A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Clinton had long ago stated that he remembered nothing about any meeting with Paula Jones in a hotel room, so his testimony on the incident itself was sure to be uneventful. The real controversy would involve what the plaintiff’s lawyers called the “pattern and practice” issues—that is, Clinton’s testimony about his relationships with other women. As Bennett told Judge Wright, “All they can really ask him is—is sex.” In a practical sense, then, the president’s deposition marked the culmination of the campaign by journalists (led by Brock and Isikoff) and activists (initiated by Cliff Jackson and his fellow Clinton-haters) to explore the secrets of Bill Clinton’s sex life. At last they all had what they really wanted: Clinton under oath on the subject of adultery.

  Wright spoke with a deep sense of unease about what was to come—the indignity, the seaminess, of it all. Like so few people in this story, Susan Wright had no agenda of her own, only a desire to provide justice in as fair and dignified a manner as possible. She had summoned the lawyers to make a last pitch to prevent her court, and the country, from heading into the abyss.

  “The idea, of course, is to be above politics, to be removed from it. That is my goal,” the plain-spoken judge began, but in light of how the case had proceeded, “I feel helpless. And for that reason, I would like for you all to settle this case. I want you to get the thing settled. This case needs—it just screams for settlement.”

  Bennett urged the judge not to hold out much hope that the case would end before the president’s deposition. “Your Honor,” he said, “with all due respect, I think we should use our time to focus on the deposition next Saturday and the trial. This case is not going to settle, as much as Your Honor wants it to settle. We are not going to even consider the amounts of money that they demand. Their latest demand, Your Honor, is $1.5 million, plus I have to take care of this $800,000 lien [filed by Jones’s prior lawyers, Davis and Cammarata]. We are not going to pay it. We’re not going to pay anything close to that.… I made every effort with Mr. Davis and Cammarata, we got reasonably close.… But I’ve had it.”

  In retrospect, Bennett’s tough line might appear foolhardy, but he was only reflecting the views of his client and a realistic assessment of his adversaries. For all his bluster, Bennett would have been delighted to settle the case. As a lawyer who had not tried a case in a decade, Bennett was not one to take heedless gambles on the whims of jurors. The president and first lady thought that a settlement would simply prompt more claims against them, and they wanted to maintain a hard line with the Jones lawyers. That was fine with the team from Dallas. They had entered the case, it seemed, as much to humiliate the president as to compensate their client, and an amicable settlement would have done nothing to advance their political agenda. Paula Jones’s legal situation had deteriorated, yet her lawyers had increased their settlement demand by 300 percent.

  Judge Wright wanted to step up the pressure on the Jones lawyers in the only way she could—by signaling her feelings about the merits of their client’s case. “I’ll say quite candidly that with respect to Paula Jones’s case, I think that it is unlikely”—here the judge hesitated, choosing her words carefully—“I think it’s unlikely that a jury will find for her if this matter goes to trial.… And I regret, personally, that she was not willing to accept what was being talked about last summer. And I was prepared to tell her that I thought she should accept it.… I would have almost forced her to take it.”

  The judge was suggesting that she might throw the case out on summary judgment—the motion that the defendants would file as soon as depositions were completed. “As you know, the record with respect to sexual harassment aspect is weak at best.… I mean, Ms. Jones is just going to have a difficult time proving her case.… I’m going to look very carefully at the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. The way it looks now, more likely than not, she will fail.”

  And in the event the judge let the case go to trial, Wright said that Jones could expect a tougher time. “I have been a lifelong resident of Arkansas,” she said. “I’m aware of Bill Clinton’s reputation for womanizing.… But he doesn’t have the reputation of being a harasser. He doesn’t. And you’re not going to be able to find a jury with twelve people who have never heard that Bill Clinton is a womanizer. But I don’t believe before this case was brought he ever had a reputation for doing anything other than just chasing skirts. You know, just having a good time.…” But the lawyers on both sides were in no mood to listen to this voice of reason.

  So Susan Wright turned to the doleful task of listening to the plaintiff’s lawyers summarize their case. She quickly recognized that they planned an extended tour of Bill Clinton’s sex life. She didn’t want to see the trial sidetracked in that way, but she knew, too, that the law left her little choice. “I’m also aware that in sexual assault cases, the Rules of Evidence promulgated by the Violence Against Women Act has certainly opened it up. So I can’t say that you can’t call any of the witnesses” regarding extramarital affairs, she said. Wright was referring to the change in the law that Susan Molinari had sponsored, and that President Clinton had championed. The judge knew, as perhaps the president did not, that the line between consensual and nonconsensual sex had blurred to the point that she would have to admit some evidence of both.

  Jim Fisher, the lawyer from Campbell’s firm who would question Clinton on Saturday, said the plaintiff’s case would be divided into three parts. First, there would be evidence about the events at the Excelsior Hotel. Second, they would call “witnesses that relate to the pattern and practice issue, the habit evidence … focused on his harassment of other women.” And finally, “the cover-up, the suppression of evidence, the intimidation of witnesses in a concerted, systematic effort to prevent our client and others like her from developing cases that they might bring.” Fisher rushed through the first category—it was, of course, never of great interest to the Dallas team—and then moved on to the subject of other women.

  “With regard to the pattern and practice evidence,” Fisher said, “the evidence involving other victims, there are three troopers … Roger Perry, Larry Patterson, and L. D. Brown.” They were, of course, part of the same group who had supplied Brock and Isikoff in the early days of the story. “With regard to the women themselves,” Fisher went on, “they would include Kathleen Willey—Your Honor, do I need to refer to these individuals by a Jane Doe designation?”

  For purposes of public documents, Wright had ordered several of the women to be referred to as Jane Does, in order to protect their privacy. But because they were meeting in secret session, the judge ordered the lawyer to use the real names. “Let’s just give me the names, because it’s confusing,” said the judge. “Go ahead. Kathleen Willey.”

  Fisher resumed: “Beth Coulson,” an Arkansas woman whom Clinton had appointed to a state judgeship (and who denied any improper relationship with him), “Monica Lewinsky. I believe that is spelled L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y.”

  “Can you tell me who she is?” Wright asked.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I never heard of her,” the judge said.

  “She’s the young woman who worked in the White House for a period of time and was later transferred to a job at the Pentagon.”

  “All right,” said the judge. “Thanks.”

  Fisher then resumed the litany. Shelia Lawrence, the wife of a major Democratic fund-raiser; Juanita Broaddrick; Gennifer Flowers; Dolly Kyle Browning, a purported high school girlfriend who claimed to have had an extended affair with Clinton; Marilyn Jo Jenkins, an Arkansas friend; Cyd Dunlap, an Isikoff discovery who claimed that Clinton had propositioned her in 1986. For all Fisher’s talk about “harassment” and “victims,” only three of these eight women—Willey (an alleged groping), Broaddrick (a claimed sexual assault), and Dunlap (an asserted proposition by telephone)—had had even arguably nonconsensual contact with Clinton.

  And there was one more thing. “Depending on how the president’s deposition goes,” said Fisher, “
we may designate an expert on sexual addiction.”

  Wright had been holding herself back during most of Fisher’s presentation, but this was more than she could take. “Well, hold it now,” she said. “I think, really, Gennifer Flowers and the troopers and Paula Jones is bad enough. And—because I’m not going to let you use my courtroom to—you know, just to—to spend a long time throwing dirt at the president.” But Fisher was serious. He wanted the judge’s permission to give a copy of the president’s deposition to a psychiatrist who “will render an opinion whether an examination is warranted or not”—on the question of whether Bill Clinton was a sex addict. In other words, the Dallas team had come up with the same theory of their case as the one behind Isikoff’s projected book.

  The whole idea was absurd as a legal matter, more so because Wright had never heard the phrase “sexual addiction” until Fisher mentioned it in her courtroom. “I thought, well, that’s funny, that’s a good, funny term,” she said. “I didn’t realize that this is a serious—you know, that you are very serious about this.… I just don’t think too much of your theory, Mr. Fisher.” Repeatedly, the judge tried to remind Fisher that his case, in theory at least, involved his client’s claim of employment discrimination, not psychobabble about the president’s deepest urges. Fisher’s evidence of a cover-up was even thinner. He said they wanted to depose Jack Palladino, a San Francisco private investigator who had worked for the 1992 Clinton campaign, and Sam Jones, a Little Rock lawyer, but Fisher couldn’t say what relevant evidence they might provide.

  Wright wound up talking to the lawyers nearly all day on Monday. The judge was torn. She wanted to limit the lawsuit to a fairly straightforward matter—“the issue is whether he sexually harassed Paula Jones and caused her damages—and that’s really it.” But the law did compel her to allow the plaintiff’s lawyers to wander through Bill Clinton’s sexual past. Though she held no especially fond feelings for the president, Wright had a sense of foreboding about the spectacle of a sexual cross-examination of him. But as the midwinter skies began to darken in Pine Bluff, Wright saw that Saturday’s deposition was going to proceed. She agreed to remain on call at her home in Little Rock, so the parties could telephone her if any disputes arose at the deposition.

  If she was called on Saturday, Bennett warned the judge, she should not use a portable phone, because her words might be intercepted. “I’ll certainly try to, you know, remain close at hand,” Wright said. “I’m already thinking what room in my house am I going to go that doesn’t have those little phones. I do have one—my daughter has a telephone that’s a teddy bear. It’s a speakerphone, and the bear talks.”

  Two days later, Bob Bennett made a call that might have saved Bill Clinton’s presidency. Earlier in the proceedings, Bennett had said, in a spirit of business as usual, that he did not want Judge Wright to attend Clinton’s deposition. She had not attended the depositions of other witnesses—federal judges almost never preside over these examinations—and the final pretrial conference had proceeded on the assumption that she would not attend Clinton’s, either. But Monday’s secret meeting had made it so clear that the Dallas lawyers were going to focus on sexual matters that Bennett felt he had to request an exception to the general rule. On Wednesday, January 14—the day after the Starr team made its “sting tape” of Lewinsky and Tripp—Bennett requested a telephone conference with his adversaries and Judge Wright. In its decision in Jones v. Clinton, the Supreme Court had said that the judge should give considerable deference to the office of the president in presiding over the case. Accordingly, Bennett argued, Judge Wright should travel to Washington and protect the office—not the man—in person. Wright was persuaded and made plans to come to Washington on Saturday, January 17.

  Wright’s decision to attend conferred an enormous advantage on Clinton. All other witnesses had to answer every question that was put to them, no matter how irrelevant or abusive. Paula Jones had to endure Bill Bristow’s degrading inquisition about her sex life even though those questions would probably never have been allowed to be aired in open court. Bill Clinton would have no such problem. The judge would be available to rule on the questions to him before he was forced to answer them—which, as a practical matter, greatly narrowed the range of questions Fisher could ask.

  So Susan Webber Wright and her clerk Barry Ward joined in the great convergence that was taking place in Washington in the days leading up to Bill Clinton’s deposition. The events of Saturday, January 17, would change everything. The deposition, Newsweek’s deadline, Lewinsky’s decision whether to cooperate secretly with Starr—all would be resolved on that day. As in the final act of a drawing-room farce, all the players—among them, the Dallas lawyers, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, George Conway, Michael Isikoff, Bob Bennett, Mitch Ettinger, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, Monica Lewinsky, Jackie Bennett, Bruce Udolf, Paula Jones, Kenneth Starr, and Bill Clinton—took their places for the denouement.

  Fisher returned home to Dallas after the secret court session in Pine Bluff to complete the preparations for his historic encounter with the president. Fisher was no less conservative than his fellow partners at the firm, but he had a gentler, less confrontational manner than Campbell. Where Campbell served on the board of the Rutherford Institute, Fisher helped run a Christian ministry called the Art of Family Living. It hurt Fisher’s feelings that Clinton’s lawyer Mitch Ettinger referred to the Dallas firm as “the Branch Davidians,” whereas Campbell took the jibe as a badge of honor. Because Fisher had smoother edges, and also greater experience with depositions, than Campbell, the Dallas lawyers had agreed from the beginning that he would examine the president.

  But as Fisher sat down to make his plans, he had to confront the fact that he and his team had been consistently outmaneuvered by Bennett and his. (Indeed, Fisher was interrupted in his final preparations by the conference call in which Bennett asked the judge to attend the deposition.) Fisher knew that the president’s lawyers had spent an enormous amount of energy portraying the Dallas lawyers as political extremists—“drooling monsters,” as Fisher put it. So Fisher wanted to avoid any unnecessary prurience in the course of the deposition. Still, the entire focus of the plaintiff’s case had been to show that the president was, in deed if not in name, a sexual addict. Fisher’s dilemma was how to make that case without talking too much about sex.

  Fisher’s answer was to turn, as others did, to the definition of sex in Representative Susan Molinari’s Violence Against Women Act. Fisher sat down with a copy of the definition and altered it slightly so that it would cover (he thought) consensual as well as unwelcome sexual advances by the president. By using this definition, Fisher believed, he could ask Clinton questions about his sexual activities but do so in a manner that would not offend the judge. The definition that Fisher labored to create at his word processor would turn out to be another event of Wednesday, January 14, that helped guarantee the president’s survival in office.

  Fisher’s partners, on the other hand, were still conducting their dance with Linda Tripp in preparation for the deposition. On Thursday, the lawyers all flew to Washington. Their top priority, of course, was to get copies of Tripp’s tapes. If they had the tapes, they could confront Clinton with them during his deposition. Fisher’s partner Wes Holmes had been assigned to track the tapes down, and he wasn’t making any progress. Several times on Thursday, Jim Moody, Tripp’s lawyer, had canceled meetings with him. (Unknown to Holmes, Moody was just that day collecting the tapes from Kirby Behre, playing them for Isikoff and his colleagues at Newsweek, and then taking them to Ann Coulter’s apartment to listen to them with George Conway.)

  By Friday, January 16, Holmes was growing frantic. Lucianne Goldberg had been telling the Jones team for weeks about the existence of the tapes, but Holmes couldn’t get Tripp’s lawyer to give them to him. (In fact, this was the day that Moody turned them over to the Office of Independent Counsel.) And while Holmes was trying to reach Moody, the Starr lawyers were meeting with Lewinsky
at the Ritz-Carlton and attempting to persuade her to wear a wire on Currie, Jordan, and perhaps the president.

  Finally, late on Friday, Holmes and Moody did speak, and Tripp’s lawyer proposed a deal. He wouldn’t turn over the tapes (Moody didn’t say that he had already given them to Starr), but Moody would allow one of the Jones lawyers to interview Tripp that evening. So Holmes picked up Moody in a rented car and they set off for Tripp’s home in the distant Maryland suburb of Columbia. (Not surprisingly, because Holmes didn’t know the area and Moody couldn’t see, they got lost on the way.) The meeting lasted only half an hour, and Tripp mostly provided information that the Jones team already knew from their conversations with Goldberg. More disappointed than pleased, Holmes returned empty-handed to the Jones team’s base at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

  There, the happiest woman was Susan Carpenter-McMillan. Paula Jones was delighted, too. At the Pentagon City Mall, Susan had surprised Paula by buying them matching Jones New York suits for the big day on Saturday. Susie would wear cream, Paula black. Paula’s mentor bought two identical sets of earrings as well.

  By late Friday, the rumors were everywhere. An intern. Tapes. As the story reached the lawyers at Williams & Connolly, who were defending Clinton on Whitewater, there was an intern claiming an affair with the president, and there were tapes about something else. As with so many rumors, truth and fiction mingled in an unreadable tangle. On this day, Isikoff kept a lunch appointment with Lanny Davis, a White House lawyer who served as a spokesman on scandal issues. Davis found Isikoff distracted and preoccupied. In the course of a rambling conversation, Davis happened to say, “These womanizing stories are old hat and still haven’t gone anywhere.”