INSIDE THE CLINTON ATTACK MACHINE

But there Palladino was, scoping out Leach’s Northwest Washington premises one evening as the congressman arrived home in 1994. Palladino, a San Francisco private detective who had been paid more than $ 100,000 by the Clinton campaign in 1992 to deal with what Clinton intimate Betsey Wright called “bimbo eruptions,” quickly scurried away, and Leach never went public with what he saw. But the House Banking Committee chairman privately told colleagues the intended message was clear: You mess with us, we’ll mess with you.

William Clinger got the same treatment. When the now-retired Pennsylvania Republican congressman was probing Commerce secretary Ron Brown’s business dealings in 1995, a New Jersey detective named Louis Stephens suddenly started snooping around. Stephens had been hired by Brown’s ex-business partner and mistress Nolanda Hill to button up Clinger’s sources.

About the same time, a member of Clinger’s staff got a call from a reporter working on a Clinger profile. She’d been tipped by a supposedly solid source that Clinger was a wife-abuser who’d once viciously pushed his spouse down a flight of stairs in a rage. There was a kernel of truth to the tale: As a young man, Clinger had gotten into an altercation with an Englishman he suspected of moving in on Clinger’s fiancee. The shoving match ended with the pretender being tossed down a flight of stairs. This was about 40 years ago.

“Can I prove it was the White House behind the story? No,” concedes a well- informed source. “Do I think it was them? Absolutely. They do have a pattern of getting into your past.”

That’s why Clinger, who chaired the House committee now run by Dan Burton until his retirement last year, wasn’t surprised at revelations that White House aides were peeking through FBI files of Republicans a year later. “We do know,” Clinger said at the time, “that this White House had a history of amateur detectives rooting around for dirt.”

Just another day at the office for Bill Clinton’s dogs of war.

The president’s impressive people skills and abundant personal charm mask a streak of political cold-bloodedness and score-settling worthy of a Mario Puzo novel. That’s particularly true in the way he and his lieutenants deal with anyone — critic or innocent victim alike — who poses a potential menace to the massive effort to keep the lid on the various scandals dogging Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and his administration.

If you pose a threat to this president, you’re not merely a political adversary — you’re clearly a bimbo, homosexual, homophobe, alcoholic, moron, sexual harasser, crook, dupe, fellow traveler, embezzler, pathological liar, or even murderer. At least that’s what every reporter, news editor, bureau chief, or network executive interested in what you have to say will be told.

“This is their standard operating procedure,” says a prominent Washington attorney who’s watched the Clinton team ply their black trade close up. “They go way beyond the normal give-and-take of political discourse. First they set out to dirty you up in an attempt to discredit you. Then they try to destroy you to send a signal to the next guy who might think about saying something uncomfortable for the president. And it’s all a sideshow to deflect from the facts.”

That’s not to say the Clintonites should be playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules. Politics is a blood sport, and the Clinton crowd plays the game with considerable skill. Zapping one’s political adversaries is always fair game, but there’s a big difference between creating a Web site to tell the universe about Dan Burton,s own alleged ethical lapses and kooky behavior, and trafficking in sub rosa character smears. Clinton’s partisans move seamlessly between the legitimate and the tawdry.

While many White House aides play hard but clean, the Clinton attack machine has convincingly proven time and again that crime pays. Enemies have been intimidated, inconvenient truths suppressed, and reputations shattered — all at negligible political cost to the president. The low road has worked out so fabulously, in fact, that it’s now generally accepted in Washington political circles that every future president will have at his call a taxpayer-funded team of high-octane damage-control specialists to muck out the presidential stables.

You have to admire Clinton’s arsenal and the ferocity with which it’s deployed. A cadre of current and ex-White House staffers, Arkie loyalists, high-priced private legal eagles like David Kendall and Robert Bennett, friendly journalists, and political assassins such as James Carville are willing to do the president’s dirty work. All it takes is a nod, and the political button men are dispatched. They rarely fail to off their target.

Just ask Sally Perdue. When the former Miss Arkansas claimed in 1992 to have had an affair with Clinton, Palladino went to work, getting four friends and relatives to help knock down her story. Perdue never got any TV time. At the time, Clinton confidant and former chief of staff Betsey Wright bragged how she’d short-circuited “gold-diggers” who claimed to have slept with then- governor Clinton: “There were 22 of them, each one wilder and more off the wall than the last. With all that tabloid TV money out there, they were just lining up to get a slice.”

Considering the number of land mines he defused, Palladino was well worth the $ 100,000 he was paid. (He has since gone on to bigger and better things. He was hired by the parents of the 14-year-old boy Michael Jackson was accused of molesting, and rocker Courtney Love used him to shoot down rumors she had hubby Kurt Cobain killed.) Bimbo suppression worked so well in the campaign that the Clintons quickly brought the attack mode into the White House in 1993. That’s when it got ugly, and quickly backfired.

One of the first victims of the Clinton attack machine was Billy Dale, the veteran director of the White House travel office, which arranges air charters for reporters traveling with the president. The firings of Dale and his entire staff in May 1993 are still being scrutinized by independent counsel Kenneth Starr for possible criminal conduct by White House aides, but there’s no longer any question that Hillary Clinton took more than a passing interest in the matter, or that Clinton intimate Harry Thomason was heavily involved in the maneuverings that led to the summary dismissals on trumped-up charges of alleged malfeasance.

When a political furor erupted over the ousters, the White House turned around and trashed Dale, a career civil servant whose recordkeeping was well known among reporters to be a little sloppy but who had a reputation for personal probity built over more than three decades of travel-office service. The attack machine, led by Thomason attorney Bob Bennett and thenDemocratic party mouthpiece Ann Lewis, let it be known that Dale and his colleagues had been sacked for financial irregularities discovered by an independent audit. In fact, the audit found no such malfeasance.

Then the character assassins said that Dale and his colleagues may have been getting kickbacks in exchange for directing business to airlines and transportation companies. It was an utterly bogus allegation, later quickly demolished by the Justice Department, but not before it was widely disseminated. But never mind: The attack machine then said Dale had violated customs and state tax laws by letting reporters bring back millions of dollars of foreign goods on press planes without paying customs. That accusation may have been true, but it wasn’t Dale’s responsibility — the practice has flourished for decades with the nod and wink of customs officers who routinely accompany the press entourage on all presidential trips abroad.

Later, in what his backers insist was a trumped-up prosecution designed to give cover to an embattled White House, Dale was indicted for alleged embezzlement. It took a trial jury little more than an hour to clear him on all counts.

Even after that, Bob Bennett went on ABC to imply Dale was guilty anyway. His evidence: Dale, Bennett alleged, had been prepared to cop a plea and take a few months of jail time. That wasn’t true either, and when the press confronted the White House with Bennett’s charge, aides said Bennett was freelancing without prior approval. But Clinton loved it; the president told Bennett he’d done a great job, according to presidential staffers.

Notwithstanding the boss’s private glee, one of Clinton’s most trusted lieutenants admits in a burst of candor and understatement: “I think it’s fair to say we were a little too heavy-handed on Dale.”

Bennett and Lewis, of course, have gone on to greater glory in the pantheon of Clinton button men. Lewis is now the sycophantic White House communications director, while Bennett has dusted off his trusty hatchet and swung it in the direction of Paula Jones.

You’d think the Dale fiasco would have warned them off, but the White House attack machine plowed ahead. Next target: Arkansas troopers. When Clinton’s ex-bodyguards went public with claims he used them to line up women, all his top lieutenants were dispatched to kill the story.

Senior White House official Bruce Lindsey, the president’s closest aide, worked the angles, calling old Arkansas hands to stand up for the president. ABC was interviewing Federal Emergency Management Administration regional director Buddy Young — who had been the troopers’ boss and disputed their assertions — when Lindsey called to instruct him to be sure to tell CNN the same story.

Palladino also got into the act. “Everywhere we went to talk to women, he was there first,” says ABC investigative producer Chris Vlasto, who recently won the Edward R. Murrow award for his Nightline coverage of the Clintons.

Fortunately for the Clintonites, the troopers gave them plenty of ammo. Money-hungry and bitter, troopers Roger Perry, Larry Patterson, and L. D. Brown had checkered pasts and were quickly trashed as drunks, cheats, and wife-beaters. Wright went to Little Rock’s Capital Hotel to spin CNN, the New York Times, and British tabloid pressies hanging out at the bar. ” She’d go around and say, ‘These guys are drunks, they beat their wives,'” says a reporter who was there.

Perry and Patterson were especially easy to whack. Clinton’s henchmen quickly discovered the two lied to an insurance company about wrecking a state police car in 1992 after a night of heavy drinking. Once the story was all over the networks and newspapers, the troopers were dismissed by many as opportunists.

But that was nothing like what the attack machine did to L. D. Brown, a trooper who was once close to Clinton but became angry after he was passed up for a promotion and fought with the governor over police issues. After Brown went public with his allegations against Clinton in April 1994, Clinton partisans, including David Kendall, “told us that L. D. Brown murdered his mother and that’s why you shouldn’t believe him,” one reporter remembers. It wasn’t so. When Brown was 14, his father tried to commit suicide in front of Brown and his mother. In the struggle for the gun, Brown’s mother was shot and killed. For that, he was dubbed a murderer.

Because she was the only woman other than Gennifer Flowers to go public with allegations against Clinton, Paula Jones was singled out for special venom. James Carville set the tone. “Drag hundred-dollar bills through a trailer park, there’s no telling what you’ll find,” he said in 1994. For the better part of three years, Jones was dismissed in the mainstream press as a goldbricking stooge for Clinton-haters. The offensive worked so well that the Clinton crowd outsmarted themselves. On the verge of a settlement in 1994 that would have made Jones go away, Clinton’s courtiers couldn’t resist one more slam. They told reporters Jones was dropping her suit because she knew she had no case. That torpedoed the deal; Jones got her back up and filed suit against Clinton. Three years later, he’s still being embarrassed by the hubris of his attack machine.

But that didn’t stop it. Bob Bennett gleefully talked about nude photos of Jones being shopped to Penthouse and confided to friendly reporters that he had affidavits from several men who’d allegedly been serviced by Jones in the back of a pickup.

Finally, after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in May that Jones was entitled to her day in court, Bennett brought attack-machine tactics out into public view for the first time. On Meet the Press, he served notice that if Paula Jones really wanted to delve into his client’s past, he was fully primed to explore Jones’s sex life as well. This was too much even for the feminists whom Clinton has successfully courted since 1992. The firestorm led the White House to disown Bennett’s remarks — even though Clinton himself had approved the broadside the night before. For good measure, the attack machine then turned on Bennett himself, making sure reporters knew that Bennett hadn’t exactly lived up to his $ 500-an-hour fee.

As that incident proves, Clintonires are themselves very much at risk from the attack machine. Consider the case of David Watkins, a longtime Clinton pal who proved a disaster as director of White House administration and was eventually canned for using presidential helicopters to whisk him to a golf outing. Watkins had been the hatchet man who personally fired Billy Dale and his cohorts.

After he left, Watkins turned over to congressional investigators a two- year-old “soul-cleansing” memo blaming Hillary for the Travelgate firings. ” There would be hell to pay if . . . we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes,” Watkins wrote.

While gleeful Republicans arranged for Watkins to testify about the memo, a horrified White House weighed whether to expose Watkins’s tender spot: allegations he sexually harassed women in the White House, including Clinton’s distant cousin Catherine Cornelius, another key Travelgate player. Watkins was particularly vulnerable because the 1992 Clinton campaign actually had to spend $ 37,500 to settle a sexual-harassment claim against Watkins made by a campaign accountant.

Just before the White House prepared to pull the trigger and spread the sexualharassment story, word came that Watkins would fudge his testimony and not finger the First Lady as having directly ordered the firings. Given their modus operandi, it’s hard to believe Watkins wasn’t apprised of what was about to happen to his reputation. He fudged — and they didn’t go nuclear.

The most successful hit so far by Clinton’s team was delivered on Gary Aldrich, author of Unlimited Access, a kiss-and-tell memoir of his days as an FBI agent posted to the Clinton White House that sent the president’s men into orbit. When ABC invited Aldrich onto This Week last summer, Clinton aides went to red alert to try to get the interview scrubbed. Chief of staff Leon Panetta called ABC’s veep for news to complain. Former congressman Tony Coelho leaned on a Brinkley producer, Capital Cities/ABC president Robert Iger got a call, and so did Michael Ovitz, then president of ABC’s parent corporation, Disney. Democratic party chairman Chris Dodd and White House press secretary Mike McCurry hit the phones as well.

The message was identical: Aldrich was a Clinton-hating conservative nut case whose book wasn’t worthy of network air time. ABC officials say it was the most aggressive and heavy-handed attempt to muzzle a presidential critic since the government went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers.

The strongarming didn’t keep Aldrich off camera, but it did shape his treatment at the hands of suddenly hostile inquisitors. True, Aldrich gave the Clinton attack dogs a huge opening by including some journalistically indefensible hearsay in his tale. As a result, the soft underbelly of the book was ripped to shreds, while the more credible passages — those having to do with the conduct of the countercultural Clintonites running free in the White House in 1993 — were largely ignored. On ABC, Aldrich had to concede that his most sensational and preposterous tale — that Clinton was smuggled out of the White House for late-night trysts at the nearby J. W. Marriott Hotel — was merely a “possibility.” Aldrich’s credibility never recovered. CNN and Dateline promptly decided to disinvite him — helped along by more White House lobbying — and although the book was a bestseller for a surprising number of weeks, Aldrich’s J’accuse had been effectively silenced. “We killed it,” senior aide George Stephanopoulos later boasted of the Aldrich menace.

Stephanopoulos was speaking from experience; the attack machine had already perfected its technique for keeping Clinton critics off the air. They’d learned their lesson the hard way in December 1993, when CNN ran a story about what the Arkansas troopers knew about Clinton’s extramarital flings. Even news outlets that had already decided to ignore the story latched onto CNN’s report as an excuse to back into it. Forever after, one of the first calls the White House made to spike a story was to Tom Johnson, CNN’s president. It worked in 1994, when Stephanopoulos persuaded Johnson that Paula Jones’s allegations were old news from a trailer-park Madonna.

Remarkably, the one official who was, until recently, exempted from a full- blown jihad by the Clinton attack machine was the official who could hurt the White House most: independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr has largely been allowed to conduct his Whitewater investigation without a White House target on his back.

The Clintons fumed privately that Starr was getting away with murder, never having to explain why he represented tobacco interests and works as a parttime prober, or divulge who pays for his travel to speak to conservative groups, “The guy’s a persecutor, not a prosecutor,” Clinton has exploded to his aides. As for Hillary, “I remember the first lady saying many times, ‘If we refused to answer those questions, people would be all over us,'” a Clinton strategist says. That fuming has gone public every now and then, as when the president complained to Jim Lehrer last fall that he felt Starr was out to get him (“Isn’t it obvious?”).

But even though they stewed, Starr was untouchable. No detectives, no efforts to direct reporters, nothing. “The feeling was it was not smart to pick a fight. The Clintons usually agreed,” says an ex-aide.

But this summer, following an ill-advised decision by Starr to cooperate with a New York Times Magazine reporter, the attack machine has been unleashed. Clinton lawyer David Kendall sent a blistering six-page letter to Starr challenging his judicial integrity and followed up with a statement saying he’s presiding over “an investigation that is out of control.” Former White House lawyers Abner Mivka and Jack Quinn have suggested Starr should resign for reportedly inquiring into Clinton’s personal life. Carville’s invective has taken on an abusive, even belittling tone. Even current White House counsel Charles Ruff, Clinton’s fifth lawyer in as many years, is described by an associate as having become “radicalized” about Starr.

What changed?

In part, Starr brought the trouble on himself. But the Clintonites have been hearing the same rumors about his investigation as everybody else, and those rumors indicate there is a strong current of opinion inside Starr’s office for seeking an indictment of Hillary Clinton. So in hopes of discrediting what would be a catastrophic development, the White House has reversed field and is suddenly on a war footing against the independent counsel. “There’s been a sea change at the White House,” a senior Clinton hand concedes. White House aides have been instructed not to discuss the change in strategy (counsel Charles Ruff said, “I don’t want to characterize our mood”), but it’s clear the Clintons now view and plan to treat Starr the same way they treat all enemies. With extreme prejudice.

“Every time he missteps, there will be a tough response,” says a Clinton legal strategist. “No more freebies.” There’s even a low-level whisper campaign underway alleging that Starr has his own personal problems down in Little Rock.

It is true that James Carville, who ran Clinton’s 1992 campaign, has made a sideline in the past year out of bashing Starr. Since forming his nonprofit Education and Information Project last fall, Carville has gleefully given hundreds of interviews, dozens of speeches, and cranked up a Starr-chamber Web site (www.eip.org) bashing Starr as a partisan Clinton-hater in judicial clothing and delightedly exploiting Starr’s political blunders — like announcing he was folding his tent for a dean’s chair at Pepperdine University before backing off under intense pressure.

Privately, the Clintons were delighted with Carville’s spirited defense. But the attack machine thought his increasingly petulant broadsides were becoming counterproductive. Indeed, Stephanopoulos called him periodically to ask him to give it a rest. “James didn’t want to be told to lay off,” says a senior White House aide. “His attitude was, ‘I’m a free American male and this guy deserves to be called for what he is.'” Still, aides agree that one phone call from the president would have caused Carville to shut up. Carville didn’t get that call, and now he has a free hand to crank up his Web site and go nuclear.

Recently, Carville fired off a letter to Starr about news reports that he had just unsuccessfully shopped a book. “Hey partner,” Carville needled, ” here’s just a bit of some friendly advice, spend less time trying to cash in on your 15 minutes of fame and wrap up this farce of an investigation.” Only a few weeks ago, the White House would have been forced to disavow a letter that demeaning in tone. (Even David Kendall’s broadsides have been addressed to “Judge Starr.”) But those days are over.

The attack machine is now poised to shift into higher gear with the ascension of Paul Begala and Sidney Blumenthal to the level of senior White House staffers. Begala’s return in particular augurs poorly for Starr’s prospective treatment as the indictment sweepstakes heat up. A gut fighter, Begala has a reputation for scorching the earth in pursuit of his enemies. And Kenneth Starr is now, and forever, White House Enemy No. 1.

Thomas M. DeFrank and Thomas Galvin are, respectively, Washington bureau chief and congressional correspondent for the New York Daily News.