A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Whitehead knew Susan Carpenter-McMillan from the pro-life movement. After he saw the story in the Post, he decided to give her a call and tell her he had a lawyer in mind for her case. Like almost every lawyer who represented Paula Jones over her long legal battle, Whitehead had other priorities besides his client—himself, the movement, his press clippings.

  When Whitehead called McMillan, he told her the Rutherford Institute would agree to underwrite litigation costs for the lawsuit—lawyer travel, copying, the preparation of deposition transcripts—but would not pay the legal fees themselves. This wouldn’t necessarily pose a problem, because he had some lawyers in mind for Jones who would agree to handle the case on a contingency-fee basis. Like Davis and Cammarata, the new lawyers would not ask for anything up front—and unlike their departed predecessors, they were anxious to wage war on the president no matter what the cost. The new team would be led by a Texas lawyer named Donovan Campbell, Jr. McMillan invited Campbell and a few of his colleagues to come to Los Angeles and meet with Paula and Steve to see if they made a good fit. (The conservative activist and frequent talk-show guest Ann Coulter had volunteered earlier, but she lacked the resources to take on Bob Bennett and his troops at Skadden Arps.) In a press conference in front of Susan Carpenter-McMillan’s home on October 1, it was announced that Paula was now represented by the firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher and Pyke, of Dallas, Texas.

  Don Campbell served on the board of directors of the Rutherford Institute, but he could scarcely have differed more from John Whitehead in temperament or disposition. Whereas Whitehead had a laid-back, almost libertarian approach to politics, Campbell practiced a punitive, judgmental brand of law. He was renowned in Dallas for leading a long and successful effort to reinstate the Texas sodomy law after it was found unconstitutional, and for picketing performances of Torch Song Trilogy at a local theater. He abhorred homosexuality and adultery—and Bill Clinton.

  With discovery deadlines looming, Campbell and his colleagues entered the case just in time. Indeed, for a few harrowing days at the end of September, Jones had had no lawyers at all. So Jones had had to act by herself at one critical moment in the case. “Where is it?” Mitch Ettinger had been demanding of his adversaries for weeks. “We need to see it,” Bob Bennett insisted. In the confusion following Davis and Cammarata’s departure, though, the Jones team had never supplied a piece of evidence that Clinton’s lawyers had been seeking for more than three years.

  Then, at 5:55 P.M. on September 29, 1997, Paula Jones herself had finally answered these demands with a two-page fax sent from her home. The cover page was written in her own flowery hand.

  Mr. Robert S. Bennett

  Skadden, Arps

  fax #202-xxx-xxxx

  Dear Mr. Bennett,

  Here is the affidavit you requested. I just received a copy of this today from Mr. Cammarata. Before today, I did not have the original of this copy.

  Paula C. Jones

  The second page read as follows:

  AFFIDAVIT

  State of Virginia;

  County of Fairfax, to wit:

  I, Paula Corbin Jones, after being duly sworn, state as follows:

  1. I am the plaintiff in the case of Paula Corbin Jones versus William Jefferson Clinton and Danny Ferguson, Civil Action No. LR-C-94-290, pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

  2. In the Complaint, paragraph 22, in Civil Action No. LR-C-94-290 I allege that there were distinguishing characteristics in William Clinton’s genital area that were obvious to me.

  3. I briefly observed the erect penis of William Jefferson Clinton in a hotel suite of the Excelsior Hotel on May 8, 1991. That is the only time I have seen his genital area, and I have never had it described to me by anyone, nor have I read anything on that subject.

  4. Mr. Clinton’s penis was circumcised and seemed to me to be rather short and thin. I would describe its appearance as seeming to be five to five and one-half inches, or less, in length, and having a circumference of the approximate size of a quarter, or perhaps very slightly larger.

  5. The shaft of the penis was bent or “crooked” from Mr. Clinton’s right to left, or from an observer’s left to right if the observer is facing Mr. Clinton. In other words, the base of Mr. Clinton’s penis, to an observer facing Mr. Clinton, would be further to the left of the observer than the head of the penis.

  Paula Corbin Jones

  Joe Cammarata had prepared the affidavit with Jones shortly after she filed her lawsuit. Robert C. Lockhart, Jr., a notary public in Cammarata’s law office in northern Virginia, had recorded that the affidavit was signed on May 26, 1994. Perhaps noting the magnitude of the historical moment, the notary had written in the time as well: “10:15 A.M. (EDT).”

  Clinton’s lawyers read the document with amusement—how could one not?—but also with relief. Anticipating the release of the affidavit, Bennett had had the surreal experience of questioning the president of the United States about what his erect penis looked like. Counsel had been assured that there was nothing out of the ordinary, and this information had been corroborated by Clinton’s urologist, Dr. Kevin O’Connell, of Bethesda Naval Hospital. But if Jones had made some truly exotic claim, like a distinctive birthmark, it might have led to a great deal of embarrassing litigation on this unseemly topic. The information in the affidavit did not suggest anything terribly out of the ordinary, and Bennett thought that the judge—and even Jones’s new lawyers—would finally leave this doleful subject alone.

  But Bob Bennett was wrong about his new adversaries. Don Campbell and company did not wish to let go of the subject of Bill Clinton’s penis—and that foretold a great deal about the future course of the Paula Jones case.

  On the very first day that Campbell’s team took over as Jones’s new lawyers, they submitted a new set of interrogatories to the president. These are questions that the defendant is required to answer in writing, under oath. Campbell asked: “Please state the name, address, and telephone number of each and every medical doctor who has performed any surgery or medical procedure on your genitalia at any time after May 8, 1991.”

  In other words, the Jones lawyers were suggesting that, as a litigation tactic in the Jones case, Clinton had undergone surgery to change the appearance of his penis.

  Another question demanded, “Please state the name, address, and telephone number of each and every individual (other than Hillary Rodham Clinton) with whom you had sexual relations when you held any of the following positions: a. Attorney General of the State of Arkansas; b. Governor of the State of Arkansas; c. President of the United States.”

  Not surprisingly, Clinton refused to answer both questions, replying that the questions had “been propounded solely to harass, embarrass and humiliate the President and the Office he occupies.” Privately, the Clinton team began referring to their new adversaries in Texas as the Branch Davidians.

  These intrusive demands for information established the plaintiff’s legal strategy for the remainder of the case. The Dallas lawyers would largely ignore the facts of Paula Jones’s alleged encounter with the president at the Excelsior Hotel. They also ignored the client herself and her meddling husband. Jones’s new lawyers instructed her to drop her book plans, which had been the subject of embarrassing leaks that fall, and simply to remain silent pending the trial. Instead, Campbell’s team decided to focus almost exclusively on Bill Clinton’s sexual history. There was a nominal justification for this strategy—Campbell said at the time, “His custom, pattern, and practice of harassment is clearly relevant to the legal issues in the case.” In fact, the relevance of Clinton’s prior sexual history was a debatable legal point, but at this stage the Jones lawyers had virtual carte blanche to question anyone about almost anything they wanted. It was an opportunity Clinton’s enemies had been seeking for more than a decade—an open-ended fishing expedition, with subpoena power, into every rumor that had ever been told about Bill Clinton.

  The Jo
nes lawyers worked, in effect, as the legatees of Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent whose memoir made the cultural critique of the Clinton presidency. The Jones lawsuit was based on the concept of “harassment,” but in the fall of 1997 Campbell made no distinctions between women who were alleged to have had consensual encounters with Clinton and those who charged that he had made unwanted advances. To track down Clinton’s sexual history, the Rader Campbell firm retained Rick and Beverly Lambert, a husband-and-wife team of private investigators. Some, like the singer Gennifer Flowers, whose accusations nearly ended Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and who later wrote two books about her relationship with him, agreed to testify willingly. So did Dolly Kyle Browning, a Texas woman who wrote a self-published novel based on a purported romance with Clinton. Many more women fought the subpoenas, filing affidavits with Judge Wright saying that they had no information relevant to the case. Kathleen Willey went to court near her home in Virginia in an unsuccessful effort to avoid being ordered to give a deposition. (At the same time, in keeping with the spirit of the case, Willey made her own efforts to retain a literary agent and write a book about her encounter with Clinton. She ultimately demurred on her book project.)

  But the Lamberts kept after their sexual investigation of the president, and they made their greatest effort to secure the testimony of a woman named Juanita Broaddrick. Her name had first surfaced in political circles during Clinton’s last Arkansas gubernatorial campaign, in 1990, when there were rumors that she was going to accuse Clinton of raping her in the late 1970s. As of the fall of 1997, though her name had never made it into the respectable press, Broaddrick became a kind of holy grail. True, the alleged assault was so remote in time that Judge Wright would probably never allow the accusation to be aired in court, but if a deposition could be taken and then leaked, the plaintiff’s team could accomplish their goal—damaging Bill Clinton, if not helping Paula Jones.

  “Are you Juanita Broaddrick?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Ms. Broaddrick, my name is Beverly Lambert. I’m a private investigator. This is Rick. Could we talk to you for a few moments?”

  “No, no, you can’t. What’s this about?”

  “We’re doing an investigation, working for the attorneys who are representing Paula Jones.”

  “That’s what I thought. No, I don’t want to talk to you.”

  Shortly after they were retained in the case, the Lamberts made their way to the small town of Van Buren, Arkansas, where Juanita Broaddrick lived. Their initial conversation with her was tape-recorded, and the transcript offers some revealing clues about their approach to their work and a woman who would eventually play a role of considerable importance in the Clinton saga.

  Broaddrick said she had been pursued for years by reporters and “I just had to try and evade all of this.” Her memories of Clinton were “not pleasant.… It’s very private. We’re talking about something twenty years ago.”

  Rick tried another tack. “Do you feel in your mind that Paula Jones …?”

  “Oh, she’s telling the truth.… Anything she would say bad about him, she’s telling the truth,” Broaddrick replied.

  Rick picked up the thought. “All of the attorneys we are working for are good strong Christian men, and they are taking it with the risk of knowing what could happen, and we are, too. We’ve already been warned about the dangers and what could happen.” Even in private settings like this one, the myth of the Clinton hit teams surfaced.

  “We’re Christians,” Beverly explained.

  “You’re a Christian?” Rick asked.

  “Yeah,” Broaddrick answered.

  “The reason we took the case,” Rick went on, “the reason those attorneys took the case, this is a law firm that is all Christians.”

  “There’s just no way I can get on the witness stand and tell that,” Broaddrick said with some finality. Then she referred the Lamberts to her attorney, who was also an Arkansas state senator.

  “Is he a Democrat or a Republican senator?” Rick asked.

  “Republican.”

  “Good,” the investigator said.

  Broaddrick stuck with her refusal to tell her story to the Jones team and filed a sworn affidavit stating, “I do not have any information to offer regarding a nonconsensual or unwelcome sexual advance by Mr. Clinton.” She also gave a sworn deposition to the same effect. Broaddrick would later recant both of these statements and assert that Clinton had raped her.

  Beverly Lambert certainly thought they were on the right track. Not long after their interview of Broaddrick, Beverly told me later, she saw a “black helicopter” circling over her family’s farm, outside Tyler, Texas. Because the Lamberts regarded the helicopter as the prelude to a White House–sponsored assault to obtain their files from the Jones case, they promptly moved the records to a more secure location.

  The pious murmurs of Campbell and the Lamberts had a different sound from the ribald prattle of Tripp and Goldberg, but they merely represented the sacred and profane sides of the same coin. As the end of 1997 drew near, the literary team on the East Coast and the legal team in Dallas had reached much the same conclusions—that the Jones case represented the best way to hasten Clinton’s destruction. For the lawyers, their weapon was the subpoena; for the agent and putative author, their tool was the fragile psyche of one Monica Lewinsky.

  “You know what I just want to say to him?” Monica Lewinsky asked her friend Linda Tripp. “I just want to be like—you know what I think? I just have to say this. Okay?”

  “What?” said Tripp.

  “The most pathetic commentary on this entire relationship is that it will be two years next month, and I have no clue how he feels about me.…”

  “I think you have a lot of information,” Tripp answered. “You have to sort through what you feel resonates to you. I think—I think there is no one outside of you and him who can really determine what level of emotion was there.…”

  And so the conversations went, for hour after droning hour. There were few better measures of Tripp’s dedication to her book research and Clinton-hating than the simple fact that she tolerated Lewinsky’s inane chatter for so long. Their talks occasionally drifted into areas like dieting and hair care, but mostly focused on a few themes: Monica’s desire to leave the Pentagon for a new job at the White House; her uncertainty about Clinton’s feelings for her; her resentment of the women who had succeeded in getting access to him; her frustration with Betty Currie for failing to engineer more frequent contact between her and the president. Yet despite the endless repetitions and slight variations on these leitmotifs, Tripp remained a rapt audience. “Now, listen to me,” she said at one point. “If you get a call [from Clinton] tonight, I don’t care what time it is, will you please call me?” On another day, Lewinsky made a rare inquiry about Tripp’s life. “Oh, please tell me about your weekend,” Monica offered. But Tripp would have none of it, answering, “Wait a minute. Come on, come on, come on. So what about Betty? What is Betty saying?”

  Tripp posed in these conversations as a sort of wise aunt—commiserating, consoling, concentrating, as she often said, on “what’s best for you.” She expressed disdain for Clinton’s behavior, but she also advised Monica on preserving her relationship with him. “You know,” Tripp mused at one point, “I have to say this because I’ve thought about it a lot recently. If he for one minute considered someone doing this to his daughter—”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Lewinsky jumped in. “I thought the same thing, you know? I know. What would you tell your daughter to do?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Tripp replied. “In fact, that’s a question you might want to ask him. I mean, he would die rather than let this happen to Chelsea, but you’re supposed to be a stoic soldier.” (“Sigh,” the Starr transcript advises.) “Some fifty-year-old man decides to have an intimate relationship with his [deleted] daughter, and then she—oh, it defies imagination. Well, who would want to with her?” (That last line, disparaging Chelsea’s app
earance, was an especially rich Tripp touch.)

  For all the whining, though, Tripp and Goldberg, who were speaking to each other often during this period, made clever use of the conversations to close the vise on Clinton. For her part, Lewinsky still entertained dreams of resuming her relationship with the president. On September 30, 1997—the day before Donovan Campbell officially took over the Jones case—Lewinsky wrote Clinton a jokey memo in an effort to wangle an invitation to see him. Heading it “Memorandum for: Handsome; Subject: The New Deal,” Lewinsky wrote that they had not visited or spoken in six weeks. She promised that she “will be on my best behavior and not stressed out when I come (to see you, that is).” She concluded by comparing herself to one of her presidential forebears. “Oh, and remember,” Lewinsky wrote, “FDR would never have turned down a visit from Lucy Mercer!” Clinton did call Lewinsky late that evening, when, she testified later, they “possibly” had phone sex, but they also discussed the possibility that she might return to the White House. It was now ten months into the president’s second term, and Lewinsky was no closer to returning to the White House than she had been when she was evicted a year and a half earlier. Monica was primed for disappointment, and on October 6, Linda Tripp dashed her hopes once and for all.