4/1/1998 Esquire
by David Brock
I started it by introducing Paula Jones to the world. Now I’m trying to stop it.
Dear Mr. President,
My mind keeps drifting back to that paragraph about “Paula” and to the memory that her name wasn’t even supposed to show up in print. Back in December 1993, when I broke the Troopergate story in The American Spectator, neither of us could have predicted its consequences–for you, for me, and for the country. In the piece, Arkansas state troopers alleged that they procured women for you when you were governor. One of the women was remembered only as Paula. Soon after the piece was published, Paula Jones shocked the world by identifying herself as the woman in question and by suing you for sexual harassment. And, of course, Paula Jones begat Monica Lewinsky. Surveying the wreckage my report has wrought four years later, I’ve asked myself over and over: What the hell was I doing investigating your private life in the first place?
As an authority on the subject, I want to tell you how it all began. I didn’t go searching for the story. It found me one steamy August morning, when I received a telephone call from a man I barely knew, asking if I would fly to Little Rock to meet with Cliff Jackson, your Arkansas friend turned nemesis who accused you of lying about your draft record in the 1992 campaign and was apparently still out to get you. I had met the man on the telephone–who I later learned was a major contributor to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC–once before, in a meeting on Capitol Hill a few weeks prior to the 1992 election. It was my introduction to the gothic world of anti-Clintonism. You appeared headed for victory, and the Republicans were frustrated and desperate: I was being importuned to follow up on a story in a supermarket tabloid that suggested you had fathered a child with a Little Rock prostitute. A mysterious source who identified himself only as “Mr. Pepper” was supposed to help me track the story down. After several furtive telephone calls, he never delivered.
Now, eight months into your presidency, the dirty war was on again. Cliff Jackson, my caller said, could hook me up with several state troopers who claimed to have knowledge of, and even to have helped arrange, extramarital affairs you were said to have had. The call came out of the blue, but I was a natural for the mission, and I jumped at it. I was perhaps the only self-proclaimed conservative journalist devoted to digging up stories rather than writing editorials. A few months earlier, I had published a best-selling attack on Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, and I was the star reporter at the Spectator, the crusading anti-Clinton magazine.
The man from GOPAC, Jackson, and I conspired to damage you and your presidency by exposing what your political enemies have always seen as your main point of vulnerability: your so-called zipper problem. I had no idea how wildly successful we’d be.
A nervous Jackson met my plane in Little Rock–I was told to hold a copy of the Washington Post under my right arm so he would recognize me, and I gamely played along. He took me to a nearby Holiday Inn. Holed up for two days, I listened to four state troopers as they told salacious stories of sexual shenanigans–late-night trysts at the governor’s mansion, oral sex in parked cars, even your alleged statement, which later became famous in the Monica Lewinsky case, that oral sex was not adultery according to the Bible. For a reporter, it is incredibly rare to get a politician’s bodyguards to tell you what he ate for breakfast, much less graphic sexual details of the sort the troopers were retailing. Were these guys and their far-fetched story for real? I wondered as I flew back to Washington. I told no one about the trip as I tried to figure out how to reel in the wary troopers while checking out their story further.
I returned to Little Rock in mid-September, carefully reinterviewed the troopers–one by one and in different combinations–to test their accounts for inconsistencies. I transcribed the second set of interviews and compared them with the first. By now, I was convinced that either the troopers saw what they said they saw or they had spent months rehearsing one of the most sensational lies ever told about a sitting president. My gut told me they were telling the truth. The level of detail seemed too hard to make up. Only later did I allow for more complicated possibilities.
The story was now in my sights. The question I then grappled with–the same question that would vex the press in the Monica Lewinsky case and that has haunted me ever since–was, When, if ever, are allegations about a politician’s personal life newsworthy? For reporters, there are no bright lines, no set rules, on how to handle these stories. For many years, politicians’ personal peccadilloes were considered out of bounds in what was known as the “gentlemen’s agreement” with the White House press corps. Then came Gary Hart, John Tower, Clarence Thomas, and Bob Packwood. Even George Bush was faced with press questions about a long-rumored extramarital affair.
And during the Gennifer Flowers controversy, polls showed that 25 percent of the electorate would not vote for an adulterer. Personally, I was not part of that group. But I had evidence about your private life that went well beyond what Flowers had claimed, and I wasn’t sure what I should do with it.
I discussed my dilemma with two Washington wise men who had been mentors of mine, and the verdict was split. Significantly, perhaps, they were both conservative Republicans with no training in journalism. Significantly, too, in the way of Washington careerists, they focused only on how the piece might affect me personally. No thought was given, by any of us, to how baring the most intimate details of your sexual conduct by a politically hostile writer might dramatically alter the way political battles are fought in Washington. One adviser told me flatly that I was sitting on perhaps the most devastating portrait of a president ever to be published–the biggest story of my career. The other warned that the allegations, even if proved, would be dismissed as tabloid trash and could therefore hurt my reputation as much as yours. They both turned out to be right.
In the end, I decided that the allegations met several tests that made them relevant to public character. If they were true, the behavior described was chronic and exploitative. Using the troopers to procure women was an abuse of power and certainly showed a reckless willingness to allow yourself to be compromised by their knowledge of your private conduct. The troopers also claimed that you lied about Gennifer Flowers in the 1992 campaign, which raised concerns about whether your word could be trusted. When one of the troopers told me that you had called him as I was reporting the story to express concern about my inquiries and dangled a federal job in front of him, my instinct was that you probably weren’t calling from the Oval Office about idle gossip. That tipped the scales.
But to be honest with you, these “tests” were something of a charade, more an attempt to fashion defenses for myself against charges that I was a “tabloid” journalist than they were a neutral set of journalistic principles. I wasn’t hot for this story in the interest of good government or serious journalism. I wanted to pop you right between the eyes. Test or no test, the story was going, and I would have found some way to dress it up ex post facto.
I think a similar disingenuous exercise went on with the Lewinsky story in Newsweek. When it broke, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, and his editors said that the involvement of independent counsel Kenneth Starr made your alleged affair with a White House intern major news. But we soon found out that Isikoff had been working on sex stories long before there was any connection to a criminal investigation. If a reporter is determined to make a name for himself by publishing a sexual expose, he can usually find some high-minded reason to do it. The pieties of the press know no bounds.
In my case, there was an open political agenda at work as well, which must have colored my judgment at least at the margins. I never felt the visceral hatred toward you that many of your detractors harbor, but I did regard you, the first Democratic president in my adult life, as an ideological threat. Ironically, I had just finished a book in which I argued strenuously against the use of personal scandal for partisan advantage in the Thomas-Hill case. In contemporary Washington, I lamented, it was no longer enough to defeat your opponent fair and square on the issues; you had to destroy him as a human being. The hypocrisy involved in what I was about to do to you didn’t strike me until after the deed was done.
In the next three months, as I worked to convince the troopers to go on the record and put their names to the allegations, I ran on an adrenaline high. Two troopers peeled off, refusing to go public, and the other two began suffering bouts of cold feet. Meanwhile, two investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times were chasing the same story, and I was so focused on getting it first that I didn’t really think about the stakes or the consequences.
The big stumbling block was the troopers’ insistence that their story was worth money. When I told them that no reputable journalist would pay sources under any circumstances, there was talk about how to structure a future book deal, and there were several rounds of negotiations between Cliff Jackson and the GOPAC moneyman about guaranteeing the troopers income and legal expenses if they were fired from the state police after the piece was published. At one point, as the talks faltered, my last two troopers wanted out and came to my hotel room, demanding that I turn over the tapes of our interviews. I told them it was too late and hopped a plane back to D. C.
At this juncture, I brought the editor of The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, into the loop. I reached him over Thanksgiving weekend at a vacation home in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. When I described the reason for the delay, he screeched into the phone: “How much do they want? I’ll write them a check!” Not much help there.
I spent the next few weeks alternately threatening and cajoling over the telephone. Jump in the pool with no protection, I warned, or you’ll Flowerize yourselves. You need to do this for no other reason than the good of the country, I pleaded. How much I believed this, I’m still not sure. But as’ Christmas approached, my pressure tactics worked.
Deep down, though, I knew that the good of the country was the last thing on the troopers’ minds. In fact, in these discussions, I came to realize that the reason they were willing to come forward at all (other than their palpable contempt for Hillary) was not moral principle or ideology but personal pique–they were pissed off at you. They had happily done your dirty work for years and stayed mum when reporters approached them in 1992. Only when you didn’t take care of them when you became president–no jobs, no perks, nothing–did they decide to become truth tellers. In other words, I felt the way Ken Starr must have when wiring up Linda Tripp: The troopers were greedy and had slimy motives, and I knew it. But that wasn’t going to stand in my way.
When the story hit, it made national headlines. The Spectator quickly sold out and went back to the presses several times. The Los Angeles Times ran a similar story based on its own interviews with the troopers. Officially, the White House stonewalled; the press briefing was canceled for two days. Behind the scenes, your aides were in full damage-control mode. One called CNN to protest the airing of the charges. Others dug up stories about the troopers’ involvement in an insurance scam to impeach their credibility and tried to solicit affidavits from the troopers denying the most damaging aspects of the story By week’s end, you called the stories outrageous, but you never denied them.
It was the week before Christmas. I gulped hard when I saw your mother arrive at the white House for the holiday–my first fleeting second thought.
Because it was so brutally invasive of your private life but drew no refutation from you, my work became part of what everyone just knew about you, penetrating the media culture and public consciousness completely across ideological lines. It was now open season on you: Anybody could say just about anything they wanted about the president. A virulent scandal culture was spawned that eventually drew in not only your conservative critics but also the mainstream press.
Politically, though, the revelations appeared to do you little harm and may have even inoculated you somewhat against the current sex charges. The story quickly faded. Washington was titillated, but the public believed that the events described had taken place before you were president, you had tacitly acknowledged an adulterous past in answering the Flowers charges, and, in any case, your private life had nothing to do with your ability to carry out your public duties. The press, meanwhile, characterized me as a bottom feeder in the pay of a right-wing rag and moved on to a less seamy scandal, Whitewater. Case closed.
Or so we all thought. Unknown even to me, there was a time bomb embedded in the piece.
In my interviews, the troopers had named several women they claimed you had had affairs with. I contacted the women, and, not surprisingly, they all declined to comment or denied it. But even if they had been involved with YOU, some of the women were married and had children, and, after Gennifer Flowers, none of them had any reason to throw themselves into a he-said, she-said contest with the president. I had decided that naming the women against their will served no journalistic purpose and scrubbed from the text the paragraph that named names.
“Paula,” however, appeared as an incidental character in a later section of the piece. One trooper recalled that, at your request, he had approached a woman he “remembered only as Paula” and escorted her to your room one afternoon at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. When Paula left the room, the trooper said, she had told him she was willing to be your “regular girlfriend.” Presuming’ that there were hundreds of Paulas in Arkansas, I didn’t think that I was identifying anyone. If I had, I would have taken “Paula” Out, too. I should have removed the name. It was just an oversight. Surely, this will go down as one of the more fateful oversights in the history of your presidency.
One night a few weeks ago in Washington, my doorbell rang. Expecting the dog sitter, I swung open the double doors. “David Brock?” the process server asked as he thrust a subpoena into my hands. “Well, I guess you have a place in history,” he laughed, and walked off.
Almost four years since Paula Jones called a press conference and said she was suing you for sexual harassment to clear her name of the implication in my piece that she had had consensual sex with you, your antagonists are now mine. (That she sued you rather than me may have been an early clue to her motives.)
Twice before, Jones’s lawyers had contacted me on a friendly basis, asking for assistance with their case. They sought the notes and tapes of my trooper interviews. Presumably, the Jones team regarded me not as a journalist but as a political partisan eager to help the cause. I declined their overtures, and when the subpoena was finally served, I hired a lawyer to fight it on the grounds that my trooper interviews were protected by the First Amendment.
No matter how I felt about the case personally, as a journalist, I would never have compromised that important principle. And with the passage of time, whatever sympathy I may have had with the Jones “cause” is gone. And whatever place in history I may have, I’m not proud of it.
When I watched the media hoopla as you got hauled into a deposition by Jones’s lawyers, I had a sinking feeling. My ransacking of your personal life had given your political adversaries–who were now funding and fighting the Jones case–an opportunity to use the legal process to finish the job that I started. Worse still their effort to dig up sexual dirt on you was sanctioned by the Supreme Court, which in a landmark ruling has imperiled future presidents by making them vulnerable to character assassination in all manner of civil suits while in office.
None of this was supposed to happen. Now that I’m living through it, I’m sure it should not have happened.
I made Paula Jones famous. And whatever happens with her case, in a way, the people who hate you have already won, and we have all suffered not only from their malice toward you but also from their contempt for the office of the president. When one of Jones’s key legal advisers told me that he didn’t necessarily believe her story of sexual harassment, my worst fears were realized. “This is about proving Troopergate,” he told me gleefully.
I guess I should confess that as the author of the infamous piece, I think “proving Troopergate” may be a tall order. I was as sure of that story when I wrote it as any journalist can be of any story But in the years since then, the troopers have greatly damaged their credibility
I’m sure you remember that during the Senate Whitewater hearings, the troopers made fools of themselves with improbable claims about the circumstances of Vincent Foster’s death. One of the two troopers who went on the record with me, Larry Patterson, helped promote the infamous Clinton Chronicles, a crackpot video accusing you of drug running and murder. Patterson was also recently cited as a source for several wild allegations in the spurious book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. So I’ve had occasional pangs of doubt: Is it possible that they took me for a ride, embellishing their account for fame and fortune?
Perhaps it was my own tortured experience as a muckraker that has made my reaction to Ken Starr’s attempt to find a crime in the Monica Lewinsky case so different from that of almost anyone I know in Washington. For your political opponents and most of the press corps, the story was like crack. But I was chilled. The spectacle seemed strangely and depressingly familiar. I had seen it all before: Filthy tapes. Too many details not to be true! An accuser whose credibility got shakier by the hour. Hidden agendas. Book deals. Friends betraying friends. Declarations of “war” and even talk of “killing” you by those who forced the sludge out.
Troopergate had come full circle. Watching Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff tell NBC that Linda Tripp’s tapes were too detailed not to be true, I saw myself. I recalled a time when the two of us–for a time, Washington’s leading Clinton sexologists–traded stories over drinks at the Four Seasons Hotel. That night, Isikoff shared with me the outtakes from his own groundbreaking Paula Jones reporting, done for The Washington Post in 1994. Isikoff, an intrepid reporter, had dug up some additional claims by other women that you had hit on them, but the Post decided they weren’t relevant to Jones’s claim of harassment. Isikoff passed them on to me, resident bottom feeder.
I wasn’t interested. I never intended to make a career out of Troopergate. But I didn’t have to. Soon enough, Newsweek would become The American Spectator.
I suppose I could have felt vindicated by the Lewinsky story. Sex is your Achilles’ heel, after all. But I was more wrong than right. Even if all the worst of the charges leveled against you are borne out, this still ain’t Watergate. You’ll be the first president impeached for orchestrating a cover-up of a blow job.
I don’t know what happened between you and Monica Lewinsky any more than I know how much of Troopergate or Paula Jones’s story is true. But regardless of how the drama plays out, as the first r&porter who leered into your sex life, I do know that I didn’t learn a damn thing worth knowing about your character. I also know that if we continue down this path, if sexual witch-hunts become the way to win in politics, if they become our politics altogether, we can and will destroy everyone in public life.
When I published Troopergate, I didn’t much care. Now I do, and many other people don’t seem to.
I’m thinking of getting out of Washington for a while.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-20420828.html
