American Rhapsody (47 page)

Broaddrick was as believable as anyone I'd ever seen on television. She told the details and more. She described Bill Clinton at the moment of the rape as “a vicious, awful person.” She said, “My hatred for him is overwhelming.” She said she came forward because “I just couldn't hold it in any longer.” She said she didn't want her granddaughter to ask, “Why didn't you tell what this man did to you?” She said she wasn't interested in a book deal or a lawsuit, but that “all of these stories were floating around . . . and I was tired of everybody putting their own spin on it.” She said, “I do not have an agenda. I want to put all of these stories to rest.”

She said, “I just told him—‘No.' You know, ‘Please don't do that.' Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me, he starts biting on my lip. He starts to bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed, and I just was very frightened. And I tried to get away from him. I told him ‘No!' because I don't want this to happen, but he wouldn't listen to me.”

Asked about Broaddrick's allegation, President Clinton said, “Well, my counsel has made a statement about the issue . . . and I have nothing to add to it.” The president's counsel, David Kendall, called the charge “absolutely false.”

Those who defended Bill Clinton pointed out that:

1. There was no physical evidence.
   
2. No one else was present.
   
3. She didn't remember the date or the month that it allegedly happened.
   
4. She never screamed.
   
5. She went to a Clinton campaign fund-raiser three weeks after she was allegedly raped.
   
6. The year after she was allegedly raped, she accepted a Clinton appointment to a nonpaying post on a state advisory board.
   
7. She denied the rape under oath in an affidavit for Paula Jones's lawyers.
   
8. She conferred with Kathleen Willey, who had been embarrassed by the White House release of her letters to Bill Clinton, before her interview with Lisa Myers.
   

As former White House counsel Lanny Davis said, “It is not corroboration because her girlfriend said she had a swollen lip. That doesn't make the charge of rape a fact . . . . How do we know that she didn't lie to all her friends? We know that, voluntarily, without anyone influencing her, she swore out an affidavit that she now says she lied about.”

And yet, a poll taken a week after her interview with Lisa Myers showed that 84 percent of Americans believed Juanita Broaddrick . . . believed that the president of the United States was a rapist.

It didn't matter. We were a tired people, tired of pornographic imagery on the evening news, tired of feeling we were mired in filth. This was the worst . . . and we didn't want to hear it.

It was like the reaction to the
Starr Report
when it was released. The details themselves came to Bill Clinton's defense. Our heads had been forced into the mud for over a year and we wanted to free ourselves. To countenance that
this
was the president of the United States,
our
man in the White House, this person who put his shades on and said, “You'd better put some ice on that,” was too much to ask of us.

Bill Bennett had it right: “Judging from most of the media and most of the public reaction, the silence on Capitol Hill, most people are just too tired to inquire into the question as to whether the President of the United States committed rape.” The managing editor of the
New York Times,
Bill Keller, said, “Legally it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Congress isn't going to impeach him again. And, frankly, we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue.”

As the
Washington Post
wrote, “Had NBC aired the interview during the Senate impeachment trial and the furor over Monica S. Lewinsky, it might have had a significant impact on the national climate.” NBC had acted either ethically, nailing down the details of a complex and incendiary story, or had, cynically and corruptly, made a decision for its own reasons to protect the president of the United States.

In either case, NBC News president Andy Lack or his superiors or General Electric had saved Bill Clinton from removal from office . . . as surely as Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt had.

The day after the Lisa Myers interview with Broaddrick aired, Bill Clinton was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a speech about saving Social Security and Medicare. He spent more than fifteen minutes in an auditorium greeting well-wishers as Bachman-Turner Overdrive blasted “Taking Care of Business” from the speakers. He received kisses and hugs from several women at the front of the crowd. A small group of protesters stood outside the auditorium with placards that said
I BELIEVE JUANITA, PAULA, AND KATHLEEN . . . MR. CLINTON, DID JUANITA BROADDRICK CONSENT? . . . JAIL TO THE CHIEF! . . . GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE! . . . STAY AWAY FROM OUR DAUGHTERS! . . . RAPIST!

On Matt Drudge's TV show, after the Broaddrick interview on NBC aired, Drudge said, “There's all this talk behind the scenes in the media that a second woman has made sexual claims against Bill Clinton. I don't know if it's true, but it's out there.” Dick Morris said, “People don't rape once.” Lucianne Goldberg said, “The new allegation is assault, not rape. It occurred after he became president and comes from someone who cannot be faulted. I expect her to come forward in the next month.” No one came forward.

In his new book, published shortly after Broaddrick's interview, Michael Isikoff quoted Elizabeth Ward Gracen, a former Miss America, as telling a friend she had “rough sex” with Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. Isikoff wrote, “Clinton got so carried away that he
bit her lip.
”

He was still in office, but the party was over. You could hear the fat lady singing for him across the land. People didn't want to look at him anymore. Playing with your willard, accepting homage to your willard, was one thing 
 . . . this
was another. Yeah, rock and roll, gotta put the shades on, dude, before you walk out the door . . . when she's bruised, sobbing, paralyzed on the bed.

Revulsion.
That was the word. There he was on TV, smiling, taking care of business, but it didn't work anymore. Juanita Broaddrick had shown us more than we ever wanted to see. He had come into our homes, where we welcomed him. He was cool. We thought he was one of us. The first rock and roll president of the United States. The first black president of the United States. The first playboy president of the United States. We had welcomed him into our homes . . . and he had befouled our walls. Maybe some of us thought we'd smelled something, but Juanita Broaddrick took us there and pointed to it:
He had befouled our walls!
We couldn't wait to get the smell off. The election campaign of 2000 began the instant we shut the set off when Juanita Broaddrick's interview ended on NBC.

The
Washington Post
reported that before Broaddrick went public, she “talked and exchanged E-mail with scandal impresario Lucianne Goldberg.”

Oh no, I thought, not again.
In the right place at the right time . . .
Please God, not again! She had told Tripp to tape Monica. She had made sure Drudge leaked the Lewinsky story so the rest of the media would follow. Now Drudge had leaked the first Broaddrick details to the world. Drudge had revealed NBC's reluctance to run the interview. The
Wall Street Journal
had followed Drudge. And all this time, Lucianne Goldberg had been talking to Broaddrick?

Sweet Jesus, I thought, was it possible that a cackling, chain-smoking, croak-voiced sixty-something Bag Lady of Sleaze diagrammed all, or at least most, of these plays? And was it possible that, through Juanita Broaddrick, Lucianne Goldberg had accomplished what she had set out to do—the assassination of the president of the United States?

Lord, I thought. Bill Clinton . . . as slick as he was, as sick as he was, as smart as he was, as dumb as he was . . . never had a chance. Richard Nixon, the Night Creature who'd created Lucianne Goldberg, had exacted his infernal, Machiavellian revenge.

[9]

John Wayne McCain Chickens Out

I
let you down, pal. No, not by making that speech about the Ayatollahs Robertson and Falwell. No, not by saying the Crown Prince twists the truth like Bill Clinton. And no, not by showing up at the big California debate on the monkey screen instead of in person.

But by being the good soldier that I am and have always been.

I listened to Bob Dole, my friend, my fellow war hero, my fellow Republican. Bob Dole did to me what those gooks couldn't do in Hanoi. He talked me into quitting. He talked me into giving up.

Hey, you want straight talk, my friend? I could've been the president of the United States. But I chickened out.

Me! The Punk, McNasty, John Wayne McCain, the White Tornado, Luke Skywalker, heir to Barry Goldwater's Senate seat, friend to Ronald Reagan. I didn't have the balls.

How's that for straight talk? Are you any less heartbroken yet?

Okay, so I said to my fellow Republicans, come on, guys, let's stop sipping the Kool Aid with Jim Jones. Let's appeal to the real Americans and not the anti-abortion fanatics and the southern Grand Dragons and the gay-bashing, Jew-hating, nigger-lynching holy-holies.

And my fellow Republicans said to me: John, we've respected you until this moment for being a tough guy with those Commie cocksuckers in Hanoi, but now we see that the middle finger you jabbed at them was an act, a part of your programming as the Manchurian Candidate. John, goddamn it, you're a Commie cocksucker, too, even though you became one against your will.

Then they tarred and feathered me, screwed me, and lynched me while they glugged down their Jim Jones Kool Aid.

 . . .

And that's when Bob Dole convinced me not to belly up to the table and put it up there to see whose was the biggest. Jesse Ventura was begging me to do it. Two polls showed me only a few points down behind Gore and the Crown Prince.

And that's when I revealed to myself and the average Americans who'd given me all that money that I was more of a Republican than an American. That was the moment, my dear friends, after they'd screwed me, that I screwed you.

That's when I went back to the empty chambers of the Senate and left you—those of you who had voted for the first time, those of you who had believed in me, those of you who had given me the dollars you couldn't afford to give—in the same old hopeless, futile lurch you've been in all these years and with all those other candidates.

I was a politician after all, you now saw. For a moment there, I'd made you forget that. For a moment there, I'd forgotten it myself.

The reason I ran for president was to give America back to you, to take it away from the toothless call girls who sit next to me in the Senate and are paid to take care of the special interests and the lobbyists. The reason I ran was to turn the world right side up again from the America where Bill Clinton is introduced before a speech as a “tough, battle-tested, principled” president and praised for his “undaunted courage and bravery.” The reason I ran was because in the 1996 election, voter turnout among eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds was the lowest in history.

The reason I ran was to give the American people access, total access, to the man who led them. No more Robopols, rope lines, and lying, full-a-shit spin doctors who wanted to “control the story of the day” and “stay on message.” No more politicians who spoke like programmed Furbies. I also wanted to take the
MOTEL SIX
sign off the Lincoln bedroom and be a president, not a bellhop.

I'm a romantic and an adventurer. When I was a kid, my heroes were Hemingway characters like Robert Jordan, who died for a cause he believed in.

I felt there had to be a reason why I wasn't dead. God had to have something in mind that I had to do. I don't mean just the five and a half years in Hanoi, the broken arms, ribs, shoulder, teeth, and knee, the dysentery, the puking, the torture.

There was a plane crash in Corpus Christi, too, when I was in training, when my engine conked out and I fell into the bay. And another plane crash in Philadelphia, when my engine blew and I fell onto a beach. And the power lines that almost brought me down in Spain. And the carrier
Forrestal
, when I was about to take off and got hit by one of my own guys' rockets, creating a firestorm that killed a lot of men. And then, above Hanoi in my Skyhawk, getting hit by that SAM missile that blew my wing off and sent me ejecting into a lake.

But I survived. Miracles. All of them. Why does God spare a man on all those occasions? So he can drink and be merry, for tomorrow he may die? I didn't think so.

But like I said, I grew up reading Hemingway,
before
he killed himself.

I thought about running for president as Bill Clinton was going through impeachment, and when I wrote it down on a piece of paper, it made no sense:

1. Much of my own party hated me.
   
2. My party was already blowing the trumpets, heralding the coronation of the Crown Prince.
   
3. I had had as many zipper problems as Bill Clinton.
   
4. I had dumped my crippled wife of fifteen years and traded her in for a sexy young babe loaded with big bucks.
   
5. My own mouth was my biggest enemy. I had said and I knew I would continue to say some dumb-ass, tasteless things.
   

I thought about my list for weeks and figured I didn't have a prayer of becoming the president of the United States.

So I said, I'm running.

I decided that I am the way I am, that I can't help it. I'm a flawed human being. I'm going to let the American people see my flaws and let them decide.

My grandfather Slew smoked and drank and crashed five planes. He finished 79th out of 116 in his class at Annapolis. He became a full admiral. My father, “Good Goddamn” McCain (as in “I don't give a good goddamn”) drank more than my grandfather, which was a helluva lot. He finished 423rd of 441 in his class at Annapolis. He became a full admiral.

I didn't drink as much as they did at Annapolis, but I was always a member of the Century Club, an exclusive society of those students who had earned a hundred demerits. I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman who felt it necessary to prove his mettle by challenging authority. In short, I acted like a jerk. I outdid Slew and Good Goddamn. I finished fifth from the bottom of my class.

I had myself photographed in James Dean poses. I went over the wall to visit greasy-floor strip clubs. When some older women wouldn't let me pick them up, I yelled, “Shove it up your ass!” at them and got arrested. When a commander asked if I knew who he was, I said, “Frankly, Commander, I don't give a rat's ass!”

I am like my grandfather Slew, who was always ready to fight. When the Japanese surrendered, my grandfather told a friend, “This surrender has come as a kind of shock to me. I feel lost. I don't know what to do. I know how to fight, but now I don't know how to relax. I am in an awful letdown period. I feel bad.” A week later, he had a heart attack and died.

And I am like my father, Good Goddamn, who always liked beautiful women. My mother is a beautiful woman and she has an unmarried identical-twin sister. Both my mother and her sister were always around Good Goddamn McCain. “How do you tell 'em apart?” somebody asked him. “That's their problem,” my dad said.

My friend Gary Hart says I've got a little boy inside me trying to get out. He's probably right. On the other hand, gee,
Gary Hart
? Talk about having a little boy inside you!

I hired Mike Murphy as my strategic consultant and chief media adviser, probably because he likes convicted felon Chuck Berry as much as I do. A couple of years ago,
Cosmopolitan
picked Mike as one of America's most eligible bachelors. I was very impressed with that, too.

He's thirty-seven years old, has long blond hair, a stubble, wears thick glasses, black leather jackets, Hawaiian shirts and sneakers. He calls himself a “rock and roll Republican” and is known as the “Mr. Groovy of politics.”

He's the guy who did the ad that stuck Pat Buchanan's Mercedes up his ass. He's also the guy who put the lumberjack shirt on Lamar Alexander. (Great shirt, wrong guy.) He's also the guy who ran this high-road ad against Senator Chuck Robb in Virginia: “Why can't Chuck Robb tell the truth? About the cocaine parties where Robb said he never saw drugs? Or about the beauty queen in the hotel room in New York? Robb says it was only a massage.”

Mike Murphy had been doing this for twenty years when I hired him. He had run campaigns out of his dorm room at Georgetown. He had won eighteen races for the statehouse or the Senate. Mike said to me, “Make the charge and let the other guy spend a million dollars to explain it . . . . We must be confrontational and define ourselves through our enemies.” He bragged that in one campaign, he focused on the rape of a nine-year-old girl to prove that his opponent was soft on crime.

I liked him immediately. I called him a lot of names during the campaign. “Murphistopheles” and “the Swami” and “008, Bond's idiot brother.”

But all I said to the press after I hired him was, “Mike Murphy is the worst low-life scum I've ever been associated with in my entire life. In some ways, he's worse than my Vietnamese interrogators.”

Mike was pleased with that. I think he liked me immediately, too.

Murphistopheles and I went over my personal soft spots. Talking to Murphy about soft spots is like confessing everything to a defrocked whiskey priest who went to the joint for rape and robbery.
Why did the Republican establishment, especially so many senators, hate me? Besides the fact I tried to take their soft money bribes away
?

Well, I told Murphy, sometimes I literally growled and shook my fist at them. I got into a scuffle with Sperm Thurmond once on the Senate floor after he physically tried to stop me from speaking on a bill. I cussed another Republican colleague out on the Senate elevator, and I said, “Only a chickenshit would create a chart like that!” to another colleague on the floor. I said to that suck-ass Mitch McConnell, during a debate, “You said it was okay for us to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies would run ads in our favor.” And I broke with Ronald Reagan over putting troops in Lebanon. Then I tried to stop some of the old girls' favorite pork-barrel self-diddlings: An aircraft carrier the navy didn't want, which was to be built in Trent Lott's hometown; $1.1 million for a manure disposal project; $750,000 for a study of grasshoppers.

But that wasn't even the real reason why they hated me, I told Murphy. They hated me because I don't think leadership means compromises, coalitions, and deals. They hated me because I'm a loner and like being one. They hated me because once I take a position on something, I won't change that position as a favor to the venerable round-heel sitting next to me. They hated me because I was uncooperative and a general pain in the ass—which was the same damn reason my North Vietnamese captors hated me.

Murphistopheles smiled.

What about dumping my first wife? Murphy asked.

I am a flawed human being, I told Murphy. Carol was faithful and true to me while I was in prison. She didn't deserve my treatment of her.

Look, I said, she was a beautiful woman when I married her—tall, a model. I was in bliss. She had two kids. I adopted them. We had another child. Then I went to Nam. I talked about her in prison all the time. I called her “Long Tall Sally.”

I came back. I was crippled up. She had been in a car wreck. She was four inches shorter from surgeries than when I had last seen her. She was in a wheelchair. She'd put a lot of weight on.

We tried. It didn't work anymore. We were a golden couple when we'd met. We weren't that anymore. It hurt to remember how we'd been.

I started cheating on her, and then I met Cindy. Tall, model-like, beautiful. I fell in love with her. She was my
new
Long Tall Sally. A year after we met, I filed for divorce. Carol was in shock, but she understood. She said I was forty and wanted to be twenty-five again.

It looked bad, I know, not only because Cindy was so much younger and beautiful but also because she was the heir to a Budweiser distributorship. Some people said I was like Bob Dole—dumping the woman who'd helped him to walk again. I don't know. All I can say is that I tried to do the honorable thing with Carol—alimony, child support, giving her both houses.

Over time, we healed it. Carol tells the press, “I'm crazy about John McCain. I love him to pieces.” Like Bob Dole's ex-wife, she supports my campaigns. I was the best man at our eldest son's wedding. Our youngest son works at the beer distributorship.

The breakup was a human tragedy. It was my fault. All of it. I didn't marry Cindy to use her for my political gain, I married her because I love her. And I have to tell you, the fact she doesn't look like Sabina Forbes helps.

Murphistopheles laughed.

A zipper problem, really? Murphy grinned. An old coot like you
?

Not anymore, I said to him, but I wasn't always an old coot. Even at Annapolis, we had a group of guys, the Bad Bunch. It was the James Dean thing I told you about. Being on liberty with me, one of the guys said, was like being in a train wreck.

Women liked me. I had a friend, Dittrick; he used to tag along, hoping for sloppy seconds. The guys used to say—no shit—I'd walk into a room and you could hear the panties drop.

I went to Rio on a destroyer and met this little blond honey who was a fashion model.
Oh man!
The guys put her picture in the Academy magazine—the caption was “So nice to come home to.” I remember being on a terrace with her and a bottle of champagne and a bucket of ice.
Oh Christ,
believe me, she wasn't dressed for dinner.

Then there was a girl who was a stripper—Marie, “the Flame.” She used to clean her fingernails with a switchblade. And in Meridian, Mississippi, we had toga parties and bands from Memphis and guys were flying in to party all the way from the West Coast. All those Mississippi girls.
Sweet Jesus!