MIDWAY THROUGH A PRESS BRIEFING on the last day of July, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry if he would “address the allegations that deal with Kathleen Willey and whether or not she was harassed by the president.” In the context of a press briefing, the question was not outrageous — Willey’s name had surfaced in the news the day before, when she was subpoenaed by lawyers in the Paula Jones case — but McCurry responded as if he’d just been asked something obscene. “No,” he replied curtly, and moved on to the next question. Generally accommodating to the press, McCurry on this day refused even to say whether Kathleen Willey had ever worked at the White House. “I have nothing to add,” he said. “And I think it’s up to responsible news organizations to make editorial judgments about whether that is a matter they want to pursue.”
Reporters were understandably confused. “How can we exercise news judgment if we can’t get the facts?” one journalist asked. McCurry didn’t explain. Instead, he pointed out that “a number of news organizations have elected not to further report on this matter.” And that was it. “I’m not going to do anything here that helps to feed the story,” he declared, effectively ending the discussion.
Less than a week later, the president himself held a press conference on the South Lawn of the White House. Though the Willey story had developed considerably over the previous six days, he took only one apologetic question about it and declined to answer it.
And so the Kathleen Willey affair is, for the moment at least, dead. It may have been the shortest scandal in Washington history.
Rumors of the latest sexual-harassment problems involving the president started in early July when Matt Drudge, the Los Angeles writer who publishes a Walter Winchell-like tip sheet called the Drudge Report on the Internet, heard that investigative reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek was working on a story about a woman who had been groped and fondled by the president. Within several weeks, Drudge had learned the woman’s name and some of the details contained in Isikoff’s story and had sent the information out to the 70,000 or so people who subscribe to his online newsletter, many of them members of the media.
It took the publication of Isikoff’s Newsweek article several days later to fill in major gaps in the story. But even Drudge’s early outline — a White House volunteer sexually propositioned by the president during what amounted to a job interview in the Oval Office — was enough to send the administration’s scandal managers scrambling for a response strategy. In the first 12 hours after he posted his account of the story, Drudge says, White House computers logged on to his Web site more than 2,600 times.
It was not initially clear to anyone what Willey hoped to gain by coming forward with her story, or even if she had in fact come forward to tell it. (To this day, every on-therecord account of Willey’s interactions with Clinton has been given by her friends or former friends, not by Willey herself.) The first instinct at the White House, nonetheless, was to attack Willey as unreliable, even unbalanced. “They didn’t know where she was coming from,” says Matt Drudge. “Someone in Hillary’s office was calling her a ‘psycho’ on the phone to me: “Don’t believe her, she’s a psycho.'”
This approach didn’t last long. Almost immediately, Willey’s attorney issued a statement saying that his client was outraged to be subpoenaed by Paula Jones’s lawyers, who had hoped Willey’s story would help them characterize the president as a chronic sexual harasser. Moreover, the statement said, Willey and Clinton “had and continue to have a good relationship.” (The statement does not confirm or deny whether that relationship was at any time a sexual one.) It became obvious pretty quickly that going after Willey’s character was not going to be fruitful, so the White House tried a new angle. Willey met with Clinton in his office on November 29, 1993, to discuss getting a permanent job in the White House. That same day, Willey’s husband, a Richmond, Virginia, lawyer who had been caught stealing money from clients, shot himself to death. As Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, explained to at least one reporter, the president-if he met with Willey at all — was simply trying to comfort her. What kind of sicko, Bennett wanted to know, would make a pass at a grieving widow? The very idea was “preposterous.”
It was a pretty good defense, but there was just one problem: Willey may have been a widow, but neither she nor Clinton knew it at the time. Her husband’s body wasn’t found until the day after the meeting in the White House. So the White House moved to Plan C: Clam up. Clinton turned media management of the Willey matter over to Bennett. White House staff were instructed in the strongest terms not to talk to the press about it. And, for the most part, they haven’t.
“Really I know nothing about this,” says Lanny Davis, White House flack in charge of denying campaign-finance violations. “I’ve spent the last six months of this awful job saying that I don’t do Paula Jones, until someone told me to stop using the verb “do.” So I don’t ‘do’ Kathleen whatever-her- name-is.” Even if he did do her, Davis says, sounding a little sad, “I’d have to refer you to Bob Bennett, who is answering the entire spectrum of questions, even the ones related to whether she worked in the White House and what she did here, which, quite frankly, I think are the ones we ought to be answering.”
The normally garrulous Ann Lewis, the incoming director of communications, is equally mum. Asked to comment on Willey, Lewis sounds almost robotic: “As I understand the subject of your call to me, I think I need to refer you to Mr. Bennett, the president’s attorney. Bye.”
Not everyone associated with the Clinton White House has been so circumspect. Dick Morris took one look at the story and saw a perfect opportunity to get himself on television. The day the Willey subpoena made the papers, Morris took to CNBC as the president’s “unofficial spokesperson” and denounced as “McCarthyite” questions about Clinton’s private life. (Without apparent self-consciousness, Morris also assailed “this perverted woman, Paula Jones.”) “This is like Joe McCarthy saying, “I have the names of 236 Communists in the State Department,'” Morris said.
Morris’s grandstanding enraged Bennett, who was already irritated by the few unauthorized — and sometimes inaccurate — leaks about Willey coming from the Clinton camp. But it did not detract from the overall effectiveness of the White House strategy, which remained simply to ignore Willey’s existence. “When people hear things like this, it does add to the steady chipping away of what people see as the president’s character,” says one administration official. On the other hand, “character only matters for challengers, or for people who are running for the first time. But this guy’s president. If you’re happy enough with the way the country’s going that you can reasonably tune out politics, which is what a lot of people do, then you don’t need any indication of what he’s going to be like as president, because you see what he’s like.” The proof, in other words, is in the economy.
This may be a smug assessment, but it’s probably also accurate. So is the feeling at the White House that one more tale of Clinton groping isn’t going to sink an administration that has overcome so many other Kathleen Willeys over the years. “This sort of thing is aired so often and in so many ways,” says an administration employee, “that people are inclined to discount it. There’s nothing fresh about it. There’s nothing here that people haven’t already heard and feel they’ve made a judgment on one way or another. There aren’t a lot of undecideds in this country about Bill Clinton’s character.”
Of course it also helps to be blessed with perfect timing. After a particularly scorching summer news drought, the Willey story emerged the same week as — and was quickly swallowed by — the budget deal, the UPS strike, and the crash of a Korean airliner into Guam. Willey could wind up in the headlines again if Paula Jones’s attorneys succeed in forcing her to sit for a deposition, but it seems likely a judge will quash the subpoena before events get that far. “The story’s totally gone now,” says Matt Drudge, who wishes it weren’t. “It’s dead.”
A victory for privacy, common sense, and seemly news coverage? Maybe. Or maybe it is significant that the president of the United States may have made sexual advances in the White House toward a married woman seeking a federal job. Either way, it’s a shame that the Willey story has disappeared from the news because a number of interesting, unanswered questions remain, none of them having to do with sex.
What, for instance, was Kathleen Willey doing at the White House in the first place? Shortly before Willey met with Clinton, her husband embezzled more than $ 270,000 from two people in Richmond. Kathleen Willey personally signed a note taking responsibility and promising to repay the money. She later reneged and refused to pay, even after being ordered by a court to do so. Did any of this show up on her background check? Did anyone at the White House care?
Willey also received an unusual series of work assignments, beginning with the job in the counsel’s office she got just days after her meeting with Clinton, and extending through her presidential appointment to the board of the U.S.O. last year. In 1995, the White House added Willey to the American delegation to two separate United Nations summits, one in Copenhagen, the other in Jakarta. On both, Michael Isikoff reported in Newsweek, she “was the only American participant who had no apparent experience in the issues under discussion.”
To put it mildly. On the trip to the Jakarta conference on biological diversity, Willey’s fellow delegation members included the deputy assistant secretary from the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Affairs, the assistant secretary of state for environment and development, the deputy assistant administrator of the Global Environment Center of the Agency for International Development, a staff geneticist from the Department of Agriculture, and a representative of the National Marine Fisheries Service. On this roster of scientific heavyweights, Kathleen Willey was listed as a ” public member.”
What was someone like Kathleen Willey doing traveling around the world at public expense? What exactly was her relationship with President Clinton? It’s likely the public will never know. Less than 48 hours after the Newsweek story hit the stands, the only journalists said to be snooping around Richmond hoping to talk to Kathleen Willey were reporters from the supermarket tabloids.
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
