A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Paula was torn. She wasn’t worried about dirt from her past, but she was concerned about Steve—how he would react to hearing “the whole truth.” Toward the end of Ferguson’s visit to Paula’s table, she mused, “Five hundred thousand dollars would last me a long time.” Here, it seems, was planted the idea that the Spectator article might mean money for Paula and Steve Jones.

  A few days later, Ballentine decided to call the lawyer who had handled her divorce—Danny Traylor. “This is Danny,” he answered. And so the Paula Jones case began.

  Through the fall of 1997, the depositions proceeded in an increasingly rancorous atmosphere. The ideologically motivated Dallas team remained obsessed with pursuing Clinton’s alleged girlfriends, and the Clinton team, in turn, focused on Jones’s commercial motives in filing the lawsuit. There was an antic session with Lydia Cathey, Paula’s corroborating sister, when Bill Bristow sought to draw her out on the distinguishing-characteristic issue. (Q: “Did Paula tell you that there were distinguishing characteristics of the president’s penis?” A: “Yes,… she worded it as, ‘His dick was crooked.…’ ” Q: “Any more description than that?… Did it have a U-turn in it?” A: “No,… It was hard and crooked and gross. You know. That was the word she used.…”)

  On November 12, though, the case reached an important turning point. On that day, the lawyers all converged on Little Rock for a two-day deposition of the plaintiff herself. Bennett was well prepared. He began with a promising subject for the defense—Jones’s employment record. This was, after all, an employment discrimination case, and one of the plaintiff’s claims was that she had been denied promotions and raises because of Clinton’s sexual harassment. Her prior record might offer some clue to her potential at AIDC.

  When Paula Corbin was hired at AIDC, she had been out of high school for less than four years, but she had already held several different jobs (and dropped out of secretarial school as well). She sold shoes, which she quit to work at J. B. Hunt Transport, where she was fired for “talking too much,” according to Paula. From there she went to Dillard’s department store, where she was fired for lateness. Then on to Hertz, where she was fired for undetermined reasons—and so on to Crown Rental, Pest-masters, Holliday’s Fashions, and finally AIDC. All in all, she had been fired from five of the seven jobs she had held before going to work for state government. It was an extraordinarily damning recitation of failure in the workplace.

  From there, Bennett moved to a handful of other topics, starting with the incident itself. In this telling, Jones added a new, sinister detail—that, after she rejected his advances, Clinton “put his hand on the door to where I could not open it up any further, and he stopped me and he says, ‘You’re a smart girl. Let’s keep this between ourselves.’ ” Had there been a trial, Jones would no doubt have been asked how she came to forget the detail of her false imprisonment in her earlier tellings of the incident. As her question to her husband on the outtake from the Matrisciana film illustrated—“Isn’t that what happened?”—Paula’s recollections were always a work in progress.

  But the Clinton team felt it wasn’t enough simply to show that Paula Jones’s employment history was dismal and her story inconsistent—which were both perfectly appropriate subjects to explore in a deposition in a case of this kind. The next moments in the deposition show how grotesque this case became. Bennett’s promises notwithstanding, the next portion of the deposition reads more like a verbal sexual assault than a legal proceeding. Clinton may indeed have “done more for women than any president,” as Bennett once said, but these questions form part of his legacy as well.

  At first the queries were simply embarrassing. Bennett called Jones’s attention to her “distinguishing characteristic” affidavit. “All right,” Bennett said. “Now you say in paragraph five, ‘The shaft of the penis was bent or crooked.’ Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you sort of just show me what you mean on that piece of paper? Draw the penis for me. Show me what you mean by the shaft was bent or crooked.”

  “I have to draw it?” Jones asked.

  “Yes,” replied the president’s lawyer.

  “(Whereupon, witness complied),” the court reporter dryly noted.

  But the true cruelty began when Bennett turned the questioning over to Bill Bristow. First question: “You made a statement at one forty-two this afternoon that you were not a bimbo. Would you tell me what your definition of the word ‘bimbo’ is?”

  “Whoa, whoa,” her lawyer Donovan Campbell sputtered, but there was little he could do. Judge Wright was going to rule on objections after the deposition, so Jones had to answer every question, no matter how outrageous. If the case came to trial, then Judge Wright would make her rulings on the admissibility of the disputed questions. Paula stammered a brief answer—“trailer park white trash,” among other things.

  “Now, Mrs. Jones, when you make a statement that the president’s penis looks small to you,” Bristow continued, “that implies a certain familiarity with the male anatomy—in other words, that you would be in a position to make comparative studies. Have you ever taken any anatomy courses …?”

  “No.…”

  “So I would gather then that your ability to discern distinctive characteristics about a male penis would be based on experience that you have had in your life where you have had the opportunity to view other male penises, is that correct?”

  “It—very few, if there were. Yeah, I made it probably on that assumption and plus he was a really big man and really overweight and it seemed like it was real little compared to his weight.”

  Bristow used these questions as an introduction to an extended tour of Paula Jones’s sex life. He started with her husband, Stephen. “So you dated for three weeks and then began having sexual intercourse?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And then, about a week later, according to your prior testimony, you moved in together, correct?”

  “Correct.…”

  “In fact, you had been pregnant for some period of time before you and Mr. Jones got married, is that not true?”

  “That’s true.”

  All of this was entirely irrelevant—as Jones’s lawyers tried forlornly to point out. But Bristow was relentless. He asked about her high school boyfriend: “Is that who you lost your virginity to?” And her drinking habits: Was it ever “necessary for you to, quote, sleep off a drunk?” No, said Jones. He went on to ask about other boyfriends—Glenn Cope, Carl Fulkerson. The background check on Jones had been extensive. Next Bristow turned to Mike Turner, the noble soul who had sold his seminude photographs of Paula to Penthouse magazine.

  Turner, it turned out, had saved several of the notes that Jones had written to him during their brief relationship—some had been quoted in the magazine article that went with the pictures—and Bristow now began confronting her with them. “Mike, gorgeous, thanks for letting me sleep with you and I love to snuggle up to your sexy soft body and wonderful butt.… Mike, thanks for a wonderful time I had last time. Your [sic] great in bed.… Mike, thanks for letting me sleep my drunk off over here. You’re a real sweetheart. Let’s do something soon, okay?… Love you, babe. Paula.”

  “Okay,” Bristow resumed, “you do agree that you apparently had to sleep a drunk off?”

  “Yeah,” Jones conceded. “Probably so.”

  Ultimately, the responsibility for these questions belongs not with the lawyers who asked them but with the client who mattered, Bill Clinton. Bennett knew the political risks of this kind of strategy. So at each step in the case, he was especially careful to get approval for these personal assaults from the client himself—and from the first lady. Bennett always received the same message: Don’t hold back.

  For the few hours when Bennett and Bristow were haranguing their client in Little Rock, Donovan Campbell and his colleagues had little choice but to suffer in silence. At the very moment of Jones’s deposition, however, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg wer
e preparing to transform the case very much to the plaintiff’s advantage.

  With her job search still unsettled, Monica Lewinsky had taken to writing Clinton ever more beseeching notes in an effort to see him. Her first meeting with Vernon Jordan, on November 5, had yet to produce results. “I am not a moron,” Lewinsky asserted in a letter to Clinton sent by courier on November 11. “I know what is going on in the world takes precedence, but I don’t think what I have asked you for is unreasonable.… I need you now not as president, but as a man. PLEASE be my friend.” Clinton and Lewinsky talked the following evening, and he proposed she stop by briefly on November 13—the second day of Paula Jones’s deposition—which would prove to be her most pathetic, and comical, visit to the White House.

  That morning, Lewinsky began hounding Betty Currie. After several calls, Currie finally admitted that the president had gone golfing—news that prompted Lewinsky to go “ballistic,” as she wrote in an e-mail to a friend. She announced that she was coming to the White House anyway, and Currie told her to wait in Currie’s car in the West Wing parking lot. Lewinsky arrived to find the car locked—and then it started to rain. After getting a good soaking, Lewinsky persuaded Currie to let her in, and the two women hustled into the president’s private study, where Monica awaited his return from the links. Noodling around in the president’s desk, Lewinsky was delighted to see that he had kept several of her gifts to him, including Vox, Nicholson Baker’s novel about phone sex, and Oy Vey! The Things They Say: A Guide to Jewish Wit. Clinton finally arrived from his golf game, with only a minute or two to talk. Lewinsky gave him an antique paperweight and showed him an e-mail describing the effects of chewing Altoid mints before performing oral sex. “Ms. Lewinsky was chewing Altoids at the time,” the Starr report noted, “but the President replied that he did not have enough time for oral sex.” He rushed off to a state dinner for President Zedillo, of Mexico.

  Later that evening, Lewinsky reported all of these developments to Linda Tripp, who was by now thoroughly frustrated. She had no book contract. Isikoff had not yet written a story. The Paula Jones case seemed to be going nowhere. And still this hysterical young woman was whining to her about the president in several long phone calls every day. She had to do something to break the logjam. So, just after she heard about Monica’s latest misadventure at the White House, Tripp called Goldberg with an idea. Tripp said she wanted to be subpoenaed to give a deposition in the Jones case. That would finally get the information about Lewinsky’s affair with the president to people who could do Clinton some real harm.

  Goldberg took to the mission with gusto and embarked on a game of what might be called right-wing telephone tag. First, she called Alfred Regnery, the conservative publisher of Gary Aldrich’s book—and that of Goldberg’s client Mark Fuhrman. “This woman recently phoned me with some fascinating info, and she wants to be in touch with Paula Jones’s lawyers,” Goldberg told Regnery. “Call my friend Peter Smith,” Regnery said. This was fitting. Smith was the Chicago financier who had bankrolled David Brock’s original investigation of the trooper story, which had led to the publication of his article in The American Spectator. (Indeed, a year before the trooper story, Smith had tried to sell Brock on the Clinton-and-the-black-prostitute story.) Smith, in turn, directed Goldberg to Richard Porter, the former aide to Dan Quayle who had since made partner at Kirkland & Ellis, Kenneth Starr’s law firm. Goldberg called Porter on November 18.

  Porter was one of the original “elves,” the group of conservative young lawyers who had been secretly advising the Jones lawyers throughout the case. Amazed by what he heard from Goldberg, Porter quickly e-mailed his fellow elf George Conway in New York. “There’s a woman named Lewisky [sic],” he wrote. “She indulges a certain Lothario in the Casa Blanca for oral sex in the pantry.” Porter’s message went on to say that Betty Currie was “Lewisky’s” contact at the White House and that Isikoff had been kept abreast of all the latest developments. Conway printed out the e-mail, made sure Goldberg’s phone number was included, and faxed it to Don Campbell in Dallas. Just to make sure, he then called one of the lawyers in the Dallas firm to make sure that they followed up on the message.

  There was an unmistakable sense of giddy delight as Clinton’s enemies passed this juicy morsel to its intended recipient. Virtually all of these people—including Smith, Porter, Conway, Goldberg, Tripp, and Isikoff—had been hoping for years to catch Clinton in an adulterous affair. Of course, based on what they knew at that point, the president’s conduct wasn’t illegal, wasn’t harassment, wasn’t relevant in any way to his public duties; it was just a story about sex. But that was what they really wanted—and that went for everyone from the raunchy sophisticates like Goldberg to the “good strong Christian men” on the Jones team. In a small way, the smarmy tone of Porter’s e-mail (“a certain Lothario”) illustrated how the elves—and the right wing generally—were more obsessed with the details of Clinton’s sex life than with the content of his character.

  Conway need not have worried about a lack of interest on the part of Paula Jones’s lawyers. On November 21, another one of Campbell’s partners, David Pyke, called Linda Tripp at home. (Apparently unintentionally, Tripp taped the call—which, it appears, she put Goldberg on call-waiting to receive.)

  “Ms. Tripp?”

  “Oh, Mr. Pyke.”

  “How are you?”

  “Well, thank you. Thank you for calling.… I don’t know how familiar—familiar you are with my situation.”

  “Well,” Pyke answered, “Lucy Goldberg filled me in to some degree.”

  Some of the details had been lost in the long telephone chain—Pyke thought Tripp worked at the Treasury Department, not the Pentagon—but the lawyer had the gist of the story. Tripp began by asking about the status of Kathleen Willey’s deposition. Tripp’s onetime friend had filed a motion, near her home in Virginia, to avoid testifying, but the judge in the case had just made a secret ruling that Willey would have to submit to a deposition. “Okay,” Tripp said. “That would leave you open to deposing me?”

  “Right,” said Pyke.

  But there was a hitch. Under normal circumstances, the subpoena for Tripp’s deposition would go through her attorney, Kirby Behre. A young lawyer who had recently left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, Behre had urged Tripp to stay out of the Jones case. Tripp told Pyke that Behre “has my best interests at heart, but he … feels strongly that I should not involve myself.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Pyke.

  “Um, I feel strongly that the behavior has to stop, um, or should at least be exposed.”

  Pyke then turned to the real reason for his call. “Ms. Goldberg told me about—that you’ve—you talked to a woman that’s having a relationship with Clinton currently, is that correct?”

  With her usual precision, Tripp said that “currently” wasn’t exactly right. “It’s in the process of ending, let’s say.… It is very sad and the girl will deny it to her dying breath. Um, she is very, very angry with him because of the way he’s handling this, but would rather martyr herself in a way rather than—than expose him.”

  Tripp then set out to construct a scheme, with Pyke, to deceive her own lawyer about her plans to testify. “I need to look hostile,” said Tripp, so Pyke should pretend that she was not cooperating with their side. “My livelihood is at stake here,” she explained. (This was a recurring theme of Tripp’s—that because she was a political appointee, she would lose her job if her anti-Clinton activities were known. Yet even though her role became highly public—as did her illegal taping of Lewinsky—Tripp never lost her high-paying political appointment at the Pentagon.)

  Tripp and Pyke agreed on a plan whereby “a subpoena would drop on your doorstep out of the blue,” and only then would Tripp tell Behre about it. Tripp would pretend to be upset that she was being dragged into the case, but ultimately she would cooperate and tell her tale about Lewinsky under oath. “Hold on,” Tripp said. “I’ll get my calendar.” In sub
sequent calls, Tripp and Goldberg told the Jones lawyers the correct spelling of the name in Richard Porter’s e-mail—Lewinsky, not Lewisky.

  At 5:40 P.M. on Friday, December 5, the Dallas lawyers faxed their witness list to Robert Bennett, in Washington. Many of the names were unfamiliar to Bennett and his team, so they had an informal agreement with David Pyke to give a capsule summary of each potential witness’s testimony. Bennett’s partner Mitch Ettinger called Pyke for the rundown. As Ettinger read a name, Pyke would say, “He slept with that one,” “He raped that one,” “He harassed that one.” It was a surreal litany.

  The following afternoon, Clinton’s lawyers met with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the witness list. It was an important meeting for Bennett and his team. They had the names of all the women that the plaintiffs had managed to track down during three months of depositions. The president now had his chance. If Clinton had even hinted that there might be a problem with one of them—if he had just raised an eyebrow—Bennett could still settle the case. Bennett prided himself on his ability to get clients to be straight with him, to confide their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. All these names would become public if the case proceeded to trial. This was the time for Clinton to cut his losses.

  So in the course of the long meeting, the lawyers put the question to their client: “Monica Lewinsky?”

  Clinton’s confidant, the deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, who was also there, didn’t even recognize her name. Bennett explained that she was a young former White House aide. The plaintiff’s lawyers were alleging Clinton had had an affair with her.

  “Bob, do you think I’m fucking crazy?” the president said, according to two people present. “Hey, look, let’s move on. I know the press is watching me every minute. The right has been dying for this kind of thing from day one. No, it didn’t happen.