CLINTON CORNERED

Paula Jones confided in two close friends immediately after Clinton exposed himself to her in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel on May 8, 1991. Both those friends confirm her story under oath. One of them, Debra Lynn Ballentine, reports that Paula told her there was something peculiar about Clinton’s genitals. Did she tell you anything else about his anatomy, Ballentine was asked in her October 1997 deposition? “She said he was really white and really overweight.”

Peculiar. Pasty. Fat. But somehow, nevertheless, irresistible to the ladies. That’s what Clinton’s one-time friend and self-described mistress Dolly Kyle Browning, in another sworn deposition, says he told her during a 1987 conversation they had in Texas. “Women are everywhere,” Browning testifies he told her. “I can’t even walk down the street without someone literally trying to pick me up.”

Could Clinton really believe this, the hoariest of all lecher’s self- justifications: that they want it? He could. Browning and the president had a long conversation at their 1994 Hot Springs High School reunion. Clinton made extensive notes about this talk and kept them “in a briefcase that was always either under my desk in the White House or in my little private office.” Clinton’s notes say Browning was frustrated because he never had sex with her. In his sworn deposition, the president restates this point more forcefully. Browning has falsely claimed to have been his mistress, Clinton insists, to punish him for being an unattainable object of uncontrollable lust. “She was mad at me because I’d never been her lover.”

In any case, Browning “had been through some very tough times in the last several years,” and “she was very upset.” Kathleen Willey, of course, was also “very upset” before the now-infamous West Wing encounter during which the president mashed her hand onto his privates. Though his lawyer initially announced that the president had no memory whatsoever of this meeting, Clinton now remembers Willey “very vividly” — because “she was so agitated.” An Arkansas-era press aide to Clinton, one of the Jones lawsuit’s “Jane Does,” was agitated once, too. State trooper Larry Patterson swears that he dropped Clinton off at this woman’s Little Rock house one evening, took measures to hide the governor’s license plate, and then waited outside. A long time. When Clinton finally emerged, smeared with makeup at 4:30 in the morning, he told Patterson that his host “was really distraught . . . and I just had to stay. That’s what took me so long. I had to comfort her.”

So they’re horny and hysterical, and he feels their pain. But before he does the feeling, he likes to have someone else do the feeling-out and facilitating. Kathleen Willey says that just before the 1992 presidential debate in Richmond, Clinton noticed her in a welcoming crowd of Democratic activists and asked then-Virginia lieutenant governor Don Beyer for her name and phone number. ABC videotape of this event shows Clinton doing just that. State trooper Danny Ferguson, co-defendant in the Jones lawsuit, acknowledges under oath that he delivered Paula to Clinton’s private room after the governor told him she had “that come-hither look.”

And two other members of Clinton’s Arkansas gubernatorial security detail confirm the basic technique. Larry Patterson’s deposition says that it was Clinton’s common practice to ask his troopers, “Would you get me her name and her phone number? She has that come-hither look.” The troopers would comply. That was “the procedure I used,” Patterson reports, on at least “fifteen, twenty occasions.” Trooper Roger Perry’s deposition contains an account of one particularly telling incident. It was a 1989 or 1990 public appearance in Augusta, Arkansas. Clinton’s eyes fell on an attractive young woman. He sent Perry to chat her up. Later on, Perry briefed the governor on his reconnaissance. Her name was Holly Cain. She was getting a divorce. And ” you’re going to like this,” Governor. “She’s wanting a state job.” Clinton’s response: “All right.”

All right, indeed. Job offers figure prominently in the president’s past adventures. Kathleen Willey sought and received more than one job assignment from the White House after the president “hugged” her. In February 1995, for instance, she sent Clinton a handwritten request for appointment to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. On that letter, routed to his aides, there is a notation from the president that reads: “Is this what Shelia Lawrence did? Can we do this for her?”

Gennifer Flowers, for her part, swears that, with Clinton’s collusion, she secured a public post in Arkansas under false pretenses. Monica Lewinsky got a White House job and later offers from the United Nations and Revlon. Dolly Kyle Browning says Clinton urged her to move to Washington in 1994: “You can live on the Hill. I can help you find a job.” Jane Doe #2 was appointed to the Arkansas Court of Appeals after Clinton’s alleged affair with her. One woman named in court documents — not the “distraught” press aide, someone else — worked directly for Clinton while they were reportedly having a dalliance. One other woman’s daddy got a Clinton nomination to the Arkansas state highway commission.

Next there is the matter of, well, fellatio. Under oath, Gennifer Flowers says oral sex was a common element of their relationship. Under oath, Larry Patterson says Clinton and Jane Doe #2 were once together in a car, but that you could see “only one head in the car, and that was Bill Clinton’s, driving. ” Patterson says he also personally witnessed two similar episodes involving yet another woman, once in a Little Rock elementary-school playground and once in the traffic circle behind the governor’s mansion. Trooper L. D. Brown, again under oath, has an equivalent tale to tell about a scene outside a Florida discotheque. Monica Lewinsky, most infamously, told Linda Tripp that oral sex was all she did with the president.

Confronted with potential disclosures like these, Bill Clinton seems to have an automatic instinct. He sends emissaries to hush the witnesses up. This effort often involves an offer of employment or something else of value. The president acknowledges talking to his troopers’ former supervisor, Buddy Young (himself now a regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration), about their public statements. And Danny Ferguson says that Young then approached him — and offered the troopers federal jobs.

Dolly Kyle Browning swears that she got some free, unsolicited help from the president’s lawyers at Washington’s Skadden, Arps: a formal motion, prepared for her signature, asking Judge Wright to quash Browning’s Paula Jones subpoena. An attorney named John B. Thompson declares, under penalty of perjury, that his law-school buddy, M. Samuel Jones, worked the bimbo patrol for the Clinton campaign during 1992. According to Thompson, Samuel Jones told him more than once that it was his job to “make them go away,” these bimbos — a job that included paying the women for silence.

But the cover-up is not always so gentle. Dolly Kyle Browning says that her brother, working for the Clinton campaign in January 1992, called her on the phone and said, “If you cooperate with the media we will destroy you.” Larry Patterson says Buddy Young, on four separate occasions, told him to “keep your mouth shut” if you “know what’s best for you and your career and your family.” Roger Perry says — “and I’m under oath here, and I swear on my mother’s life” — that Young was even more brutal with him: If you talk, Young promised, “you will be destroyed, your reputation will be destroyed, and I represent the president of the United States.” L. D. Brown says another Clinton crony, Skip Rutherford, once threatened him this way: “You don’t want your credit card receipts all over the front page, do you?” Even Danny Ferguson admits to having warned Paula Jones about what would happen to her if she pursued her complaint against Clinton in public: “You better think about your family, because I’ve been through it, and they was starting to dig up dirt.”

When all else fails, of course, Clinton simply asserts that his accusers are lying. All the women are lying, under oath. Linda Tripp and Kathleen Willey and Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones and Dolly Kyle Browning and Debbie Ballentine are lying. Pamela Blackard, another Jones friend who confirms Paula’s account of the Excelsior Hotel harassment, is lying. Lydia Cathey, Jones’s sister, is lying. Judy Stokes, who testifies that former Miss America Elizabeth Ward once tearfully confided to her that she’d had sex with Clinton, is lying. They are all lying.

The men are lying, too. John B. Thompson is lying. All the troopers are lying. And any journalist who has reported what these witnesses have said is lying. There is a truly surreal moment in the president’s deposition when he suggests, at great length, that Bill Rempel of the Los Angeles Times offered the troopers several hundred thousand dollars for their story. Any story. “They were encouraged to be as negative as possible,” Clinton testifies, “they were told they didn’t have to tell the truth, they were told all they had to do was to get two or more people to agree,” and “there was a lot of money in it for them if they did it.” Moreover, Clinton claims to believe that Rempel “threatened” the troopers about what would happen if they didn’t cooperate with this Los Angeles Times conspiracy.

Yeah, right, Mr. President.

It’s an infuriating thing to be told by the White House and its agents that several dozen people are perjuring themselves and that only Bill Clinton is telling the truth. It’s an infuriating thing to watch media commentators — and timid congressional Republicans — pretend that the facts are still in some dispute, and that those facts will become a problem only “if and when” they are finally proved. And it is an infuriating thing that ordinary Americans continue to tell pollsters they approve of the pretender-in-chief.

But we can take some comfort in human nature. Clinton may appear serene on the outside. Inside, he must be going near berserk. Maintaining a lie of such scale and complexity is a task beyond normal human capacity. It is bound to fall apart. And so, therefore, is he.

At one point in the transcript of his January 17 deposition, Clinton is asked whether he has ever talked to Monica Lewinsky about her possible testimony in the Jones lawsuit. You can almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he tries to figure out the right answer. Clinton cannot say no, because he knows that any such denial will be thoroughly incredible. He knows there are records of White House meetings he’s had with Lewinsky — meetings that post-date her subpoena from the Jones attorneys. How could they not have talked about it?

At the same time, though, Clinton cannot offer an uncomplicated acknowledgment that he has talked to Lewinsky about her potential testimony, because that might make it appear that he has tampered with a witness. Remember: At this point, January 17, only a handful of people know that the president’s friends have just spent several weeks making unusual efforts to spirit Lewinsky out of town.

So Clinton pulls a Clinton. He fudges. He says he’s “not sure” whether he has ever mentioned subpoenas and testimony to this young lady. And if he has mentioned such stuff to her, the mention was something merely offhand, speculative, jocular. Here’s the president trying to thread this needle:

“Seems to me the last time she was there [at the White House] to see Betty before Christmas we were joking about how you-all [Paula’s attorneys], with the help of the Rutherford Institute, were going to call every woman I’d ever talked to . . . and so I said you [Lewinsky] would qualify, or something like that. I don’t, I don’t think we ever had more of a conversation than that about it, because when I saw how long the witness list was, or I heard about it, before I saw, but actually by the time I saw it her name was on it, but I think that was after all this had happened. I might have said something like that, so I don’t want to say for sure I didn’t, because I might have said something like that.”

Did you catch his mistake? It’s a whopper. It comes when Clinton begins to talk about “how long the witness list was.” Those words constitute an admission that he knew Lewinsky would be called for testimony before he raised the possibility with her directly — and, it would soon turn out, before people like Vernon Jordan began their most intensive job-placement activities on her behalf. The “witness list” reference, in short, is testimony, by the president, that he has recently been smack in the middle of what he knows will look to any objective observer like an obstruction of justice.

Reread Clinton’s answer. He’s no dope. As soon as the “witness list” business comes out of his mouth, Clinton realizes he’s goofed and immediately tries to backtrack. That’s what all the subsequent gobbledy-gook over chronology is about. He discussed Lewinsky’s possible testimony with her only before he knew for sure she would be called. If he discussed it with her at all. He’s “not sure.”

Yeah, sure, Mr. President.

Conventional wisdom in Washington now has it that Clinton will ultimately get away with all this nonsense. We wouldn’t be so sure. The man has already painted himself into an eensie-weensie corner. Sooner or later, we wager, one way or another, he will be cornered for good, and his dishonesty will stain him, indelibly, for all the world to see.

David Tell, for the Editors