A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The agreement left open precisely how Paula Jones was to bring her story to the attention of “the American people.” Traylor and Steve Jones wanted to make a public demand for Clinton to apologize to Paula. “If you are hell bent on having a press conference,” Jackson told them, “you have three choices. You can do it in Little Rock on your own and try to get the press to cover it. You can do it in Washington and try to get people to come. Or you can tag along with my troopers.” Jackson and the troopers were planning a press conference the following week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “There’ll be a lot of press there,” Jackson explained, “but you have to be aware that it’s a conservative organization, and the White House will try to spin that.” Frustrated by George Cook’s brush-off and lacking any better ideas, Paula, Steve, and Danny agreed to go to Washington.

  “Has everybody had an opportunity to get a press packet? Raise your hand if you did not get a press packet.”

  Cliff Jackson stood at the podium on February 11, 1994, and surveyed the rows of seated journalists who were waiting, pens poised, before him. The hotel ballroom was nearly full. In addition to about fifty reporters and a half-dozen television crews, more than a hundred participants in the CPAC conference stood behind a velvet rope awaiting the beginning of his presentation. Jackson’s press conference wasn’t on the official calendar of events for the annual convention, but it was the most anticipated event of the year’s festivities.

  This was the fourteenth annual meeting of CPAC, and the event had grown each year—more people, more speakers, more passion. The event gathered the hard core of the right wing of the Republican Party, and they were, at this moment, united in passionate loathing of the new president. There were bumper stickers—WHO KILLED VINCE FOSTER?—and doctored photographs of a naked Hillary Clinton. Jackson and his troopers were greeted like heroes.

  When the time came for the press conference, Jackson had arranged for a large sign to be placed just in front of him. TROOPERGATE WHISTLE-BLOWER FUND, it said, with a post office box in Little Rock and an 800 number. Seated behind Jackson to his right were Patterson, Roger Perry, and Lynn Davis. To his left were the real stars of the day: Danny Traylor and Paula and Stephen Jones.

  After making a pitch for funds for the troopers—who, as it turned out, were never fired from their jobs—Jackson turned to the next part of the program. “You’ll hear the details,” Jackson said. “I’m not going to steal her thunder.” Then, instructing the reporters who were going to ask Paula questions, Jackson said, “Make it simple. And no follow-up questions.”

  “Ms. Jones,” the first reporter began, “a lot of people want to hear this in your words. What was wrong in your view with what happened?”

  The answer was the first time Paula Jones ever spoke in public. As her case stretched out over five years, Jones became a fairly accomplished public performer, but at this moment she was painfully awkward to behold. With her untamed Arkansas twang and her curls stacked so high that her hair bow was barely visible in the tangles, she projected a wounded innocence but painfully little sophistication. “What was wrong,” Jones said, “is that a woman can’t work in the workplace and be harassed by someone that high, and it’s just humiliating what he did to me.”

  “Will you tell us in your own words something about what really happened in that room? Everybody has been vague,” another reporter said.

  “I will not speak on that,” Jones replied.

  The reporters, clearly perplexed, followed up. Jackson had read the relevant portion of the American Spectator article and denounced it as untrue, and Traylor had said vaguely that they were seeking an apology from the president. So, the journalists wondered, why weren’t they suing the Spectator? Why wouldn’t they say what Clinton had done? Why were they here?

  “Understanding that you don’t want to go into any great detailed description of what happened,” one reporter ventured, “can you tell us just what happened in the room?”

  “I’ll just put it this way,” Jones replied. “He presented hisself to me in a very unprofessional manner. I would call it sexual harassment, and that’s all.”

  “Did he ask you to have sex with him?”

  “A type of sex, yes.”

  After another reporter harangued Jones about the details of the encounter, Traylor jumped in. “I appreciate that concern, but you also have to appreciate our deference to the first family and you have to appreciate the sensitive nature of what we’re discussing, but I am going to talk to Paula right now and ask her to give you kind of a blow-by-blow account …”

  Snickers filled the room at Traylor’s choice of words.

  “… of what transpired in the room.”

  Then, as the bewildered reporters waited, Traylor and Paula and Steve Jones conferred behind the podium.

  When they finished, Paula expanded her story a bit. “When I went into the hotel room, then he proceeded to take my hand and pull me over, and then slide up my legs. I pushed him back. It was just humiliating for someone of that nature, you’re supposed to trust somebody like that or I would never have went to that room.… Somehow it worked its way into, ‘You have nice curves.’ ‘I love the way your hair goes down your body.’ Garbage like that.”

  Finally, the reporters grew a little giddy with the sparring. “You have mentioned that he asked you to perform a sexual act,” one person ventured. “Was this something that could have been performed without you taking your clothes off?”

  The reporters groaned, and Traylor allowed, “The answer is yes.”

  Finally, as Jackson said they would take only one more question, one reporter asked, “Did the governor ask you to perform fellatio?”

  “Excuse me?” said Paula.

  “Fellatio?” he shouted back.

  With that, Jackson closed the proceedings. Back in their room, Paula and Steve were distraught. So was Traylor. They knew the event had gone badly. (The press conference received little coverage, and the White House dismissed it. “It’s just not true,” said press secretary Dee Dee Myers.)

  It had been two months since Paula’s name surfaced in the Spectator, and the efforts on her behalf had ranged from ineffectual to catastrophic. The White House had dismissed her; the press had scorned her; her prospects for a lawsuit were dim and for a book or movie deal nil.

  Amid the gloom of that February night in the capital, Cliff Jackson told the group he did have one idea. He had one final hope for keeping Paula’s story alive. There was someone he wanted her to meet.

  2

  “Isn’t That What Happened?”

  In the summer of 1987, a new reporter joined the staff of The Washington Post and was assigned a desk next to that of Michael Isikoff. The rookie had never worked at a big paper before, and he had certainly never seen or heard anyone like Isikoff. Isikoff was rumpled, in the vanishing mode of old-time newspapermen—an imperfect shave, a mess of tousled hair, a collection of ill-fitting sport jackets, a habit of gnawing on Bic pens when he wasn’t barking at someone on the telephone. But none of this was the real reason Isikoff stood out. What really amazed the newcomer was the subject matter of those high-decibel phone calls. This was what people reported on at The Washington Post?

  Finally, the new arrival couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer and asked Isikoff what he was working on.

  I’m second-sourcing a blow job, Isikoff explained.

  The story was the biggest of his career to date. In February 1987, a reporter named Charles Shepard of The Charlotte Observer broke the news that Jim Bakker, a celebrated televangelist who ran a religion and real estate empire known as the PTL Club, had deposited $265,000 into a trust fund for the benefit of a woman named Jessica Hahn. The purpose of this payment, it became clear, was to try to buy Hahn’s silence about an adulterous encounter the former church secretary had had with Bakker in 1980. (Bakker’s broadcast partner in the PTL Club was his wife, the famously makeup-slathered Tammy Faye.) Shepard’s story set off on
e of the great journalistic chases of the era, as reporters began uncovering the corruption that permeated PTL and, as it turned out, several other ministries of the airwaves.

  Isikoff—and the Post generally—had come to the story late, but he took after it with gusto. By late summer, Hahn had become a public figure herself, especially after she agreed to provide Playboy magazine with an interview and a photo shoot for a reported $1 million fee. Together with a similarly aggressive reporter named Art Harris, Isikoff decided to look into Hahn’s background, and they reported on September 30, 1987, that “questions have been raised about the credibility of the ex–church secretary whose revelations toppled a multimillion dollar TV pulpit.… Some of the questions … focus on Hahn’s alleged sexual experience.”

  The key source for the story was a thirty-five-year-old electrician from Massapequa, Long Island, Rocco Riccobono, who told the Post reporters that he had had a “brief affair” with Hahn. Isikoff and Harris wrote, “Contacted by The Washington Post over several weeks, Riccobono said his fling with Hahn was in 1978. Hahn, then 18, had recently been hired as a church secretary and was visiting the apartment of a friend. After his pregnant wife fell asleep in a bedroom, Riccobono said, he plopped down in front of a fire where Hahn ‘seduced me on the couch.’ Riccobono said, ‘I didn’t resist. I couldn’t help it, my flesh is weak … I was with Jessica several times.’ ” (Asked to respond, Hahn said, “I had absolutely nothing to do with Rocco Riccobono.”)

  The reporters ran with the story for weeks—Harris found Riccobono and handled more of the sexual material, and Isikoff did more on the financial details—and when they exhausted the Post’s interest in the subject, they wrote two long freelance articles about PTL for another publication—Penthouse. The PTL story, they wrote, was “a saga of sex, sin and pseudosalvation”—and they emptied their notebooks of material that may have been too racy for their usual employer. In one of their tales about the Bakkers, there was even a foreshadowing of a bigger story in Isikoff’s future. An anonymous former aide identified as Daniel recalled how Jim Bakker told him “about parking with Tammy Faye at Bible college, how they’d first had sex in his car. ‘He was laughing,’ recalls Daniel. ‘He said Tammy had on a black velvet skirt, and he’d messed it up pretty badly by [ejaculating] all over it when they were petting.’ ”

  Isikoff had helped to invent an entire new field in American journalism—sexual investigative reporting. His work on the PTL story coincided with an even more famous moment in the history of this new territory. In May 1987, just as Isikoff and Harris were pursuing Bakker and Hahn, reporters from The Miami Herald were crouched in the bushes outside a town house in Washington where the presidential candidate Gary Hart was having a tryst with a woman named Donna Rice. The journalists who covered these stories never had any trouble coming up with rationales for their work. For Hart—for any politician—inquiries into sex life were said to reveal “character,” or, in Hart’s case, “recklessness.” For Hahn, it was said that the public had a right to know that she was not as innocent as she claimed to be; it was true, as Isikoff and his partner wrote, that “questions have been raised” about her sex life—if only by the reporters themselves. At each of these landmarks of sexual investigative reporting, there were misgivings expressed inside and outside the journalistic world. But journalists moved in only one direction—toward more investigations and more disclosures about the sex lives of public people. These changes, of course, took place in an ever more competitive business environment for journalists, and sex, it need hardly be said, sold. Whether sexual investigative reporting was rooted in serious questions about character or merely in profitable voyeurism, there was more of it all the time.

  Mike Isikoff was perfectly situated to take advantage of this new world. For one thing, he was good at his work. He did second-source blow jobs—and much else besides. Isikoff had journeyed to Washington in the great post-Watergate migration of investigative reporters. A native of Long Island, he had graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1976, and he came to Washington to work on a Ralph Nader project. Because many small newspapers could not afford to hire their own Washington correspondents, Nader believed that most members of Congress never received adequate scrutiny from the press. So he founded the Capitol Hill News Service, hired a bunch of energetic kids just out of school, and gave them each a state delegation to cover. Isikoff had Illinois.

  A little more than a year later, at the age of twenty-six, Isikoff was being profiled on the front page of The Washington Post, his future employer, because of his first big scoop. Isikoff had been monitoring votes on the year’s farm bill when, as the Post reporter wrote, “he noticed something funny about George Shipley,” a congressman from east-central Illinois. Shipley was missing lots of votes that mattered a great deal to his rural district, so Isikoff tracked him down and asked him why. “My back hurts, Mike,” the congressman said. “Sometimes it hurts so bad that I just have to stay in bed. But the folks back home don’t know about it—and I don’t want them to know.” Isikoff wrote the story up for his subscribers, such as the Decatur Herald, and Shipley’s missed votes as well as his comments about keeping his constituents in the dark generated a modest tempest back home.

  Many reporters might have left the matter there, but doggedness was always Isikoff’s trademark. In the course of following up his investigation of the congressman, Isikoff received a tip that at the same time Shipley was claiming he was too sick to vote, he was actually hosting a golfing fund-raiser for his campaign back in Illinois. The tip checked out, and Isikoff’s story made news across the state. SHIPLEY ATTENDED FUND-RAISER WHILE TOO SICK TO VOTE, cried the headline in Decatur. Not long afterward, Shipley announced he would not seek reelection to Congress.

  However, it was only when the Post profile was published several months later that the full story of Isikoff’s scoop became clear. The tipster whose information ended George Shipley’s political career was an Illinois businessman named Gene Stunkel. “Stunkel had decided, a few months before, to run against Shipley in 1978,” the Post’s T. R. Reid reported. “He wanted to give Isikoff a tip that would embarrass the incumbent.” There was a lesson in that, too.

  From the Capitol Hill News Service, Isikoff migrated to the Washington Star and, when that paper folded, to the Post, in 1981. He had done good work over a dozen years, covering a mix of subjects, mostly crime stories of one kind or another. He had never covered much national politics or dealt with the tangled motives of the sources in that unique setting. Cop stories—with clear good guys and bad—were his métier. And still, in more than a decade on the job, he had never made a splash like the one he had with the Bakkers. Isikoff’s pugnacious insistence on doing things his way meant that editors never wanted him around for very long, and he tended to bounce from editor to editor, from beat to beat. He was a valuable reporter, his editors and colleagues invariably said about him, and he was also—the same phrase recurred—a pain in the ass.

  Cliff Jackson had met Isikoff during the 1992 campaign, when the reporter had written some stories about Clinton’s avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War. Jackson liked Isikoff, not least because they shared many of the same views about Clinton. Unlike Jackson, Isikoff was no conservative. But with friends, colleagues, and sources, the reporter never shied away from expressing his view that the new president was a pathological liar. Jackson and Isikoff also shared similar feelings about Clinton’s sex life. Based on the reporting he had done, Isikoff referred to Clinton as a sex addict, and he believed that virtually all of his problems stemmed from this fatal flaw.

  Invited by Jackson to the press conference at the Shoreham on February 11, 1994, Isikoff had attended and then filed a fourteen-inch story about Paula Jones’s charges. But the paper didn’t run it and referred to Jones only glancingly—and mockingly—in a story about the CPAC conference three days later.

  Jackson knew immediately that the press conference had been a disaster, so while
he was still with Paula and Steve Jones in their room at the Shoreham, he told them what he thought they should do next. “You are going to have to give a respected reporter an exclusive,” Jackson said. “Mike is top-notch. He’s honest. You should deal with Isikoff and Isikoff alone.” Summoned to the hotel room, Isikoff met the Joneses and received their promise of full cooperation. Isikoff would have access to Paula, Steve, Debra Ballentine, Pam Blackard, even Paula’s sisters. Paula and Mike hit it off right away. Isikoff had even seen Steve in Mystery Train.

  So Isikoff received permission from his editors to go down to Arkansas and research Paula’s claim. He spoke to the people that Jackson recommended, but it was difficult to find anyone else who might prove or disprove the story. (Ferguson wouldn’t talk to Isikoff.) One of the perils of sexual investigative reporting was that the key evidence tended to be known by only two people. Through spokesmen, Clinton was denying Jones’s accusations, so Isikoff’s investigation seemed stalled at the impasse of he said/she said. So the reporter, stymied, took what he regarded as the logical next step. In an effort to prove whether Clinton had propositioned Jones, Isikoff would see if the president had made similar approaches to other women. Was there a pattern in Clinton’s behavior?

  The search for such “patterns” is a key element of sexual investigative reporting. At one level, it does make sense. Some men do display consistent aberrant habits in their dealings with women. But reporters who set off to identify such patterns essentially make a public figure’s entire private life fair game. Isikoff set out to track down every rumor about Clinton’s sex life that he could find in Little Rock, and there were a lot of them. Brock had been down this road before, and the two men began comparing notes. There were, in fact, a number of reporters from all over the country who had come to Arkansas in search of Clinton girlfriends, and Isikoff became their dean. As he began drafting his Paula Jones story, Isikoff included some of the tales of other women as corroboration of Jones’s claim.