CONSIDER O. J. SIMPSON and Bill Clinton. Save a homicide or two, they’re not entirely different. Both cheat on the links and on their wives (Simpson’s being former and late). Both do their best acting under penalty of perjury. Both compel us, under a crush of evidence, to pressure their guilt even as they insist on their innocence.
Now consider O. J. Simpson on Bill Clinton. Not physically, God help us — but as an informed commentator. Most of Simpson’s recent interrogators (Greta Van Susteren, Esquire, the BBC) continue talking to O. J. about gloves and prosecutors and decapitations, without calculating that he is a man of reflection, a man of the world, a man with enough leisure time to fritter away his days in front of Hardball with Chris Matthews (one of his favorites).
Recently, I learned O. J.’s life is more than just golf dates, rounds of clubhouse gin rummy, and the search for the “real killer.” On a lark, I had been faxing Simpson, in hopes of soliciting a cameo quote for an unrelated story. Last week, when his daily golf game was rained out, he called me (collect) and chatted for an hour-and-a-half, as he loitered in the repose of perennial unemployment. “The incident — as he calls the stabbing murder of his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman — has been bad for business. But what hasn’t suffered, four years after the murders, is his golf handicap. “Pre-Nicole, I was probably playing mostly round a 10, 11, 12,” he says. “Now, I’m about a 7, 8. Once again, I don’t have all those other distractions, you know.”
It was at San Diego’s Del Mar Country Club, in 1994, that O. J. got to know Bill Clinton. An independent Perot-voter in 1992, Simpson joined Clinton there for a golf outing. The president was escaping the North Korean nuclear showdown. Two months later, O. J. would be escaping in a Bronco down the Santa Monica freeway. Never sticklers for rules, the two men both took a few mulligans, says O. J. — using the golfers’ slang for cheating — then drained a few beers. But back in the clubhouse, Clinton wooed a new voter. “I was just touched . . . how sincere he was talking about his wife,” says Simpson. About the onset of the Whitewater investigation, “He said, ‘I can take it, but here’s a woman who only tried to help people her whole life, and they’re really comming after [her].’ . . . I was struck by the sincerity. . . . I think I’m a pretty good judge.”
Besides Clinton’s sincerity, O. J. says he was impressed that the president conducted himself like a regular guy. “On the golf course,” Simpson allows, ” there was some irreverent humor about various things.” I ask him to specify. Was it like the blue golf-course patter that Vernon Jordan memorialized earlier this year with his delicate disclosure, “We talk p–sy”? But Simpson has apparently taken the Susan McDougal course in omerta: “I’m not going to talk about it. It was private. Don’t even try. I refuse to discuss it.”
With O. J. foursquare in the Clinton camp, Democratic party hacks may want to start targeting the Simpson-supporter demographic, which, like Spice Girls fans and intravenous drug users, is an under-reported constituency. Following the example of many Clinton loyalists, Simpson says he is not that interested in the president’s recent travails. On Paula Jones, O. J. takes a Carvillean tack: “If it’s true what happened to Paula Jones, simply for hitting on a dog like her, he should do 30 days. Other than that, I don’t think it’s anybody’s business.”
Concerning the Starr investigation, O. J. proves himself a perfect student of Lanny Davis: He derides spending “another 30 to 50 million dollars on who may have given Clinton h–. To me that’s a shame.” The investigation, that is, not that Clinton was given . . . what O. J. said. While he doesn’t pretend to know the state of play between Clinton and Lewinsky, Simpson does know a thing or two about the overpowering affection of young lovelies (in his post-” incident” phase, O. J. says he is deluged with nude photos and women’s underwear). “I don’t care what they tell you,” O. J. says. “A 22, 23-year-old girl who has her mind set on a 50-year-old guy is more in control than the 50- year-old guy. . . . When their minds are set on something, more than not, they’re going to get what they want.”
One gets the sense that it would not matter terribly to O. J. if Clinton were guilty of these alleged indiscretions. For one of the attributes O. J. prizes most — even more than sincerity — is loyalty: “I had a friend in the past who’d sort of done something, not his wife — but who, in a street thing, killed a person. I’m a Christian, and to me, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is the first commandment’ [N.B. To most Christians, it’s the fifth]. But I still supported the guy as best I could.”
As for his own case, not much has changed when I grill him on specifics. The blood evidence was still cooked by the LAPD. He allows that “I could’ve owned” the famed Aris Isotoner gloves, but he also sees “tons of people” with the same gloves. In any case, they still don’t fit. Those 30-plus photographs of O. J. in Bruno Magli shoes that match the bloody footprint? They were doctored. And with the “real” killer still at large, is O. J. still fulfilling his vow to continue the investigation into the murders? Sort of.
I called his private investigator, Patrick McKenna, who unearthed the audio of Mark Fuhrman’s racist rants. He now works pro bono for Simpson (who still draws a $ 25,000-per-month pension), and O. J. is getting what he pays for. ” It’s not like I get up in the morning, get out a magnifying glass, hop in my car, and start snooping around,” says McKenna. Mostly, he fields faxes and letters from tipsters, the majority of whom are “kooks” or “just friendly people who say, ‘Did you see Geraldo last night?'”
Since McKenna’s not optimistic that any of these clues will turn up the real killer, I ask O. J. why he’s not actually paying for the investigation he promised. He would, he says, but — and now it’s the Al Gore parallel that is eerie — what with all the private-school tuition he’s paying for the kids, it’s just more than he can afford.
Matt Labash is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
