A Vast Conspiracy Page 3

  Steve was thirty-three at the time, and he had just moved Paula and their son, Madison, to Long Beach, California, so he could pursue a career in show business. He had tried to make it as an actor in Little Rock, but there wasn’t much of a market for his talents. He had basically had only a single small role—as the ghost of Elvis in Jim Jarmusch’s quirky independent film Mystery Train. Like Elvis, Steve hailed from Memphis and had a soft Southern accent and sleepy good looks. For years, he had made a living as a ticket agent for Northwest Airlines, first at the Little Rock airport and now at Los Angeles International. Colleagues remembered him as quiet and a little sullen. When he did talk, it was often about sex. He’d probe coworkers—men and women—about the state of their sex lives, and he’d display photographs of his girlfriend Paula in skimpy costumes—garter belts, stockings, and the like.

  Steve Jones also despised the governor. Even during his governorship, Clinton had an unusual ability to generate passionate hostility, feelings that often transcended mere political differences. Indeed, one cannot understand the long siege of his presidency without weighing the depth and breadth of these emotions. Clinton haters were sometimes so obsessed by their feelings that they acted against their own political or financial self-interest. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Steve had posted Bush/Quayle bumper stickers on his locker at the airport and had even worn a campaign button until his supervisors told him to remove it. But politics only began to explain the depth of Jones’s feelings. There would come to be a personal dimension to Steve’s feelings as well.

  For his part, Traylor did a little legal research and made a revealing discovery. If he were to sue anyone on Jones’s behalf, she would have a better chance of winning a case against the president of the United States than against a small magazine. The power of the news media had manifested itself in the legal world. Public figures like the president enjoyed no legal protections comparable to those erected, on First Amendment grounds, to benefit the press. For Paula Jones, it would be almost impossible to file a libel suit and win. (This was especially true because the Spectator identified Jones only by her first name; most readers could not have known that the story referred to her, so it could scarcely have damaged her reputation.) In most circumstances, that would be the end of the matter. A nasty story in a magazine generates either a libel suit or nothing. But at this early moment in the case, the fundamentally political nature of the dispute first revealed itself. Traylor was far from a sophisticated man, but he knew the only potential leverage he had in the situation was against Clinton. The Spectator would likely just ignore the threat of a lawsuit. But if Paula Jones pursued the matter against the president, it might embarrass him—and Clinton might pay something to avoid that fate. Besides, Steve Jones had never shown any inclination to take on the Spectator; Paula’s husband, who was the driving force in the matter from the very beginning, wanted to go after Clinton.

  In truth, Traylor never wanted to go to court at all. He made his modest living doing real estate closings and small commercial deals. The last thing he needed was to embark on a massive lawsuit. To assuage Steve, and to a lesser extent Paula, Traylor proposed that he try to “finesse” the situation. He thought he might be able to persuade Clinton to make a public statement about Paula—at best an apology but at least a statement clearing her of any improper conduct. Traylor might also win a small financial settlement. Traylor didn’t know Clinton or anyone who worked for him; in a city and state full of people with connections to the president, this fact alone demonstrated just how obscure his law practice was. But Traylor made a few calls and figured he’d found the right man to use as an emissary to the White House.

  A few days later, Traylor met George Cook after work around one of the battered linoleum tables at the Sports Page, a seedy bar downtown. By Arkansas standards, Cook, a real estate developer who had raised money for some of Clinton’s campaigns, ranked as only a peripheral friend of the president’s. But when Traylor called him to set up the meeting, Cook said that he could, if necessary, pass a message to the president’s people in Washington.

  As they sat down to their scotch and waters, Traylor described Paula’s story.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Cook told him, in a conversation both men remembered the same way. Cook identified some of the problems. It was old; it was unprovable; the Spectator story didn’t even identify Paula by her last name. “Why would you take a case like that?” Cook asked.

  “I know it’s weak, but it could be embarrassing for the president,” Traylor replied. “Now, I’m sure with my little brain and yours, we could work something out. These people are in dire straits, and they need money badly.” Traylor never said anything about wanting an apology—only money and, later on, jobs. He mentioned that he thought $25,000 would be a good amount to settle on, but later in the conversation said $15,000 might close the deal.

  Cook said it sounded like a shakedown to him. So Traylor tried another tack.

  “What about a job? Her husband wants to work in Hollywood. How about if the Thomasons gave him a job? Wouldn’t that work things out?” (The Clintons’ friends Harry Thomason and his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, produced television comedies, including Designing Women.)

  Cook said it would be illegal for the president to do that.

  At the end of the evening, Cook did promise that he would call Bruce Lindsey, an Arkansas friend who now worked as a deputy White House counsel, and ask him if he thought the president might make a statement about Jones. A day later, Cook did speak to Lindsey, who told him to forget about the whole thing. “It’s absurd,” Lindsey said. “Just another crazy coming out of the ionosphere.”

  Cook called Traylor to report on his conversation with Lindsey. “But did you speak to the president?” Traylor asked.

  “The president?” Cook replied incredulously. “If I tried to talk to the president about this, he’d have me committed.”

  Now Traylor was really stymied. He clearly wasn’t going to get anything from the president without a fight. So he thought of another approach. Steve was not just angry at the president, he was fuming about the troopers’ role in the Spectator story as well. “These no-good troopers were sitting around and talking about my wife,” Steve told the lawyer. Trooper Danny Ferguson was not identified by name in the article, but Paula knew that he had been the source for the story about her. Traylor decided to call Ferguson’s lawyer and see if he could make any headway with him. So Traylor rang Cliff Jackson.

  Jackson actually did not represent Ferguson, but Traylor made an understandable mistake. When the subject was Arkansas state troopers—or anti-Clinton activity—Jackson’s name often came to mind.

  The relationship between Bill Clinton and Cliff Jackson was the stuff of hack fiction. The parallels between their lives were so pat and obvious that it didn’t seem possible they were real. But they were, and so were the implications of Jackson’s sustaining obsession with his ancient rival. Before Traylor called Jackson, the Paula Jones case loomed as little more than a minor annoyance for the president. Jackson’s determination and sophistication turned the matter into a major crisis.

  Clinton and Jackson were both born in 1946, raised in neighboring small towns in Arkansas, and marked early for success in the future. Both were class presidents as undergraduates, Clinton at Georgetown and Jackson at Arkansas College. Clinton won a Rhodes Scholarship and Jackson a Fulbright, and they both arrived at Oxford in 1968. One was a Democrat and the other a Republican, and they both nurtured political ambitions in the same small state. They even vaguely resembled each other—tall, bulky men who played together on the same intramural basketball team in England. In temperament, though, Clinton was the extrovert, Jackson more the loner. Even with his hangdog shyness and sad blue eyes, Jackson’s comparative reticence was never mistaken for diffidence about Clinton.

  Through their time together at Oxford and then for the following few years, the two men shared a wary friendship, bu
t in the letters that Jackson shared with reporters from that period, Jackson’s hostility was always close to the surface. On August 27, 1968, Jackson wrote of Clinton to a friend: “His syrupy-sweet cultivation of friendships, and tendencies … to speak in superlatives about everyone and everything rather grates on my nerves.” Still, despite their incipient rivalry, each saw the advantage in maintaining good relations with the other. Jackson even assisted Clinton in the first great crisis of his life, over the draft for the Vietnam War.

  Jackson won a medical deferment from military service shortly after both men left Oxford. Clinton spent several years struggling with the issue, hoping, as he wrote in a famous letter to an Arkansas draft official, both to avoid a war he “opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America” and at the same time “to maintain my political viability within the system.” Jackson helped Clinton do that, and Jackson chronicled these efforts, as he was making them, in a series of letters to his then girlfriend in England. “I have had several of my friends in influential positions trying to pull strings on Bill’s behalf,” Jackson wrote in one such missive, “but we don’t have any results yet. I have also arranged for Bill to be admitted to the U of A[rkansas] law school at Fayetteville, where there is a ROTC unit affiliated with the law school.” Jackson may have exaggerated his efforts, but he did make some contacts on Clinton’s behalf. As often happened in their relationship, however, Clinton managed to do Jackson one better. The future president succeeded in avoiding the draft, ROTC, and even Arkansas’s lightly regarded law school. Jackson wrote his girlfriend, “Bill Clinton is still trying to wiggle his way out of the ‘disreputable’ Arkansas law school.”

  So Clinton went on to Yale. (Jackson went to the University of Michigan Law School.) In 1971, it was Jackson’s turn to ask Clinton for help. Jackson was seeking references for his application for a White House fellowship (which he never won). Replying on Yale Law School stationery, Clinton wrote a long and revealing letter to Jackson, portraying himself as a man in some crisis about his own future, full of new doubts about his once-clear ambitions. “Glad to hear from you,” the letter begins. “I will have to hold discussion of law practice for another time except to say I’m glad you have a job that pleases you. Can’t say I look forward to it as much as you do, but I am trying at least to learn the stuff this year, and perhaps I’ll figure out something to do with it that I can really care about.”

  The next paragraph contains a strange foreshadowing of a future scandal in Clinton’s life. “About the White House Fellowships, the best story I know on them is that virtually the only non-conservative who ever got one was a quasi-radical woman who wound up in the White House sleeping with LBJ, who made her wear a peace symbol around her waist whenever they made love. You may go far, Cliff; I doubt you will ever go that far!”

  As Clinton continued his letter, he offered some general observations about Jackson’s chances. “You know as well as I do that past a certain point there is no such thing as a non-partisan, objective selection process,” Clinton wrote. “Discretion and diplomacy aren’t demanded so much by propriety as by the necessity not to get caught.” Though the sentence is garbled, and the future president is only talking about Jackson’s application for a fellowship, there is still something chilling about it. Indeed, it summons nothing so much as the advice the president gave Dick Morris on the night of the greatest crisis of Clinton’s political life: “We’ll just have to win.” Continuing in the letter, Clinton wrote, “I don’t mind writing to [Arkansas senator J. William] Fulbright for you, if you’ll tell me what you want me to ask him to do, but you ought to know that he won’t give your politics a second thought. It would look good for Arkansas if you got the thing.”

  Clinton closed with a meditation about their respective futures. “One final thing: it is a long way from Antioch to the White House, and it may not be a bad thing to make the leap. Just always remember it’s far more important what you’re doing now than how far you’ve come. The White House is a long way from Whittier and the Pedernales, too; and Krushchev couldn’t read until he was 24, but those facts leave a lot unsaid. If you can still aspire go on; I am having a lot of trouble getting my hunger back up, and someday I may be spent and bitter that I let the world pass me by. So do what you have to do, but be careful.” In a Christmas letter sent shortly afterward, Clinton again referred to his sense of malaise. “As to the ‘disturbing undercurrents’ in my letter,” Clinton wrote, “they were not meant to sway you from your course, or to express disapproval at the kind of things you seem destined to do—only to say these things too must be considered. You cannot turn from what you must do—it would for you be a kind of suicide. But you must try not to kill a part of yourself doing them either.”

  In the next few years, however, Jackson and Clinton flipped positions. Clinton got his hunger back up, and Jackson left the fast lane, only partly out of his own choosing. In 1976, the same year that Clinton first sought public office, Jackson made his only run, as the independent party candidate to be the prosecutor for Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock. He lost, and as Clinton vaulted to national prominence, Jackson retreated to a successful but obscure law practice in Little Rock. His resentments simmered. By 1991, though he was only forty-five, Jackson had mostly retired from law practice and was living off his savings.

  To fill his time, Jackson turned to anti-Clinton activism. The intensity of Jackson’s animosity was exceeded only by the fervor of his denials that it existed. But Jackson was clearly obsessed by his former rival—and his resentments often involved the subject of sex. Indeed, as with Stephen Jones, the subject of sex was near the core of Cliff Jackson’s hostility toward Bill Clinton. So Jackson formed a group called the Alliance for Rebirth of an Independent America and led a small delegation of allies to New Hampshire to campaign against Clinton. “I felt manipulated, exploited, and deceived,” Jackson said. “Our slogan was, ‘Please, Governor Clinton—don’t do to America what you did to Arkansas.’ And we talked about how he tripled the budget, but what we really went up there to do was talk about the character issue.”

  The journey to New Hampshire ended largely in embarrassment—the Arkansans were roundly ignored—but it taught Jackson an important lesson. He could inflict far more harm on Clinton by serving as a source for journalists than by campaigning himself. Journalists could sustain little interest in the success or failure of Clinton’s policies as governor. But if Jackson could provide narratives—stories—for the national press, then he might hold their attention. Jackson’s first foray into this realm involved the draft. Jackson was savvy enough to know that the story would hurt Clinton more if Jackson could portray himself as reluctant and conscience-stricken about whether to disclose his twenty-year-old letters to his girlfriend in England. (Several reporters repeated Jackson’s descriptions of his “sleepless nights” as he weighed whether to go public.) In the end, Jackson put aside his purported misgivings and served as a chief source for the stories about Clinton and the draft, which were a major crisis for his campaign in early 1992.

  Of course, the draft story failed to deprive Clinton of the presidency, but Jackson learned from the experience. He had erred by providing the information indiscriminately. By doing so, he had deprived any single journalist of an exclusive, which would have amplified the story’s impact. Also, by circulating his complaints so broadly, Jackson had marked himself as a vocal critic of the president. That allowed Clinton’s allies to dismiss any information that came from him. When he had another opportunity, Jackson would try not to repeat these mistakes.

  In July 1993, Jackson received a call from Lynn Davis, a former director of the state police. (A Republican, Davis had run for Arkansas secretary of state in 1968, and Jackson had directed his campaign.) Davis said that he had spoken with four of Clinton’s former bodyguards in the state police, and they wanted to go public with their accusations about Clinton’s womanizing. There wasn’t anything especially high-m
inded about the troopers’ motives. As Jackson acknowledged, they felt outraged by Clinton’s conduct, but at the moment they wanted to explore the possibility of writing a book or making speeches for pay. Nor did the troopers have any evidence of actual illegal behavior by Clinton. Over the years, they had facilitated Clinton’s comings and goings for what they believed were assignations with women—and they knew they could sell that as a story about the president’s “character.” As one of the troopers, Ronnie Anderson, recalled in a sworn affidavit that was prepared but never made public in the Paula Jones litigation, Davis estimated that the quartet “could earn $2.5 million in royalties.” The troopers wanted to keep their jobs at the same time they sold out their former boss, so they figured they needed a lawyer.

  Jackson quickly agreed to help them. He met with the troopers—Anderson, Roger Perry, Larry Patterson, and Danny Ferguson—and proposed that he serve as their exclusive representative in their dealings with the press. Anderson, recalling the meeting in his affidavit, said that “it had become clear to me that Mr. Davis and … Troopers Perry and Patterson were only interested in bashing the Clintons and that any book we authored would be used to hurt Mr. Clinton politically. On numerous occasions, I specifically recall Cliff Jackson stating that he ‘wanted to see President Clinton impeached’ and that he would ‘do anything to bring him down.’ ”

  But at the end of the meeting, Troopers Anderson and Ferguson refused to participate in the project (at least for the time being), and Jackson could persuade only Perry and Patterson to sign the contract he had prepared. In the document, they promised that “Jackson will negotiate and arrange subject to the approval of bodyguards the initial timing, manner and terms in which their story is brought to the attention of the American people.” Moreover, Jackson agreed that he would act “to secure compensation for all … damages suffered by them” and to find them “employment opportunities outside the state of Arkansas.” This time Jackson would not repeat the errors he had made with the draft story. He would use his new friends in the news media to make the disclosures instead of trying to do it himself.