On February 11, 1994, during a zoo-like Washington press conference organized by some of the president’s least cautious ideological opponents, a woefully inarticulate woman named Paula Jones suggested that Bill Clinton had once done something horrible to her at a “Quality Management Conference” in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel. Jones appeared easy to dismiss: Her complaint was vague and confusing, and her own lawyer expressed some reluctance about it. Initial West Wing reaction was casually contemptuous.
The few news organizations that bothered to ask for comments from the president’s aides were reminded to “consider the source.” Clinton “didn’t know” this woman. Her charges were “not true.” And — since it seemed a matter of “he said, she said,” and who can ever tell? — there it might have died.
But before that first day was done, reporter Michael Isikoff, then of the Washington Post, rang up Jones’s mother and one of her sisters — both of whom attested that in May 1991 Paula had come to them distraught after what she said was a crude sexual advance by Clinton. Next, for three hours the following morning, Isikoff quizzed Jones herself. He found her description of the alleged incident surprisingly credible. And so he managed to persuade executive editor Len Downie, over the objections of several other senior Post decisionmakers, to give the green light to a further investigation.
At which point George Stephanopoulos made a large and momentous blunder. Tipped off that Paula Jones remained a live, behind-the-scenes issue at the nation’s most important political newspaper, Stephanopoulos decided he would try to spin their reporter away from the story. All Too Human, Stephanopoulos’s new memoir (reviewed on page 34 of this issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD by Brit Hume), contains one version of the resulting conversation:
Before I called [Isikoff], Bruce Lindsey and I compiled all of the facts — even reviewing Clinton’s May 8, 1991, gubernatorial schedule to see if we could prove that Clinton could not have met with Paula when she said. It appeared that Clinton had left the Excelsior Hotel by the time of the claimed encounter, but the people accompanying Clinton that day said he made an unscheduled afternoon return. We didn’t have our silver bullet. But even if we couldn’t convincingly disprove her claim, it still came down to a “he said, she said.” “Doesn’t the president of the United States deserve the benefit of the doubt?” I asked. Isikoff didn’t think so, and we squared off over the validity of various contemporaneous accounts. But it was a dialogue of the deaf: I believed Clinton; he believed Jones.
The trouble is, despite what Stephanopoulos now artfully implies, he did not actually fess up to Isikoff about “the people accompanying Clinton that day” and the “unscheduled afternoon return” they remembered. Instead, as Isikoff reports in his own spectacular new book, Uncovering Clinton, Stephanopoulos attempted to steer him in completely the opposite direction:
He couldn’t believe I was still pursuing this Jones story, he said. But in any case, he had somebody for me to talk to: Phil Price, a former member of Clinton’s staff who now worked for Clinton’s successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker. He was with Clinton at the Quality Management Conference that day and would tell me this was all bulls — t.
Sure enough, that’s what this Phil Price character did soon tell Isikoff: Clinton had been nowhere near the Excelsior Hotel at the hour in question. But it would take Isikoff almost to time to establish that this alibi was wholly false and highly suspicious (Clinton and Price had been on the phone together within moments of Jones’s 1994 press conference). In short, the White House had misled him. The Paula Jones controversy was not yet one week old and still quite murky. But already, Isikoff writes, he was “incensed.”
Over the next four and a half years, most of it while working in Newsweek magazine’s Washington bureau, Isikoff would almost invariably be the first — and do the most — to advance the story: from Paula Jones to Kathleen Willey to Linda Tripp to Monica Lewinsky to the independent counsel investigation that finally commanded the nation’s attention. At every stage, the pattern held. Isikoff would discover evidence of compulsive and sometimes abusive sexual behavior by the president. And the president’s staffers, lawyers, and other minions would swarm to suppress that evidence with public lies and private threats or inducements. “A culture of concealment had sprung up around Bill Clinton,” Isikoff argues, and “it had infected his entire presidency.”
Uncovering Clinton is the most exhaustive, reliable, and clearest general explication of the road to Clinton’s impeachment that any writer has yet produced. But the book is also, as the subtitle suggests, a “reporter’s story,” an attempt to explain how and why Isikoff handled his beat the way he did — what choices he was forced to make along the way and what assumptions governed his search for the facts. To achieve this purpose, Uncovering Clinton winds up discussing a great lot of stuff that Isikoff hasn’t before reported, information that he possessed at the time but that for one reason or another he and his Post and Newsweek colleagues withheld from publication. A certain kind of super-punctilious press ethicist may well complain about this technique — on the principle that what is once not printed must remain unprinted forever. But for everyone else, I suspect, the fresh material in Uncovering Clinton — by its sheer volume, detail, and consistency — will tend to corroborate itself.
A few random and representative highlights:
* Following a 1984 Democratic party fundraiser in Mississippi, Clinton boldly propositioned a shocked young woman named Karen Hinton. Later in her career, between 1989 and 1991, Hinton worked at the Democratic National Committee in Washington, where her past experience with Clinton became widely known. One of the people who knew about it was the DNC’s then-press secretary, Mike McCurry.
* In August 1997, just after his scoop about Kathleen Willey was published in Newsweek, Isikoff received an anonymous call from a woman who claimed to have had a similar — though still more horrifying — encounter with Clinton in the Oval Office. (Isikoff’s account of this conversation is reprinted in the accompanying sidebar on the previous page.)
* During the Paula Jones litigation, Clinton attorney Robert Bennett repeatedly claimed to reporters, off the record, that he could prove Jones had once performed sex acts on five men in the back of a pickup truck. Bennett could prove nothing of the kind; the charge was a baseless smear.
* On September 1, 1996, Susan McDougal telephoned Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz seeking advice, worried that if she agreed to cooperate with the Whitewater grand jury she would be unable to avoid acknowledging a past sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. Dershowitz told her such fears were well founded. Dershowitz then called the White House counsel’s office to alert them to this development. Several days later, McDougal refused to testify, for reasons she has never convincingly explained.
* “Privately, Clinton’s lawyers have conceded that Clinton may have had consensual sex with Broaddrick but insist that he would never have forced himself upon an unwilling participant.”
To be sure, in Uncovering Clinton Isikoff does not at all restrict his criticism to the White House. Everyone involved in the scandal takes his lumps: the conservative lawyer “elves” who secretly assisted the Jones litigation; Ken Starr’s prosecutors, for the periodic heedlessness and overkill with which they pursued the president; Linda Tripp, not least, whose reputation for manipulative nastiness Isikoff implicitly endorses. With masochistic candor, for that matter, Isikoff several times rebukes himself — for errors of judgment, for minor reportorial omissions, and for the unfortunate but unavoidable centrality of sex in the history he has written.
But the book’s true subject remains, of course, the president — a character from whom any open-minded reader will recoil.
I should disclose that I know Mike Isikoff personally. It will no doubt embarrass him to receive plaudits from a friend — and all the more so from me, since, in the many years I’ve known him, we have only rarely agreed about any issue of public consequence. “Right-wing praise I do not need,” he ruefully warned me several weeks ago. I cannot help that. His book is the most compelling and important first-person “big story” narrative any reporter has written since All the President’s Men — a devastating portrait of the very bad man who now inhabits our White House. Sorry, Mike.
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
