A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  On the following morning, Friday, January 22, Trent Lott held a brief press conference in a Capitol hallway. He was asked if anything might change the momentum toward the president’s acquittal.

  “That depends on what NBC broadcasts on Sunday,” the majority leader said.

  In the shared code of Washington insiderdom, everyone caught the reference. For the past three weeks, many of the reporters covering the story had spent as much time gazing at web browsers as at the Senate floor. In a way, it was fitting that Clinton’s trial would end with a backstage drama orchestrated by Matt Drudge—two of them, actually. It was appropriate, too, that the stories dated back to even before Bill Clinton was president. The tales about him recirculated endlessly, with each failure of proof serving merely to goad later pursuers. So, with the trial winding down in Clinton’s favor, his enemies turned to their last hopes for the elusive lightning bolt that would finally strike him down.

  The first story had its origins in a rumor that dated back to Clinton’s days as governor of Arkansas—that he had fathered a child with a black prostitute. On February 18, 1992, the Globe tabloid had run a story with the headline GOV. CLINTON HAD ORGIES WITH 3 BLACK HOOKERS—IN HIS MOTHER’S HOUSE! A few weeks later, with the supermarket tabloid spread out in front of him, the Chicago financier Peter Smith had offered to pay David Brock to investigate this allegation, but Brock refused. Later, the writer did accept Smith’s money to underwrite the article in The American Spectator that mentioned “Paula.”

  As the Senate trial was beginning, Drudge brought the black prostitute story back to life. In a series of reports beginning with his familiar tag “**World Exclusive**,” Drudge announced, WHITE HOUSE HIT WITH NEW DNA TERROR; TEEN TESTED FOR CLINTON PATERNITY. In connection with the DNA tests that tied Clinton to Lewinsky’s dress, the Starr report had disclosed the genetic makeup of the president’s blood. As Drudge recounted, the rival tabloid the Star was planning to test the blood of one Danny Williams, son of the prostitute named in the Globe story, to see if there was a genetic match to his putative father, the president. “He looks just like him!” Drudge quoted the mother’s sister as saying. Alas, a few days later, Drudge had to report that the Star’s tests had ruled out Bill Clinton as the father of the young man.

  Still, by this time, Drudge was on to a bigger story, one that had already damaged Clinton—the tale of Juanita Broaddrick, who was known as Jane Doe Number Five in the Jones case. This story dated to Clinton’s last gubernatorial campaign, in 1990, when his opponent, Sheffield Nelson, had tried to put the rape accusation into public circulation. During the House impeachment inquiry, Schippers’s team had tried hard to prove the charge, and the investigators assembled a secret store of evidence about it in the Ford building. Forty-five House members examined the evidence in the days before the impeachment vote. In January, shortly after his DNA “scoops,” Drudge disclosed that NBC’s Lisa Myers had interviewed Broaddrick for the network’s Dateline broadcast. NBC SAID TO BE HOLDING INTERVIEW WITH “JANE DOE,” according to Drudge’s headline. As usual with Drudge, his reports consisted of meta-journalism—journalism about other journalists’ stories.

  Understandably, the network was taking its time to verify, as best it could, a twenty-year-old allegation of this kind. However, Drudge’s increasingly frantic reports suggested that NBC was giving in to White House pressure not to broadcast the story during the trial. (BROADDRICK EXPLOSION: CALLS FOR NBC NEWS PRESIDENT TO RESIGN, went one typical headline.) The Broaddrick interview thus became the last great crusade of Clinton’s enemies. With his comment at the press conference, Lott was, in effect, daring NBC to run Lisa Myers’s interview on Sunday, while the trial would still be continuing. As Drudge chronicled the debates within NBC about when to broadcast the interview, a new collectible appeared on the Washington scene: lapel buttons bearing the words FREE LISA MYERS (Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wore one on the Senate floor.) By the end of the trial, the Broaddrick interview became perhaps the most famous nonpublic work of journalism in American history, its propriety and fairness debated ad nauseam by a world of people who had not seen it.

  In any case, despite the pressure from Lott, Drudge, and others, NBC did not broadcast the interview until after the trial. In the broadcast, Broaddrick came across as poised and articulate, and NBC did manage to determine that she and Clinton had apparently been in Little Rock on the date in question. In public, Clinton refused to address the allegation, leaving it to David Kendall to deny that he had raped anyone. In private, though, Clinton suggested to one friend that he had slept with Broaddrick, but that it had been a “consensual deal.” An allegation like this one served mostly as a reminder of the reason behind statutes of limitations. Two decades later, it was simply impossible to determine what, if anything, had occurred between these two people.

  As it turned out, Lott’s challenge came on a day when even the most remote chance for Clinton’s conviction disappeared altogether. At 3:45 P.M., on the afternoon of January 22, Senator Robert Byrd handed Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, a copy of a press release he was issuing. Byrd said that he would “offer a motion to dismiss the charges and end this impeachment trial.” It was clear to him, he said, that there would never be two-thirds support for Clinton’s removal, so there was no point in continuing. From the beginning, both sides had recognized that Byrd was the most likely leader of a Democratic stampede against the president. His support of acquittal sealed the result. Byrd didn’t want to hear from witnesses, either. All he wanted to do was “end this sad and sorry time for our country.”

  A curious transformation overcame many of the managers as their task became more conspicuously hopeless. The more unpopular they became—in the Senate chamber and in the country at large—the more certain they became of their rectitude. Indeed, in a curious way, some of the managers seemed to take repudiation as proof of their righteousness. This trial isn’t helping us politically, they said, so we must be pursuing it because we are right.

  Hyde certainly expressed that view, with a characteristic dollop of self-pity as well. When the time came to debate Byrd’s motion to dismiss, the chairman had taken full-time to playing the victim of the Senate’s disdain. The motion to dismiss, he said on January 25, was worse than unwise; it was an insult to the dignity of the House of Representatives. “I sort of feel that we have fallen short in the respect side because of the fact that we represent the House, the other body, kind of blue-collar people, and we are trying to survive with our impeachment articles.”

  Hearing Hyde portray himself as “blue-collar” was too much for two veteran Senate Democrats, and Joe Biden and Paul Sarbanes stormed out of the chamber.

  Hyde ignored them and continued with mock humility. “However you vote,” he said, “we will collect our papers, bow from the waist, thank you for your courtesy, and leave and go gently into the night. But let us finish our job.”

  Despite all this, Hyde’s ambivalence persisted. At around this time, the chairman called his old friend Howard Berman, the California Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and asked him to make an overture to Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut. Berman was to tell Lieberman that Hyde would be amenable to a motion to end the trial with some sort of censure of the president. This conclusion would offer the managers something other than the embarrassment of a full acquittal. Berman passed the message to Lieberman, who in turn came back with an obvious question. When I propose this idea, can I say that Hyde authorized it—indeed that he came up with it? Hyde said no; he wouldn’t stand behind the idea in public. So, predictably, without Hyde’s promise of support for his own idea, the proposal fizzled.

  All fifty-five Republicans (and one Democrat, Russ Feingold) voted against Byrd’s motion to dismiss, which meant that the trial would continue—albeit with no chance for the managers to obtain the sixty-seven votes they needed to remove Clinton from office. The tortured negotiations between Lott and Hyde allowed the managers a shred of dignity
on the witness issue. They could take videotaped depositions of three witnesses, and then argue to the Senate that further, live testimony was necessary. So the managers had to decide which three witnesses to call.

  Given their central roles, Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan were automatic choices. By this reasoning, the third selection should have been obvious as well: Betty Currie. Indeed, there was an actual unresolved issue relating to the evidence that Currie could address. Because Bob Bittman had so botched Currie’s examination in the grand jury, back in the previous January, the record was unclear on an important point. Had Clinton asked Currie leading questions about her recollections a second time? Did the president really try to persuade her to testify falsely either in the grand jury or in the Paula Jones case? And what of the transfer of gifts from Lewinsky to Currie? Who initiated that transaction?

  The way the managers addressed the Currie issue underlined just how preposterous the Senate trial had become. Weighing the question back in the committee’s offices, Hyde said he didn’t want to confront a sympathetic African-American woman. He didn’t want to compound the political damage the Republican Party had already suffered. (Indeed, for the same reason, Hyde didn’t want to call Jordan either, but his managers talked him out of that view.) The issue of Currie’s testimony thus provided a kind of laboratory demonstration of the way politics trumped truth-seeking in the trial.

  Besides, Lindsey Graham gave Hyde a convenient excuse to avoid calling Currie. Graham had become obsessed by the role of Sidney Blumenthal in the case. With his fervent partisanship and refusal to give interviews, Blumenthal became a figure of some mystery, which only whetted the right’s curiosity about him. Graham wanted to explore what he thought was a sinister plot by Blumenthal to discredit Lewinsky at the beginning of the investigation. The charge had nothing to do with the case against Clinton, but Hyde still decided to make the former journalist the managers’ third witness.

  For the most part, the examinations only demonstrated the ineptitude of the managers. Lewinsky’s lawyers advised her, above all, to remain consistent with her prior testimony. This wasn’t difficult, because she knew the facts far better than Ed Bryant, the Tennessee congressman assigned to conduct the interrogation. In the videotaped session, held in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel on February 1, Lewinsky confidently breezed through her version of the events, and Bryant lacked both the knowledge and the intensity to challenge her. (McCollum, who was also present, nearly bolted out of his chair in irritation at Bryant’s meandering style.) By the end of the interview, Lewinsky was treating the congressman like a silly schoolboy.

  “Do you still have feelings for the president?” Bryant asked.

  “I have mixed feelings,” Lewinsky replied coolly.

  “What, uh—maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what those mixed feelings are.”

  No, thanks, said the witness. “I think what you need to know is that my grand jury testimony is truthful irrespective of whatever those mixed feelings are in my testimony today,” she said.

  A day later, Vernon Jordan faced a more prepared questioner, Asa Hutchinson. On the evidence, Hutchinson obtained some concessions from Jordan—that he knew the president, not Betty Currie, was behind the request for the job search, and that Clinton had withheld from him the fact that Lewinsky’s name had appeared on the witness list in the Jones case. Neither disclosure transformed the case, but both added to the air of unseemliness around the president’s behavior.

  More striking than what Jordan said was how he said it. Unlike his friend the president, Jordan had enjoyed the embrace of the Washington establishment (and press corps) throughout the Lewinsky story. Clearly, the lawyer believed the wonderful things that had been written about him, and so he spoke with breathtaking arrogance. The nadir came in an answer to David Kendall, who fed Jordan a softball about “the job assistance you have over your career given to people.”

  Jordan replied with a speech about the civil rights movement. When he graduated from law school in 1960, he said, “it was very clear to me that no law firm in Atlanta would hire me. It was very clear to me that I could not get a job as a black lawyer in the city government, the county government, the state government, or the federal government.” So, he said, his high school bandmaster got him a job with a fraternity brother as a civil rights lawyer.

  “I have never forgotten Kenneth Days’s generosity,” Jordan intoned. “That’s always been etched in my heart and my mind, and as a result, because I stand on Mr. Days’s shoulders and Don Hollowell’s shoulders, I felt some responsibility to the extent that I could be helpful or get in a position to be helpful, that I would do that.…”

  By Jordan’s astonishing reasoning, then, it was the civil rights movement that taught him to assist the likes of Monica Lewinsky. In truth, the best that can be said of Jordan’s role was that he behaved with a stunning lack of curiosity about why his friend the president was so interested in helping this particular twenty-four-year-old woman. Instead of displaying his heretofore legendary savvy, Jordan spoke couth to power and did Clinton’s bidding. A more fitting lesson about Jordan’s conduct was that black plutocrats behave a lot like their white counterparts.

  On February 3, Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, presided over the deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, and the senator promptly established that he hadn’t even bothered to learn the House managers’ names. Specter’s repeated references to Lindsey Graham, who was conducting the questioning, as “Congressman Lindsey” weren’t the only things that caused muffled laughter in this absurd examination.

  Graham went into the deposition trying to prove that Blumenthal had orchestrated a vindictive and false press campaign to portray Lewinsky as a stalker. Blumenthal denied spreading any stories about Lewinsky, but on its face, Graham’s allegation made no sense. The notion of Lewinsky as a stalker had been present in the case from the beginning, and Blumenthal had nothing to do with it. Isikoff’s original story, which was posted on the web the day the story broke, mentioned stalking. Not surprisingly, the stalker issue surfaced in much of the early press coverage. More important, Lewinsky was a stalker. The young woman used Currie and the Navy stewards to monitor Clinton’s schedule, and she even shadowed him around Washington, sometimes staking out his route to and from church. Her own aunt, Debra Finerman, told the FBI that “Lewinsky was known by some as the ‘stalker.’ ” (After Blumenthal’s testimony was released, the writer Christopher Hitchens and two other friends of Blumenthal’s came forward to say that the White House aide had, in private conversations, called Lewinsky a stalker. These comments bore on Blumenthal’s credibility, but could not assist Graham’s futile campaign to prove a White House conspiracy against Lewinsky.)

  Graham’s lack of preparation irritated the pompous Specter. In response to the senator’s chidings, Graham promised, at one point, “We’ll try to be laserlike in these questions.” An hour later, Specter twitted him, “We’re still looking for that laser.”

  On Saturday, February 6, the managers had a day to play the videotapes and explain their significance, but the senators—bored and restless after a full month of trial—paid little attention. By this time, the managers all shared Hyde’s incessant pout, and during the last break of the day their frustrations boiled over. Rick Santorum, Lott’s unwanted emissary, made a trip to the managers’ war room, off the Senate floor, and sought to buck up the troops.

  “You’re doing great,” he said to the managers. “You’re really having an impact on us.”

  Rogan called out in response, “So make a motion to let us call more witnesses.”

  “Oh, no,” Santorum said, reverting to Senate form. “I can’t do that.”

  “Then get the fuck out of here!” one manager called out, and a rain of obscenities fell down on the senator.

  “I was just trying to help you guys!” Santorum said, and then he skittered away.

  The exhausted lawyers droned through their closing statements, with the Republican
s’ Mr. Malaprop, George Gekas, thundering to the senators about “the bald-faced naked phrase of sexual relations.” Even Ruff lost his touch at this point, making the mistake of playing an excerpt from Clinton’s grand jury testimony on the Senate’s television monitors. The mere sight of the president injected a jolt of adrenaline into the Republicans in the chamber. Senators Phil Gramm and Bob Smith had been sitting drowsily through Ruff’s remarks, but when they saw Clinton on the screen, they sat up and began rolling their eyes and rubbing their faces in irritation. Such was Clinton’s effect on his adversaries.

  Hyde had the chance to speak one more time, and he resumed his posture of self-pity. “We are blessedly coming to the end of this melancholy procedure,” he began. “But before we gather up our papers and return to the obscurity from whence we came”—laughter—“permit, please, a few final remarks.”

  There was little new—fewer battles (just Agincourt), and more references to the rule of law. Hyde despaired that he had failed to persuade the Senate—and the country—of the magnitude of Clinton’s misdeeds. “Once in a while I do worry about the future,” he said, almost as an aside. “I wonder if, after this culture war is over, this one we are engaged in, an America will survive that is worth fighting for to defend.” In this final utterance, Hyde had abandoned any pretext about the nature of this fight. A scaffolding of law had been built around the conflict in this case, but the core was indeed cultural and political. It had been almost five years since Randall Terry’s bus (SHOULD CLINTON BE IMPEACHED?) pulled into the parking lot of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. The battles of those years had been fought with the tools of the legal trade, but the argument had really been about what kind of country this was going to be. Bill Clinton might not have won that argument, but Henry Hyde had certainly lost it.