American Rhapsody (22 page)

[4]

Bubba and the Burrheads

“I thought I heard he got two hearing aids,” Linda Tripp said. “It's very unusual because high-frequency loss of hearing you generally hear about in soldiers who are around ordnance or weapons.”

“Well, he's around bands and rallies,” Monica said. “I mean, rock and roll!”

W
hat Ross Perot didn't understand was that most men of my generation had dodged the draft or tried to. We didn't think going over into those bug-infested rice paddies was cool. We didn't understand—nor would we ever—the reason this war was being fought.

Communists
? What sense did it make to fight minor-league Vietnamese Communists while, at the same time, America was playing kissy face with superstar major-league Commies in Moscow and Beijing? As far as going to war because we were being told to go . . . because it was an order . . . because the cornpone or amoral commander in chief had so decided . . . that didn't cut any ice with us.

We didn't believe or respect Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. We didn't want to carry guns; we wanted to carry roach clips. We didn't want to get killed; we wanted to get high and get laid.

And now they were going to kidnap us from our Beatle bootleg albums and incense-scented pads and cut our hair . . . and we'd get reamed by some moronic inbred burrhead in basic training? And then they were going to put guns in our hands and tell us to kill “gooks,” whom we sympathized with as fellow freaks shit on by the burrheads of the world?
Bull! Shit!
Hell no, we wouldn't go!

Some of us shot our toes or pinkie fingers off. Some of us stayed in school as long as we could, adjusting career goals to necessitate grad school. Some of us ate pasta ten times a day, turning ourselves into grotesques, hoping to be disqualified for being too fat. Some of us stopped eating, turning ourselves into geeks, hoping to be disqualified for being too thin. Some of us shoved objects in our rectum, hoping to damage ourselves so we'd be disqualified for engaging in anal intercourse. Some of us
engaged
in anal intercourse. Some of us went to Canada.

The burrheads of the world could talk all they wanted about the dishonor of being a draft dodger. We felt no dishonor and no shame. We felt the burrheads were dishonorable and shameful automatons, good Nazis taking orders from higher-up burrheads who were dishonoring the new, loving, peaceful America we were trying to create.

We felt that anybody who didn't do everything to get himself out of this unjust and senseless war was stupid or unprincipled or
cowardly.
We insisted that those in favor of this scurrilous war had been poisoned by listening to Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr., or Eddy Arnold, or the gay-hating Anita Bryant.

When Bill Clinton, a graduate student at Oxford, a Rhodes scholar, got his notice to report for induction on May 3, 1969, he literally ran, panicked, to a friend. He was hysterical and hyperventilating. He beat on his friend's door, but his friend wasn't there. He slumped to the floor and sobbed.

He knew, by then, that he was going into politics, and he knew American voters wouldn't elect even a dog catcher who'd gone to Canada or shot his pinkie off or shoved objects into his rectum to avoid the draft. His options were limited by his own ambitions and by his own instinctive understanding of American realpolitik: The burrheads would be electing their “public servants” for a long time . . . until our generation was old enough to instill our values in our young and change America at the ballot box.

Bill Clinton hated this war the way most of us did and knew that he somehow
—somehow!—
had to quash his induction notice. He called his mother and stepfather to ask them if they knew of any strings that could be pulled. He asked his stepfather to see if he could get him into a National Guard or Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit.

Desperate, he flew back from England to Washington to see the most powerful man he knew, Senator J. William Fulbright, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bill Fulbright, who was becoming a public opponent of the war, was a friend and his old boss. As a young man, Bill Clinton had worked in the senator's Arkansas campaign, driving him at high, reckless speeds around the state, and later, he'd also worked in Fulbright's Washington office. He begged the senator to help him get into a National Guard or ROTC unit immediately so he could avoid induction. The senator said he'd make some calls.

At the end of his wits, scrambled, Bill Clinton went to Little Rock to see another friend, who was working for the executive director of Arkansas's Republican party. Here he was, a young and very liberal Democrat, turning for help to the Republicans, a party even then captive to the forces of segregationist and racist interests, in order to avoid his induction date. Thanks to his friend, the Republican party's director in Arkansas made a trip to see the head of the state of Arkansas's Selective Service, who went to the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, Col. Eugene Holmes.

Bill Clinton cut his beard and his long hair before he went to see Colonel Holmes, a veteran of World War II POW camps and the Bataan death march. Bill Clinton was a dyed-in-the-wool peacenik, meeting a decorated war hero. Colonel Holmes had two sons who were in Vietnam. Bill Clinton sat with Colonel Holmes for two hours, trying to convince him that he shouldn't be drafted; that he, who loathed the war and everything the burrheads stood for, would make ideal burrhead officer material. He swore that he didn't oppose America's war in Vietnam. The burrheaded Colonel Holmes said he'd think about it. The next day, he was bombarded with phone calls from powerful state and local politicians, who urged him to admit Bill Clinton into the ROTC program. “The general message conveyed to me,” Colonel Holmes said later, “was that Senator Fulbright was putting pressure on them and they needed my help.”

Colonel Holmes gave them the help they needed and quashed Bill Clinton's notice to report for the induction, which was now only days away. He admitted Bill Clinton into the University of Arkansas ROTC program. But he didn't just admit him into the program; he got him out of the war. Colonel Holmes decided to allow Bill Clinton to finish his year at Oxford
and
to finish two years of law school before he'd have to report. And in three years, everyone knew, this painfully unpopular war would be over.

Back at Oxford, free from the war, Bill Clinton went out on the street for the first time to protest it. He became one of the leaders of Oxford's antiwar movement. He marched on the American embassy in Grosvenor Square with five hundred other protesters. He wore a black armband and carried a placard on which he'd written in Magic Marker the name of a serviceman who'd been killed in Vietnam. He led an antiwar prayer service at a nearby church. Then he marched on the American embassy again, a foot-high wooden cross in his arms. He symbolically placed the cross against the embassy gate.

The newspapers were reporting, meanwhile, that Richard Nixon was withdrawing 35,000 troops from Vietnam. Other reports said the draft would be temporarily suspended shortly—and that when it was resumed, only nineteen-year-olds would be called and “only those draftees who volunteered for service in Vietnam.” Nixon was pushing for a lottery system, other accounts said, whereby you'd be eligible for the draft for only one year. Numbers from one to 365 would be randomly selected. If your birthday was picked as a high number, you'd still only be vulnerable for one year. If your birthday was picked as a low number, you'd never be drafted.

When the first draft lottery was held, shortly after the stories appeared, Bill Clinton's birth date was number 311 out of 365. He knew now that if he wasn't a member of the ROTC program, he'd never have to serve in the military at all. Colonel Holmes and the ROTC had been necessary to quash his induction notice, but they were baggage now. He knew that with his low lottery number, he'd never be drafted.

He wrote Colonel Holmes a letter, asking to be reclassified 1-A (for immediate induction),
knowing
he'd never be inducted because of his low lottery number. He knew, too, that this gesture could be made to look good when he ran for future public office. It could be viewed as a patriotic gesture. A young man who
had
a deferment
giving it up
and seemingly making himself,
on paper,
look like he was willing to risk combat. The burrheads would love it.

Knowing that he was off the hook now, he let Colonel Holmes have it with both barrels, as though he couldn't restrain himself. He wrote him a letter. He told Colonel Holmes, almost gleefully, that he'd lied to him. While he had sworn in his meeting with Colonel Holmes that he wasn't against the war in Vietnam, he now wrote that “the admiration [between them] might not have been mutual had you known a little more about me, about my political beliefs and activities.” He wrote of “working every day against a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam . . . . I have written and spoken and marched against the war.” He wrote that he “had no interest in the ROTC program itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself against physical harm.”

Bill Clinton thanked the burrhead for “saving me from the draft.” “No government,” he wrote, “really rooted in limited parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation. The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case.”

His letter, in many ways, was an eloquent presentation of how many of us felt about the war. The way he pulled the whole scam off had rock and roll aspects many of us who'd dodged the draft admired. He hated the war and got inducted. He beat the draft notice by conning a war hero and by squeezing him with political muscle. Then he hit the streets to protest the war he'd already gotten out of. Then he got out of . . . what he'd gotten into, the reserves . . . to get out of the draft. Then he told the war hero the details of how he'd conned him. Then he lectured the war hero about war.

It almost caught up with him six years later, when he ran for Congress in Arkansas against a Republican World War II veteran who started asking questions about how Bill Clinton had gotten out of the draft. Bill Clinton knew that his letter to Colonel Holmes might prove especially embarrassing to him. He wanted it back.

He'd squeezed Colonel Holmes once before through his friend Senator Fulbright, and now he squeezed him again through friends who were administrators at the University of Arkansas. The war hero called an aide to say “he wanted the Clinton letter out of the files.” The aide sent the letter to Colonel Holmes, who sent it back to Bill Clinton.

Sixteen years later, in 1991, that same aide, Ed Howard, started getting questions from reporters about a letter that Bill Clinton had allegedly once written to Colonel Holmes. Ed Howard ran into Bill Clinton in Little Rock and told him about the reporters' questions.

“Don't worry about that,” Bill Clinton said. “I've put that one to bed.”

No one knew that another copy of the letter existed, allegedly made by another aide to Colonel Holmes. It was leaked to the press during the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and for a few days Bill Clinton and his advisers went into shock. There were those who saw it as that conned and lectured old war hero's perfectly timed revenge. What would America think about a letter from a presidential candidate that was a flat-out admission of dodging the draft?

As it turned out, America thought nothing much at all. My generation had grown up now. We had taught our values to our young. The burrheads were dead or dying or certainly out of touch, like Ross Perot. Without a doubt, they were outnumbered.

In the America we had created, dodging the draft was no reason not to vote for a man . . . no more reason not to vote for a man than a blow job or a good-tasting cigar. In both instances, Bill Clinton thought there was no evidence of what he had done. He denied everything. One lie was exposed by a letter, the other by a blue dress.

[5]

Mark Fuhrman and the Navy Blue Dress

“Can I ask you a question?” Linda Tripp said. “I have a lot of fear. Do you? I mean I have a lot of fear!”

“Do you want the honest truth?” Monica said. “Do you want me to tell you the honest truth? I have fear about one thing, and that's you saying something.”

I
t was a navy blue dress without décolletage—buttons to the top—that cost $49.95 at the Gap. It was not, as one of Kenneth W. Starr's prosecutors referred to it, “a cocktail dress.” It was a dress whose color and style made Monica, always paranoid about her weight, look slimmer.

It would become one of the most famous dresses in American history, better known than Scarlett's red dress in Gone With the Wind, its impact upon America's government nearly as deadly as the blood-splattered pink suit Jackie Kennedy wore as LBJ was being sworn in on
Air Force One
.

This simple “work dress,” as Monica called it, would also become known as one of the sexiest dresses in recent popular culture—sexier than Barbra's nearly see-through Oscar pantsuit, sexier than Marilyn's sewn-on white sequins, sexier than the black safety-pin number that got Elizabeth Hurley a modeling contract. Monica's navy blue work dress was certainly the Gap's biggest fashion statement since Sharon Stone, Handsome's other friend, had worn her black Gap turtleneck to the Oscars.

On February 28, 1997, Monica Lewinsky hadn't seen Bill Clinton for eleven months, although they'd had phone sex half a dozen times as he crisscrossed the country campaigning against Bob Dole and the Tin Soldier. The day before, Betty Currie had invited Monica to Bill Clinton's weekly radio address. Monica watched him give the speech with six other guests, then had her photograph taken once again with the Handsome she'd been intimate with for nearly a year only on the phone.

They were a blue couple. He wore a navy blue blazer and a denim button-down shirt; she wore the navy blue dress she'd recently had dry-cleaned. She liked the way it fit her. After the photo was taken—“I was really nervous,” Monica said—Bill Clinton told her to go up to Betty Currie's office because he wanted to give her something.

She chatted with Betty as Bill Clinton spoke to the other guests at the radio address, and when Bill Clinton came into Betty's office, Betty walked them both into the Oval Office. She walked the two of them into the private study and left.

“Come here,” Monica said to Bill Clinton. “Just kiss me.”

“Wait, just wait,” he said. “Be patient. Be patient,” and he handed her a little box decorated with gold stars. She opened it and found a glass pin that was the color of her dress. As she admired it, he almost sheepishly slipped something into her purse and quietly said, “This is for you.”

Monica reached into her purse and found a gorgeous leather-embossed volume of Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
. It was, she thought, the most “meaningful” and “beautiful” gift he had given her. She felt he was telling her, through Whitman's words, of the depth of his affection for her.

Bill Clinton told her he'd seen the message she'd sent him on Valentine's Day in the
Washington Post
's classified section, a note addressed to “Handsome,” quoting
Romeo and Juliet
: “With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls/For stony limits cannot hold love out/And what love can do, that dares love attempt.” Bill Clinton told her how much he loved
Romeo and Juliet
.

He kissed her then and they moved to the hallway she'd missed so much. She unbuttoned his denim blue shirt. He said, “Listen, I've got to tell you something really important. We have to be really careful.” He kissed her again and unbuttoned the top buttons of her navy blue dress. They did what they had done before and she knelt down. He froze suddenly. He thought he'd heard someone in the Oval Office.

They moved into the bathroom off the hallway and she knelt down again. After a while, he stopped her and started to push her away. She stood up and put her arms around him and whispered, “I care about you so much. I don't understand why you won't let me make you come. I mean, it's important to me. I mean, it just doesn't feel complete, you know? It doesn't seem right.”

He whispered, “I don't want to get addicted to you. I don't want you to get addicted to me.”

They looked at each other for a moment. “I don't want to disappoint you,” he said.

She knelt down again and, for the first time, she felt Willard find closure in her mouth.

“I was sick after it was over,” he would say later.

“You've got to put yourself together again,” he told her now. She buttoned her dress up and put her lipstick on, and Betty Currie magically reappeared and was suddenly knocking on the door of the private study. Betty walked them both into the Oval Office and then walked her out.

Though her departure had been abrupt, Monica was sky-high. She had gained his trust. He had allowed her to finish what he'd never allowed before. They hadn't had intercourse, but until this day, he hadn't really allowed her to do fellatio, either.

They had moved now from fellatio interruptus to fellatio. She dreamed of the day they would move from fellatio to coitus . . . or at least to coitus interruptus. This was the best day, Monica thought, they'd ever had. He had given her
Leaves of Grass
and seeds of himself. She was grateful for both.

She went straight to dinner with some friends at McCormick and Schmidt's and then went home to her apartment. She threw the blue dress into her closet. Weeks later, she saw the dress there before going out with her friends. She tried to put it on, but she'd gained some weight and it didn't fit.

She noticed two “tiny dots” on it—stains in the area of her chest and lower hip. She wondered if they were the president's stains. She also wondered if it was either the guacamole or the spinach dip she'd had at McCormick and Schmidt's that night. She threw the dress back into her closet. She told two of her girlfriends about it, though, saying that Bill Clinton “should pay the dry-cleaning bill.”

She also told the Ratwoman about it. Linda Tripp had been on a diet, with Monica's help, and, as a reward, Monica invited her over to her apartment to pick out clothes Monica wasn't wearing. And there in the closet was the navy blue dress. Monica told Tripp the story and showed her the stains.

The Ratwoman went into a frenzy. She called
Newsweek
reporter Michael Isikoff and told him about the stained navy blue dress.

“Should I take it?” Tripp asked.

“And do what with it?” Isikoff asked.

“Give it to you.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Have it tested,” Tripp said.

“What in God's name are you talking about?” Isikoff yelled.

“DNA?”

“Where the fuck am I supposed to get a sample of the president's DNA?” Isikoff said, and hung up quickly afterward.

When Tripp called her, Lucianne Goldberg had the answer. Staying with her at her New York apartment—
in the right place at the right time
—was a man who knew all about stains and DNA. From out of the O. J. Simpson case's toxic sewers came the ex-cop known as “Führer Man” and “Fuhrman the German,” to become an accomplice now to the plot to bring down the president of the United States.

The former Los Angeles detective, Mark Fuhrman, was ungodly perfect casting to be teaming with Tripp, the former Delta Force black-bagger, and Goldberg, the former Nixon spy. Once a marine, the collector of Nazi memorabilia, Führer Man, an author now, had been accused of planting evidence at the Simpson trial. He had once told a police psychiatrist that he tired of the Marine Corps “because a bunch of Mexicans and niggers were telling me what to do.” A witness claimed to have overheard him rant about “burning all the niggers.” He was living now in a small Idaho town not far from the headquarters of the Aryan Nation, a town filled with other ex-LAPD retirees.

Führer Man knew just what the Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze could do with Monica's navy blue dress. A Q-tip would do it. A plastic bag. Sterile water. But they somehow had to get the dress.

Tripp and Goldberg knew very well what the dress meant. With a DNA-tested dress with his semen on it, Bill Clinton couldn't “deny, deny, deny” (as he'd suggested to Gennifer). The White House spin doctors wouldn't be able to turn this into another he said/she said. And if Bill Clinton should deny in court his encounters with Monica Lewinsky, he could go to jail. They somehow had to get a hold of that navy blue dress!

Together in the office at the Pentagon one day, Tripp turned to Monica and said she was running out of money. She was so broke, she said, that she was selling her clothes. That morning, someone had seen the suit she was wearing and wanted to buy it. Right now. Literally off her back. So could she go over to Monica's apartment, the Ratwoman asked, and borrow something out of her closet?
Right now
? So she could sell the suit she was wearing? Monica said okay, she'd go to her apartment with Tripp.

Oh no, Tripp said, she didn't want to put Monica to all that trouble. Couldn't Monica just give her the key to her apartment? Monica thought about it, then said she didn't really feel comfortable having anybody in her apartment alone. The Ratwoman foamed and accused Monica of not trusting her.

If Tripp and Goldberg couldn't physically get the dress, they had to try to make sure that Monica wouldn't send it to the dry cleaner. They decided to try to frighten her out of doing that.

“I want you to think about this,” Tripp said to Monica. “And don't just dis what I say, okay?”

“I don't always dis what you say,” Monica said.

“You're very stubborn,” Tripp said. “You're very stubborn.” She sighed. “The navy blue dress. Now, all I would say to you is I know how you feel today, and I know why you feel the way you do today, but you have a very long life ahead of you, and I don't know what's going to happen to you. Neither do you. I don't know anything, and you don't know anything. I mean, the future is a blank slate. I don't know what will happen. I would rather you had that dress in your possession if you need it years from now. That's all I'm gonna say.”

Monica said, “You think I can hold on to a dress for ten or fifteen years with semen from—”

“Hey, listen,” Tripp said. “My cousin is a genetic whatchamacallit—” It was a lie. The cousin she was referring to was the Bag Lady's houseguest, Führer Man.

“—and during O. J. Simpson I questioned all the DNA and do you know what he told me? I will never forget this. And he's like a Ph.D. and blah blah blah. And he said that on a rape victim now—they couldn't do this, you know, even five years ago. On a rape victim now, if she had preserved a pinprick size of crusted semen, ten years from that time, if she takes a wet Q-tip and blobs it on there and has a pinprick size on the Q-tip, they can match the DNA with absolutely—with certainty.”

Monica said, “So why can't I scratch that crap off and put it in a plastic bag?”

Tripp said, “You can't scratch it off. You would have to use a Q-tip. And I feel that this is what I'd tell my own daughter. That's why I'm saying this to you. I would say it to my own daughter: For your own ultimate protection, which, mea culpa, I hope you never need it. But I don't want you to take the dress away, either. I'm telling you, I would say this to my own daughter, who would tell me to fuck off, but—”

“Well, I'll think about it,” Monica said.

Tripp said, “Believe me, I know how you feel now. I just don't want to take away your options down the road, should you need them. And believe me, I know better than anybody, probably, other than your own mother, that you would never, ever use the dress if you didn't have to. I know this. Believe me. I just don't trust the people around him [Clinton] and I just want you to have that dress for
you
. Put it in a Baggie, put it in a Ziploc bag, and you pack it in with your treasures, for all I care. I mean, whatever. Put it in one of your little antiques.”

“What for, though?” Monica asked. “What do you think—”

“I don't know, Monica,” Tripp said, picking her frightening words carefully. “It's just this nagging awful feeling I have in the back of my head.”

“What if I don't have the dress?” Monica asked.

“I think it's a blessing you do,” Tripp said. “And it could be your only insurance policy down the road. Or it could never be needed, and you can throw it away. But I—I never ever want to read about you going off the deep end because someone comes out and calls you a ‘stalker' or something . . . and in this day and age . . . I don't trust anybody. Maybe I'm being paranoid. If I am, indulge me. I'm not saying you should do it if you don't want to. I'm just saying it would be a smart thing to do. And then put it somewhere where no one knows where it is but you . . . .”

Fear . . . Paranoia . . . Motherly Concern
 . . . Using Monica's own mother in her arguments . . . pretending to speak to her as though she were her own daughter . . . at the same time taping her and conferring daily with the Bag Lady, whose houseguest was Führer Man. A conspiracy of scum. But a successful one. In a later conversation, Monica talked about not betraying her Handsome or the White House: “I would not—for fear of my life—I would not cross these—these people—
for fear of my life
 . . . .” She did exactly what the Ratwoman had told her to do. She put the navy blue dress in a Ziploc bag with her “treasures” (tapes of his messages left on her machine) and hung the bag in the closet of her mother's New York apartment.

.  .  .  

When Tripp blew the whistle by calling Kenneth W. Starr's deputy, Jackie Bennett, Tripp told the prosecutors about the navy blue dress, which Monica would never have told them about. Starr's prosecutors knew they had Clinton
and
Monica by their short hairs, thanks to what Tripp had told them about the existence of the dress.