton’s sex life had begun (where else?) with tips from Cliff Jackson, and he had three names to pass along to Brock. He handed him a printout of some of his notes for his story.

  Like Isikoff’s editors, Brock found the material unpersuasive, and he never used it either.

  The only person who felt worse than Isikoff about his suspension was Steve Jones. It was Steve, far more than Paula, who was pushing her confrontation with the president. Now, it appeared, Isikoff’s story might never appear. So Steve decided to take his own first steps toward the goals he had had all along—to make trouble for the president and money for himself.

  In early April, Jones received a call from a television producer named Patrick Matrisciana, who specialized in conspiracy documentaries. His company, Jeremiah Films, produced films on the familiar obsessions of the extreme right, including creationism, alleged cover-ups about prisoners of war still in Vietnam, and the horrors of the gay rights and environmental movements. (One of his features, The Crash: The Coming Financial Collapse of America, came in a “Christian version” and a “Non-Religious version.”) The filmmaker offered Jones $1,000 for an interview with him and Paula, and on April 9, Matrisciana set up a camera on a balcony of the Joneses’ apartment building in Long Beach.

  Eventually, a few clips from these interviews were included in an enormously successful documentary called The Clinton Chronicles, which was distributed by Jerry Falwell’s organization. To a sound track of ominous music in the background, The Clinton Chronicles accused the president of drug-dealing, conspiracies to murder his enemies, and, almost incidentally, sexual harassment of Paula Jones. (About 150,000 copies of the tape were sold.) The brief snippets used in the documentary did not, however, do justice to the full interview Matrisciana conducted on that windy afternoon in April. The raw footage of the interview was never made public, but it was subpoenaed by Clinton’s lawyers in the course of Jones’s lawsuit.

  “Have you got the tape rolling now?” Jones said as the camera was turned on. She had placed an enormous purple bow in her hair in a forlorn effort to tame the frizzy mane that ran down nearly to her waist and often blew into her face. She was nervous and giggly, and each time she fluffed a line, she looked to Steve, seated just out of camera range, for reassurance and advice.

  “On May eighth, 1991,” Paula said, “I was invited to sit at the reception desk at the Governor’s Quality Management Ball.” Conference, that is—she rolled her eyes at the mistake. In time, though, she picked up her rhythm and began to recite what was becoming a familiar story.

  When she came to the moment when she and the governor were together in the hotel room, she spoke with confidence about one subject. “Before I knew it, he asked me to ‘kiss it’—that was the word he used. And I said, ‘I’m not that type of girl.’ ” In time, Jones would give many versions of the encounter. The details often changed. Who said what, when. Where Clinton was sitting. How they moved around the room. But the one thing that never changed was Paula’s response to Clinton’s overture: “I’m not that kind of girl.” (She repeated it three times in the Matrisciana interview.) There was a poignancy to that line, because she often looked at Steve when she said it. It was, in a real sense, what Steve wanted the message of the whole story to be. He told me as much when we spoke for the first time several years later. “See, I know Paula’s telling the truth about what happened, because what he asked her to do, she won’t do that,” he told me. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, but she just won’t do that.”

  Continuing her narrative for the camera, Paula said, “I started to proceed down the hall to the door and I turned around—I was very, very angry—and I asked him, did Hillary ever give him any?” Paula may have found herself caught up in Matrisciana’s and her husband’s encouragement, because this line about Hillary never came up again in her accounts of her encounter with Clinton. “And I went down the elevator, went back to my registration desk, and I told Pam the whole story.”

  Paula then paused, a quizzical expression on her face, and turned to her husband. “Isn’t that what happened?” she asked him. Needless to say, Matrisciana left that moment on the cutting-room floor. Still, why was Paula asking Steve what happened between her and Clinton?

  A moment later, Paula was describing the impact of the incident on her marriage. “My husband is very outraged at what happened to me, very, very angry with the president over what happened.” She looked at Steve. “What has it done, honey? It’s pissed you off. I know that.” Paula laughed, and then her face darkened and she stared at the floor. “Gosh, yes,” she said quietly.

  Paula finally made it all the way through her story, and Matrisciana asked Steve to walk over to her and kiss her. After six such takes, Steve then began speaking to the camera. He looked almost like a caricature of a Method actor—jutting out his chin, taking deep cleansing breaths, placing his hand on the bridge of his nose as he collected himself during long pauses. His performance would have bordered on the comical if not for the rage that poured from him.

  “I’d like to take this a few steps further,” Steve began. “I think Bill Clinton is perverted. I think he needs some deep psychological help, I really do.… It really irritates me that we’ve got this perverted doughboy in the White House. I really honestly feel sorry for his family. Every time I see Clinton, I see him with his pants down in front of my wife, and oh, God, it infuriates me.”

  On this day, however, Steve had another target for his outrage—the paper that was suppressing his wife’s story. “I think the position of the editors of The Washington Post … is under the left foot of Bill Clinton. That’s where they are, and every once in a while they creep their hand out from under the foot and give him a spit shine. That’s how I feel about it.”

  Paula’s husband didn’t feel that way about everyone at The Washington Post, however. “When we were in Washington,
Paula and I and Danny Traylor, Paula’s lawyer, we sat down and we had about a three-hour conversation with Mike Isikoff,” Steve recounted. “Paula gave the exclusive to The Washington Post and Mike Isikoff.… And Mike told Paula as far as he was concerned, he believed Paula and he thought the story should be told.”

  On the morning of April 15, 1994, less than a week after Paula and Steve’s interview with Matrisciana and one month after Isikoff was suspended, a large black bus pulled into a parking lot across the street from the offices of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. Three words were stenciled in red along the side of the customized motor coach: WAKE UP AMERICA! Right below, in bold white lettering, was a provocative question: SHOULD CLINTON BE IMPEACHED?

  The bus had been rented by Randall Terry, the founder of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, who had taken it to Little Rock to kick off what he called his Loyal Opposition Tour to seven cities. “Our motto is ‘Loyal to God, loyal to the scriptures, and loyal to the Constitution,’ in that order,” Terry said at a press conference to kick off the tour. “There are a lot of people who are talking about alleged offenses the president has committed. But at this juncture, there are very few people willing to say what is on a lot of people’s minds, and that is this: Should this man be driven from office?”

  Even at this early stage in Clinton’s presidency, Terry had no compunction about stating his goal—driving Clinton out of office. (Cliff Jackson had used the same kind of language with the troopers a few months earlier.) Of course, at the time, the notion seemed quixotic at best, but it revealed a frame of mind that was central to the story that followed. For the most part, Clinton’s enemies forswore the usual forums of American politics—voting, legislating, and organizing—in favor of calls for his personal destruction. Politics had always been rough, and presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had endured attacks as vicious as those launched against Clinton. But in the past the vituperation had generally been tethered to some matter of government policy, such as, say, the Vietnam War. With Clinton, the assaults were based almost entirely on his personal behavior, his “character.” And few played rougher than Clinton’s enemies. For example, just a few weeks before he arrived in Little Rock, the federal court of appeals in New York had upheld Terry’s conviction on charges in connection with an incident during the 1992 Democratic National Convention, when a man had thrust a fetus at Clinton.

  Terry was joined on his tour by the Reverend Patrick Mahoney, the executive director of a group called the Christian Defense Coalition, who announced at that first press conference, “We are going to be holding demonstrations at the Rose Law Firm and in front of Clinton’s former church, asking them why they did not discipline this man, or excommunicate this man, or censure this man. This man is flagrantly promoting rebellion against God’s word. We are going to grass-roots America and rip off the facade. This is the single most un-Christian administration in the history of this country.”

  So, on April 15, the tour did indeed kick off in the parking lot of Hillary’s former law firm, and there Terry’s motor coach was joined by a satellite uplink van belonging to Vic Eliason. A minister based in Milwaukee, Eliason used the van on behalf of the Voice of Christian Youth, an organization that syndicated radio programs to about two hundred religious stations around the country. Eliason, Terry, and Mahoney spent the day broadcasting from the parking lot, calling on a series of local guests, including a man who accused Clinton of participating in a conspiracy in the murder of his father. During the course of the call-in portion of the show, Mahoney heard the name Paula Jones for the first time. After a caller brought Jones’s claims about Clinton to Mahoney’s attention, he asked his assistant, Gary McCullough, to see if he could arrange to speak to her. McCullough tracked her down, and Mahoney, sitting in the satellite van, spoke to Paula for about forty-five minutes on the telephone.

  It was a difficult time for Paula and Steve Jones—scant attention, little money, and no lawsuit. In addition to her paid session with Matrisciana, which had not yet been broadcast, she did two interviews for free. She and Steve spoke to a reporter from Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, which produced a taped spot. (“We want to warn our viewers that this interview contains graphic descriptions that are offensive to all of us, but especially for your children,” the anchorwoman said in introducing the piece.) Paula and Traylor also appeared on a live local television program called A.M. Philadelphia. The lawyer was horrified to see that Paula wore what appeared to be a brown negligee for that interview.

  Mahoney was the first person to show sustained personal interest in Jones and her story. Over the next few days, Mahoney called Paula and Steve several more times. They began praying together over the telephone. Gradually, Steve took over most of the communications with Mahoney, and they decided that they needed higher-powered legal help than Traylor could provide. There was one problem. Almost as soon as Mahoney heard Paula Jones’s name for the first time, he heard a rumor that naked pictures of Paula existed somewhere. He knew this could be a problem if she embarked on a lawsuit against the president. In one of their first telephone calls, Mahoney asked Steve if these pictures existed. After checking with Paula, Steve told Mahoney the answer: there were no pictures.

  Though he mostly operated on the fringe of American politics, Mahoney was a man of considerable sophistication, and he recognized that it would help Jones’s cause—and hurt Clinton’s—if she was represented by a feminist organization. After all, they were the ones who were supposed to be concerned about sexual harassment. So Mahoney persuaded Patricia Ireland, the head of the National Organization for Women, to participate in a conference call with Jones. But Jones was confused about the time, and she missed the call. Mahoney then fell back on his contacts in the religious right. That, he knew, was the most likely source of a lawyer who might want to sue Bill Clinton.

  The anti-Clinton bus tour wound through the Midwest and finished its journey on Sunday morning, April 24, outside the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, where the president and first lady were attending services. Randall Terry led about twenty protesters in prayer.

  “Father,” he said, “this is not a Christian president.”

  A week later, Paula Jones had new lawyers.

  The search for new lawyers began, as did so much else, with Cliff Jackson. Traylor recognized from the start that he was in over his head, but he didn’t even have the resources to know where to look for legal help. Jackson, on the other hand, did. Though he never spoke to Pat Mahoney, they independently came to the same conclusion about what kind of lawyer Jones would need. Jackson called it the “go-left” strategy, and he suggested that Traylor get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Anita Hill, and Gerry Spence. Jackson even sought out a leftist lawyer he knew in Los Angeles. But these approaches came to nothing, and Jackson saw that the May deadline for the three-year statute of limitations was fast approaching. Go-left became go-right. So Jackson went back to Peter Smith, the Chicago financier who had underwritten Brock’s article and then supported the troopers themselves.

  Smith immediately went to work trying to find someone to represent Jones. He called a young lawyer in Chicago named Richard Porter, who had recently joined the firm of Kirkland & Ellis after serving on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle. Porter did mostly corporate work, but he wanted to be helpful, so he called a lawyer in Philadelphia named Jerome Marcus. They had been classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, and they were politically in synch. Marcus was interested, so he and Porter arranged to have a conference call with Jackson to discuss the case. They liked what they heard, and so the two lawyers began speaking regularly with Traylor, offering to pitch in with some of the work that needed to be done if a lawsuit was going to be filed. As a litigator, Marcus had more to offer Traylor, and he even took a stab at a first draft of a sexual harassment complaint against the president. For Traylor, though, their help came with strings attached. The most imp
ortant condition was absolute secrecy. Porter worked with a large corporate firm, and Marcus’s firm, while smaller, had strong Democratic ties in Pennsylvania.

  The involvement of Porter and Marcus marked the unofficial beginning of what became known much later, in Hillary Clinton’s words, as the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” This phrase lent their activities a more sinister cast than they deserved. There is nothing illegal or improper in one lawyer’s assisting another in the way that Porter and Marcus (and later others) helped Traylor. The issue was not what they did but why they did it. In other words, what separated the actions of these lawyers from, say, those of the private attorneys who assisted Thurgood Marshall in his civil rights battles was the question of motive. Most public interest lawyers volunteer for a case because they believe in a cause—an area of law they want to change. Here, in contrast, Porter, Marcus, and their later recruits had no interest or expertise in sexual harassment law. To the extent they cared at all about the state of the law in this area, they were more sympathetic to defendants than plaintiffs. They joined the cause of this sexual harassment plaintiff because their agenda was to try—in secret—to damage Bill Clinton’s presidency. Their involvement was a classic demonstration of the legal system’s takeover of the political system. Indeed, Porter, Marcus, and their colleagues used this lawsuit like a kind of after-the-fact election, to use briefs, subpoenas, and interrogations to undo in secret what the voters had done in the most public of American proceedings. In time, this secret group of lawyers would call themselves, half-jokingly, “the elves.”