A Vast Conspiracy Page 21

  Clinton’s defense team exploited this quirk in a most cynical way. By retaining Bristow, Ferguson had plugged into the Arkansas Democratic establishment. Indeed, Bristow was at that time engaged in a successful campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1998. (Bristow lost the general election to the incumbent Republican.) There was never any doubt who was running the case. Bennett not only represented the president but had the resources for private investigators and other expensive assistance. But Bennett made sure that all of the inquiries into Jones’s sex life were made in the name of Clinton’s codefendant, Danny Ferguson.

  But as so often happened in this lawsuit, things did not work out precisely as planned—as was apparent early on in “Bristow’s” deposition of Dennis Kirkland.

  “Did you do anything to prepare for the deposition today?” he was asked.

  “No,” Kirkland said. Then he paused and corrected himself. “Ironed my shirt,” he said. “I ironed my shirt.”

  One question left unresolved by Dennis Kirkland’s deposition was whether Paula Corbin had worse taste in men than Bob Bennett did in witnesses. In the course of questioning by Bristow, Kirkland did recount his purported night of passion with Jones a decade or so earlier. At “the back gate of Camp Robinson,” in Cabot, Arkansas, Kirkland said, “[a]fter we got there, we kissed awhile. We had oral sex, and we had sex.…”

  “How many hours had you known her at this point in time?”

  “I’m going to say approximately three or four.…”

  “Did she in any way appear to be offended by the idea of oral sex?” Bristow asked.

  “No,” replied Kirkland. “She unzipped my pants, you know, if you want to be just blunt.”

  “That’s what I want,” Bristow said.

  But that was about as good as things went for the president on this day. As for the seriatim blow jobs that had so captivated Bennett, it turned out that Kirkland had only secondhand information about his friends’ intimacies. “Never actually saw anything happen, but I had been told,” he said. Moreover, Kirkland conceded that on the night in question, he had probably had “five, six, seven, eight even” beers. As for his life after this incident, Kirkland had lost his football scholarship at the University of Arkansas because of drug use, had been convicted of forgery, and made his living, such as it was, trying to “fix the fences and see after cows” at his grandfather’s closed-down farm. One cannot imagine that a jury would have found much to admire in Kirkland, and Bennett and Bristow might have thought better of presenting his uncorroborated ten-year-old tale to the jury if the case had ever gone to trial.

  In a way, though, Kirkland’s deposition proved typical of several dozen that were taken by both sides in late 1997. Everyone—the witnesses, the lawyers, even the clients—was diminished by the degrading process of microscopic analysis. There were, for example, the Arkansas state troopers, whose supposed outrage at Clinton’s behavior set the wheels of the case in motion. Buddy Young supervised Roger Perry and Larry Patterson, the aspiring authors who were Brock’s primary sources for the American Spectator article. What, the Clinton lawyers wondered, did Young know of his subordinates’ ambitions?

  “You’ve got to know and understand Larry Patterson,” Young replied. “Larry Patterson’s mentality and objective in life was to sleep with as many women as he could. You could not have a conversation with Larry Patterson more than five minutes that sex didn’t enter into it and whose britches he was trying to get in.… So any time that Bill Clinton had contact with an attractive lady, in Larry Patterson’s mind, the objective was to get in her britches.… That’s his view of life. That’s what he did.”

  Did Patterson actually know of sexual misconduct by Clinton?

  “I don’t know,” said Young, whom Clinton had appointed to a federal job, much to the resentment of other troopers. “I know that I doubt seriously that Larry Patterson can testify that he knows that Bill Clinton did anything along that line. He can speculate. He can equate what he saw with what he would have done if it was him, and that’s what Larry did in most cases. If Bill Clinton had a meeting with a woman behind closed doors, Larry assumed it was for the purpose of sex, because that’s what it would have been if he had been there.…”

  And Roger Perry?

  “… Roger had to repay … two hundred and seventy dollars to the state to pay for long-distance telephone calls on our security telephone to his girlfriends. He fessed up, paid up, and that was the end of that deal.”

  Did he and Patterson hang out together?

  “Yes, they did. They were both divorced, and they partied together regularly.” (Closing the circle, Patterson went on to serve as the caretaker and a rent-free tenant on property that Cliff Jackson owned in Little Rock.) Based on Young’s and the other depositions, it seemed just as likely that the troopers used Clinton to pick up women as that the governor employed them for that purpose.

  For all their shabbiness, however, the depositions do contain the best available clues for deciphering the events of May 8, 1991. The aftermath of the incident—Jones’s lawsuit and Clinton’s impeachment—so outweigh the underlying encounter that it’s tempting simply to avoid the issue. Still, the question remains: What, if anything, happened in that room at the Excelsior Hotel? Only two people know for sure, but, based on the available evidence, it appears that Bill Clinton and Paula Jones both lied about the incident.

  The speech at the Excelsior Hotel was a routine event for Governor Clinton, but it took place on a day that had a special intensity for him—and for Paula Corbin. His triumphant speech in Cleveland two days earlier had been politically intoxicating; he was finally going to be a realistic candidate for president. For her part, Paula Corbin had worked for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (AIDC) for only three months, and the day held portents for her, too. She was going to dress up, get out of the office, and have the chance to meet high-powered executives, including, perhaps, the governor. As her boss, Clydine Pennington, testified, “she was just excited.”

  That excitement carried over to the event itself—a conference of public- and private-sector executives on improving quality in goods and services. Paula had arrived early at the AIDC office, where Pennington had questioned her “inappropriate” attire. Paula then traveled the couple of miles to the Excelsior in a state car with a group of colleagues. She and Pam Blackard were posted at the registration table outside the ballroom (which is now known as the President Bill Clinton Ballroom), and they handed out badges to the 150 guests.

  Clinton arrived at the hotel shortly after eight in the morning, and he was greeted at the door by his economic aide, Phil Price, who took Clinton to a room that had been reserved for him on the eighth floor. Clinton attended many events at the Excelsior, which is the biggest hotel in Little Rock, and the governor was often provided with a room to use while he was there. In the room, Price and Dave Harrington, the AIDC director, briefed Clinton on the plans for the day, and then they went downstairs to the ballroom. (Oddly, several AIDC staff members had distinct memories of this conference because the sound system faltered all day long, which was especially embarrassing for a conference devoted to “quality.” Harrington later apologized to the attendees and offered refunds.)

  Clinton left the ballroom after the first break, and he stopped to chat and snack on coffee and doughnuts. While Clinton was speaking in the ballroom, Paula and Pam Blackard had been having a flirty exchange with Ferguson, the bodyguard, asking to see his gun. Their attention was quickly drawn to the governor when he stood nearby. According to Ferguson, “I went over and started small-talking with her, and they were kind of giggling about the governor’s pants being too short. And [Paula] said that she thought he was good-looking, had sexy hair, wanted me to tell him that.”

  Ferguson passed Paula’s message along to Clinton. “He had come back that she had that ‘come-hither’ look,” he testified. Clinton asked Ferguson to get the key to the room upstairs, saying that “he was expecting a ca
ll from the White House.” (In his article, David Brock scoffed at the notion that George Bush would have been calling Clinton at this point, but governors often talk to White House staffers. It is also possible that Ferguson heard a garbled message. Earlier that morning, Clinton had told Phil Price to return a phone call to “Senator Kerry.” Price called John Kerry, of Massachusetts, but he learned that it was really Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, who had telephoned. Clinton may have gone to the room to return a call to a senator, not the White House.)

  As Ferguson was taking Clinton up to the room, the trooper testified, “he told me if Paula wanted to meet him, then she can come up.” After Clinton was settled in the room, Ferguson returned to the ballroom and handed Paula a note with the room number on it, “thinking that if she wanted to go up, she’d go up.” Paula and Blackard then discussed whether she should go upstairs. Blackard was “curious” about what Clinton wanted. Paula said she thought Clinton might offer her a job. “Go ahead and go up and see,” Blackard urged.

  Paula tracked Ferguson down and said she wanted to go see Clinton. “Do you want me to go with you?” Ferguson asked. Paula said yes, and they went up to the room together.

  It is worth pausing to note what everyone’s expectations might reasonably have been at this point. Paula’s thoughts of a job offer seem dubious. By her own account, she and the governor had not yet exchanged a single sentence. On what basis might he have offered her a job? Moreover, she had sought out the introduction to Clinton, not vice versa. The governor understood that she wanted to meet him—knew that she thought he had “sexy hair”—and invited her to the hotel room. If she hadn’t wanted to go, she could have remained downstairs. Clinton might have assumed that given her coquettish exchanges with Ferguson, Paula might be interested in a dalliance with him. That, of course, didn’t give him the right to do anything she didn’t want. But given both of their histories, a sexual encounter between the two of them might well have been on his mind—and hers.

  In the years that followed, Clinton said many times, including under oath, that he had “no memory” of being inside the room with Jones. It seems virtually certain, however, that they were in the room together. She recalled its unusual arrangement—a couch with two chairs, but no bed. (Phil Price remembered it the same way.) It is hard to imagine how she could have invented that detail. Of course, her version of what happened inside the room became well known. I-love-your-curves. I’m-not-that-kind-of-girl. Kiss-it. I-don’t-want-to-make-you-do-anything-you-don’t-want-to-do.

  Ferguson, Blackard, and Jones agree that she was in the room for somewhere around fifteen minutes. Ferguson had returned to the second floor, and when Paula saw him, she asked whether the governor was going to be at the conference for the rest of the day. He said they had to return to the mansion for lunch, but he didn’t know the rest of their plans. “And then she asked me if the governor had any girlfriends,” Ferguson testified. “She said that she would be his girlfriend.” (Paula, of course, denied making any such remark, and this comment was the basis of her defamation suit against Ferguson.)

  Paula later asserted that she was immediately distraught after the incident in the hotel room. She conveyed her anguish to Pam Blackard, at the registration table, and then immediately left the conference and drove to the office of her friend Debra Ballentine, in a building just outside downtown Little Rock. Ballentine testified that Paula arrived at her office at around 4 P.M. Ballentine’s testimony raised an important question, however: At what time of day did Paula go up to Clinton’s hotel room?

  It was a critical part of Jones’s case that the incident took place in the late afternoon. That would explain how she bolted the hotel for Ballentine’s office. But the evidence strongly suggests that the incident took place before lunch. Oddly, there was an important event on the governor’s calendar that day, but it wasn’t the AIDC conference. Clinton hosted a lunch at the governor’s mansion for, of all people, the crown prince of Luxembourg, who had recently invested in a factory in Arkansas.

  Did Clinton return to the Excelsior after lunch? Clinton’s lawyers tried hard to prove that he did not, but the matter could never be resolved with certainty. His schedule for the day was ambiguous. Ferguson insisted that he did not return to the hotel after the luncheon with the prince. (Neither did Price and Harrington, who would have accompanied Clinton.) Also, the hotel’s electronic key system cut off Clinton’s access to the eighth-floor room at 11:45 A.M. No one—not the guests or the speakers at the conference—could swear to have seen Clinton at the conference in the afternoon. In addition, Paula left her car at the AIDC, so it’s hard to figure how she drove straight from the hotel to Ballentine’s office. In short, it seems more than likely that Clinton’s encounter with Jones took place in the late morning.

  So what? What difference does the timing make? It means that Paula Corbin, far from being immediately horrified, waited all afternoon before she complained to her friends about the incident. She had hours to think about what effect the encounter might have on her then new relationship with the jealous Stephen Jones. It was only after she had a chance to worry about Steve that she decided to complain—to her friends, her sister, her mother.

  But in the days immediately after the conference, Paula did not complain about Clinton—just the opposite, in fact. Several colleagues from the AIDC testified that she was very happy to have met the governor. According to Pennington, Paula “specifically told me that she was excited that she had met the governor, held her hand out to say that he had shaken hands with her, and that he liked what she had on, and he liked her hair, and she was … thrilled she met the governor.” Paula told her boss she wanted to work for the governor and on his campaign for president. Cherry Duckett, the deputy director of AIDC, heard the same enthusiasm from Paula.

  Even before the conference, Paula had hung around Clinton’s office in the capitol building, routinely spending a half hour there twice a day when she made deliveries from the AIDC offices across the street. On the day after the conference, Paula told Carol Phillips, who was Clinton’s lead receptionist at the capitol, that a trooper had arranged for her to meet the governor at the hotel. Paula said he had been “nice” and “gentle” and “sweet.” Paula took to calling Phillips, asking about Clinton’s schedule and when he might be in the office (behavior that roughly paralleled Lewinsky’s calls to Betty Currie). Once Clinton did run into Paula in the hallway of the capitol, and he put his arm around her and said, “Don’t we make a great couple—the beauty and the beast?” But other than this harmless banter, there was no further contact between them.

  About a week after the conference, Danny Ferguson ran into Paula at the capitol. “She asked me if the governor had asked about her,” Ferguson testified. “I said, ‘No.’ She asked me for a piece of paper. She wrote her phone number down and said, ‘If he wants to talk to me, he can call me at this number. If my boyfriend answers, either hang up or tell him you’ve got the wrong number.’ ” Ferguson said he threw the paper away. Clinton never called. (Paula asserted that Ferguson asked her for her phone number, which she refused to give him.)

  So where does all the evidence lead? All in all, the record suggests that Clinton and Paula Corbin had a consensual sexual encounter in the room at the Excelsior Hotel. Clinton, it seems, lied about it from the start. When Ferguson returned to the hotel room after Paula left, the trooper testified, the governor recounted, “Nothing happened. We just talked.” As for the president’s subsequent claims that he had no memory of the incident, that seems unlikely, no matter how eventful a life he has led. Clinton denied making the approach because he always denied these accusations—and because, with some justification, he thought that his sex life was his own business.

  In this scenario, Paula’s motives seem more complex. She may have had a fling that she quickly regretted, and then, as Clinton ignored her, her resentments simmered. When the Spectator article ran, almost three years later, she took it as an opportunity to settle an old score—as lo
ng as she could do so without enraging her jealous husband. The best clue to her motives may have come out in a chance encounter in the ever-small world of Arkansas. Just after the Spectator article was published, in December 1993, Paula came home from California to visit Arkansas with her baby son. Her friend Debra Ballentine had heard about the story in The American Spectator and asked her out to dinner to discuss it. They took their toddlers to the Golden Corral steak house in North Little Rock, and Paula spied a familiar face at a nearby table—Danny Ferguson. Ferguson’s wife noticed that an unfamiliar woman was staring at him, so he turned to face her. After she passed by on a visit to the salad bar, Paula motioned Ferguson to come talk to her.

  In testimony and interviews, Jones, Ballentine, and Ferguson remembered their conversation much the same way. Ferguson began by apologizing. He said he didn’t know Brock was going to use her name—and he added that Clinton had told him nothing had happened between them. Then he explained a little about how the troopers’ plans for a book had fallen apart. “I got screwed,” Ferguson said.

  Then—as so often happened in the many-tentacled Paula Jones case—the subject turned to money. There were differences in recollections about who brought the subject up first, but Jones wondered how much money the tabloids would pay for an account of her encounter with the president. Ferguson said that Roger Perry had told him the Enquirer would pay $500,000. Ferguson warned her about the consequences. “You better think about your family,” he said, “because I’ve been through it, and they start to dig up dirt.”