A Vast Conspiracy (9 page)

So Isikoff received permission from his editors to go down to Arkansas and research Paula’s claim. He spoke to the people that Jackson recommended, but it was difficult to find anyone else who might prove or disprove the story. (Ferguson wouldn’t talk to Isikoff.) One of the perils of sexual investigative reporting was that the key evidence tended to be known by only two people. Through spokesmen, Clinton was denying Jones’s accusations, so Isikoff’s investigation seemed stalled at the impasse of he said/she said. So the reporter, stymied, took what he regarded as the logical next step. In an effort to prove whether Clinton had propositioned Jones, Isikoff would see if the president had made similar approaches to other women. Was there a pattern in Clinton’s behavior?

The search for such “patterns” is a key element of sexual investigative reporting. At one level, it does make sense. Some men do display consistent aberrant habits in their dealings with women. But reporters who set off to identify such patterns essentially make a public figure’s entire private life
fair game. Isikoff set out to track down every rumor about Clinton’s sex life that he could find in Little Rock, and there were a lot of them. Brock had been down this road before, and the two men began comparing notes. There were, in fact, a number of reporters from all over the country who had come to Arkansas in search of Clinton girlfriends, and Isikoff became their dean. As he began drafting his Paula Jones story, Isikoff included some of the tales of other women as corroboration of Jones’s claim.

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.