A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  Still, the involvement of his client’s wife in Bennett’s defense of Clinton in the Paula Jones case created complications right from the start. She wanted to fight, not settle. When Bennett finally got around to seeing his client, the president also said he didn’t want to settle, but not because he was eager for a fight. He didn’t want to settle, Clinton told Bennett and others, because he couldn’t do that to Hillary. A settlement would suggest that Clinton was admitting to Jones’s charges, and the president said he could not put his wife through that kind of humiliation. This reluctance to settle had dramatic—and catastrophic—implications for the Clinton presidency, and it was rooted in the complex dynamics of the relationship between husband and wife.

  So Bennett took his orders and fought. He began by stewing, obsessing, and seething … about Alan Dershowitz. In his many talk-show appearances, the Harvard Law School professor had expressed a theory about what Clinton should do: in Dershowitz’s opinion, the president should have “defaulted” in Paula Jones’s lawsuit against him. In other words, Clinton should have refused to defend himself and allowed the judge in the case to enter a verdict against him. The only issue then would have been damages. Because Jones could not prove that she was fired, denied promotions, or otherwise discriminated against, Clinton would have to pay only a modest sum, or perhaps nothing at all. Best of all, according to Dershowitz, a default judgment would spare the president the ordeal of testifying or even devoting much time to this distracting matter.

  Dershowitz’s theory did have an elegant simplicity. It was also completely insane. The press would have portrayed a presidential default as at best an act of contempt by the president toward the judicial process and at worst a full admission of Jones’s claims. In the American system, generally only wanted fugitives and rogue governments default in court. More important, a default would not have excused the president from testifying. Jones’s lawyers could have—and undoubtedly would have—forced Clinton to testify on the issue of damages. No serious lawyer or scholar joined Dershowitz in his quixotic notion. Yet Bob Bennett spent hours recruiting lawyer friends to rebut Dershowitz’s position, asking White House officials to defend him in public, and generally agonizing about the harsh words that rained down on him from Cambridge.

  Bennett’s anguish made no sense at all—yet it arose from the precise reason the Clintons had hired him. Bennett had a superb team around him to prepare the legal work—younger partners like Mitchell Ettinger, who could research the facts, and Amy Sabrin, who could write the briefs. What separated Bennett from scores of other successful white-collar defense lawyers was his obsession with public, as well as legal, advocacy. Bennett inhabited the world of Nightline and Rivera Live, and this was where he believed the Paula Jones case would be won or lost. He worked the press ceaselessly, on the air and off, with bombastic press conferences and discreet off-the-record whispers. Shortly after Jones filed her lawsuit, Bennett even invited a reporter from The New York Times Magazine, Ruth Shalit, to his vacation home in Montana, took a business call there in private, then informed the journalist of the (unspecified) coup he had just engineered for a client. “That’s called getting intelligence. That’s knowing people. That’s getting the inside track,” Bennett told Shalit. “That’s having inside your head a kind of wiring diagram of how Washington works.”

  In the president’s calculus of self-interest, the Clintons made the right choice in selecting Bennett, who skillfully advanced his client’s interests for more than four years. Bennett understood instinctively that the Paula Jones case was rooted more in politics than in law, and he defended it accordingly. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” had abused and manipulated the legal system to pursue Clinton. Less noticed—but no less real—was that Clinton’s allies replied in kind. From the very start, Bennett used the language and techniques of politics to prevail in the Paula Jones case. That was what he was hired to do. But Bennett’s spin, demagoguery, and exaggeration—no less than that of his adversaries—degraded the legal process as well. Bennett’s behavior fed and even helped justify the public’s cynicism about courts, lawyers, and law.

  Of course, the client in this relationship—that is, the president of the United States—could have held Bennett back and insisted on the high road. In fact, the reverse occurred. It was the president’s lawyer who had to restrain Clinton’s headlong rush into the gutter.

  “Good afternoon,” Bennett said to the nest of microphones arrayed before him. “First and foremost, the president adamantly denies these vicious and mean-spirited allegations. Quite simply, the incident did not occur.”

  When Bennett began his press briefing on the afternoon of May 6, the full text of Paula Jones’s complaint had only moments earlier slithered out of the fax machine. But the president had built his career around the idea of a perpetual campaign, and a key tenet of that philosophy was never to leave an attack unanswered. The first news cycle to report the filing of the case would certainly include his lawyer’s emphatic response.

  “In a single term,” Bennett said, “this complaint is tabloid trash with a legal caption on it. If it was a serious lawsuit, it would not read like a made-for-TV lawsuit. The language in the lawsuit just underscores the fact that this is not about the serious subject of sex harassment or civil rights. Indeed, it cheapens and it trivializes those important areas of the law.… This suit is about publicity, it’s about talk shows, it’s about money [and] book contract profits.”

  Bennett’s opening statement lasted just five minutes, but he hit all of the talking points that would constitute the president’s response to the case for the next four years: the “incident” did not take place; money and greed motivated Jones; the lawsuit was the work of the president’s personal and political enemies. And yet Bennett was a lawyer, and so he spoke with precision as well as passion in behalf of his client. And in the details of what Bennett said on the first day of the Paula Jones lawsuit, there were the first flickers of caution in his denials on behalf of the president. Shortly after Jones’s press conference in February, Mark Gearan, then the White House communications director, responded to Jones’s claim by saying, “It is not true. He does not recall meeting her. He was never alone in a hotel with her.”

  At the May 6 press conference, one reporter asked Bennett, “Are you denying every particular in the lawsuit? Are you saying there was no approach by a state trooper, no meeting in a hotel room, no discussion between President Clinton and this woman?”

  Bennett hedged—elegantly. Indeed, he used almost precisely the same words his client would employ four years later when he was asked about his relationship with another young woman, complete with the same disdainful reluctance to utter her name. “This president did not engage in any inappropriate or sexual conduct with this woman,” the lawyer said. So, Gearan notwithstanding, perhaps Clinton did meet Jones in a hotel room.

  And then there was a question of legal strategy. Bennett proclaimed emphatically that the “incident” did not take place, and he implied that he welcomed the opportunity to take on the accusation in court. But reporters asked whether a trial might involve a deposition by the president. Was that what Clinton wanted?

  Indeed not, said Bennett. “Let’s be practical and reasonable,” he said, “Do the American people really want the president of the United States of America to be spending his time with lawyers rather than solving the problems of the times? I mean, that’s just an absurd result in a democracy. And frankly, foreign countries laugh at us at the suggestion that somebody can spin a yarn and file a complaint, and be off to the races tying down the president of the United States.”

  Within these first answers were the seeds of Bennett’s real strategy to win the case. In truth, the last thing Bennett—or Clinton—wanted was to challenge Paula Jones’s story on the merits in a courtroom. In May 1994, only one date mattered to the president, and that was two and a half years away. He wanted all fact-finding—depositions, discovery, any inquiry into this case in particular or
his sex life in general—put off until after the 1996 election. As if the point needed any clarification, Clinton’s White House counsel at the time, an old Washington hand named Lloyd Cutler, took Bennett to brunch at the Four Seasons Hotel to deliver the message in person.

  “The win is getting it beyond the election,” Cutler told him. “Nothing else matters.”

  But because of the election, Clinton couldn’t just win the case. He had to win the case the right way. Or, more precisely, he had to be seen as having won the case the right way. Clinton had always enjoyed the support of feminists, and women generally voted for him in greater numbers than men. Clinton had opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and spoken eloquently in support of laws prohibiting sexual harassment. So, not surprisingly, the question arose at Bennett’s first briefing of whether he was going to defend the president in the same way that Thomas’s supporters had defended him—by attacking his accuser.

  “Are you going to go into the character of this woman … Bob, the folks at the White House are saying that you are going to go after this woman’s character and reputation.”

  “I feel sorry for her at this point, and that’s not really my style,” Bennett said.

  On June 8, exactly thirty-three days later, under the golden arches of one of the two McDonald’s restaurants in the sleepy Arkansas town of Cabot, Mitch Ettinger of Skadden Arps shared a meal with a fellow named Dennis Kirkland. Kirkland had a tale to share about Paula Corbin Jones.

  Kirkland had graduated from Cabot High School in 1985, and in the summer of 1987 he had attended a graduation party for the school. At the time of the party, he was nineteen and Paula Corbin was twenty. Before that evening, they had never met.

  Kirkland recalled that he was drunk at the party, and he guessed Paula was, too. He told Ettinger that he “talked trash” to Paula for about ten minutes, and then she grabbed his crotch. Within ten minutes of their meeting, he took Paula to a van parked nearby, and there she gave him a “blow job.” They returned to the party, where he shared news of his good fortune with several of his friends. Still later at the party, Kirkland told the lawyer for the president, he observed Paula giving blow jobs to three of his friends, whom he named. Paula gave Kirkland her phone number at the party, and they kept in touch for a while. Over the next several weeks, they met several times, usually at Paula’s mother’s apartment. From there they would go to Camp Robinson, a National Guard facility in the area, and have sex. Kirkland stopped calling when he began seeing the woman who would become his wife (and whom, he told Ettinger, he was now divorcing and fighting for custody of their kids).

  Bob Bennett hoarded the report of Kirkland’s interview like a trophy of war. Of course, he couldn’t make any public reference to what he called, in private, the story of the “blow-job boys.” Bennett’s public silence and private joy about the blow-job boys illustrated how the political imperatives of the case created twisted pretzels of irony. Because of Clinton’s feminist base, Bennett couldn’t even acknowledge that Jones’s background or reputation was relevant to her case, much less that he was studying her life with care. Bennett also had to keep his work secret, because if it was disclosed, conservatives would claim to be outraged. But in ordinary circumstances, conservatives believed that a woman’s background was fair game in a claim of sexual harassment, so their anger would be just as phony as Bennett’s denials of interest in Jones’s sex life. So Bennett dissembled to trump the Republicans’ own duplicity. This graceless standoff served as a metaphor for a larger lesson of the case—that the merger of law and politics degraded both.

  The question Bennett so greedily explored had a slight relevance to the case. Paula Jones had filed a defamation suit, claiming that she had been damaged in “her good name, character, and reputation.” So Bennett had the right to examine her standing in the community. Similarly, in her complaint, Jones had asserted that after Clinton had approached her in the room at the Excelsior, she “became horrified, jumped from the couch [and] stated she was ‘not that kind of girl.’ ” In the same way, then, Bennett had a right to ask what kind of girl Paula Jones was.

  Still, fundamentally, even these justifications served as pretexts. Like their adversaries—like, indeed, the reporters who covered the case—all the president’s lawyers really cared about was the sex. Despite denials that were as indignant as they were false, the subject of sex subsumed everything in this case.

  As the sun moves across the Arkansas sky, the shadows from the huge concrete towers of the Lonoke grain-drying cooperative stretch out along the town’s main drag. On some days, a visitor might be forgiven for thinking the shadows move faster than anything else in Lonoke. The railroad tracks that once ran up the grassy median strip of Front Street are gone, and these days only a few cars stop at the handful of surviving businesses in town. Pedestrians are few. Now and then, someone walks into Blackard’s Dry Cleaners, which is run by the family of the woman who was sitting next to Paula at the registration desk at the Excelsior. The big business in town is minnows. Since the sixties the locals have been replacing their rice farms with ponds, where they raise Lonoke’s gift to America’s bait shops. Around city hall, they even call Lonoke the minnow capital of the world.

  Today, of course, Lonoke is best known as the hometown of Paula Jones. (It’s not far from Cabot, which nurtured Dennis Kirkland.) In a case filled with authentic pornography, there may be at least a moral obscenity in applying microscopic biographical attention to Paula Corbin Jones. Until the moment she took on Bill Clinton, her life was mostly sad, mostly ordinary, and entirely alien to the world of government and law. She must be the only significant political figure of the century who could say, as she once did to me, “The Republicans? Are they the good ’uns or the bad ’uns?” After Paula became famous, friendship with her became a kind of industry, as acquaintances, boyfriends, and even relatives cashed in on her notoriety. To the extent possible, it is important to try to separate truth from financially induced exaggeration. The life of Paula Jones does contain some clues to what happened between her and the governor in 1991—and to why, years later, her case spiraled into history.

  Paula Corbin was born on September 17, 1967, the last of Bobby and Delmer Corbin’s three daughters. The lives of Paula and her sisters were dominated by the harsh tenets of the First Church of the Nazarene, where the family worshipped and her father sometimes preached. It was part-time, unpaid work, and Bobby Corbin supported the family as a pattern maker in a local mill where they made dresses for Sears. The three Corbin girls dressed in clothes that Delmer Corbin made from the scraps of fabric Bobby brought home from work. Nazarene prohibitions defined the girls’ lives. They couldn’t drink, dance, wear pants or makeup, roller-skate, watch television, or even visit friends’ houses. Paula wore thick glasses, and her hair flowed down her back. Early family pictures from Paula’s girlhood show all three girls with long hair, because haircuts were also prohibited by the family’s rules. Their isolation was intense. Delmer even fetched the girls from school so they could eat lunch at home.

  When Paula became a teenager, the family’s life, never easy, turned even more troubled. While Bobby was on a disability leave, he was laid off from the mill, just short of the time needed to qualify for a pension. Two years later, in 1984, he died of heart failure while playing gospel music on the piano at a senior citizen’s home. Paula’s sisters dropped out of high school and married. Paula struggled on at Lonoke High and then transferred to neighboring Carlisle High because it required fewer credits for graduation.

  As the girls hit their teenage years, their parents’ control over them dwindled. By the time of Bobby’s death, Paula was in full-scale revolt against the rules of her childhood. It is this period of her life—from about 1984 until she met Steve Jones in 1989, from age seventeen to twenty-two—that drew most of the attention after she filed her case against the president. For a while, she commuted the thirty-five miles to Little Rock, first to secretarial school (from wh
ich she dropped out), then to a series of retail sales jobs, from which she was invariably fired because of tardiness, absenteeism, or inattention to her work (she worked at a pest control company, sold Swatch watches at a department store, and did clerical work for Hertz and a trucking company—where she was reprimanded for her provocative dress). In 1988, the small family home on Front Street burned down—the family had no insurance—and Paula lacked a permanent place to live for a while. During this time, she dated a fellow named Mike Turner for a few months, and he arranged for them to be photographed together in nearly naked embraces. (Both wore skimpy bikini bottoms.) In other words, the rumor that both Pat Mahoney and Bob Bennett had heard about photographs was true.

  After Paula became famous, Turner sold the photographs to Penthouse. Turner had kept not only the pictures of his long-ago girlfriend but a handful of notes that Paula had written to him. The tone of the letters differed considerably from what one might expect from the horrified ingenue who recoiled in horror from Bill Clinton’s pass. In one note to Turner, for example, Paula wrote, “I miss every inch of you … but I miss some inches more than others,” and, in another, “Your [sic] great in bed.” Paula’s brother-in-law Mark Brown said Paula told him that by the time she was seventeen, she had had sex with fifteen men. (Paula’s arrival in the public spotlight brought to the surface splits in her family that had simmered for years. Charlotte and Mark Brown denounced Paula as a fabricator and fortune-hunter; her other sister, Lydia Cathey, stood by Paula.)

  Certainly there was no shortage of men in Little Rock who claimed to have been involved with her during this period. Certainly, too, there was little doubt that Paula’s life began to change when she met Steve Jones in 1989 at BJ’s Star-Studded Honky Tonk in Little Rock. Unlike her previous boyfriends, Steve was conservative and controlling, and Paula tamed her free-spirited ways when they were together. Jobs came and went; she had never held a job for longer than four months. Then her old friend Pam Blackard suggested she apply for work with Pam’s employer, the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. It took two tries, but finally Paula obtained work as a documents examiner for $6.35 an hour. Her duties at the AIDC never amounted to much more than making delivery runs to other government offices and typing employment applications into a database. These limited duties were not entirely surprising, because she typed only twenty-four words a minute. (In an employment test for alphabetizing, she got only twenty-three out of thirty-four answers correct.)