Uncovering Clinton

...The Post confirmed what Drudge did not have — Starr's investigation—and was able to break the story several days later...

...Thus, in regard to the Clinton campaign's retention (with the help of federal campaign funds) of "a high-powered private detective," Isikoff writes that "something truly worth knowing...

...Something else had happened in the hotel room, something extremely unpleasant...

...That is, he's the one who took the actions that got him into trouble, and he's also the one who tried to hide these actions from formal legal authorities (not to mention the American people...

...The Times account also included the allegation by one of the troopers that President Clinton had offered him a federal job in exchange for silence...

...Nonetheless, the prevailing view at the Post, as at most other outlets, was that "unraveling mysterious real estate transactions was a lot more respectable than chasing after Clinton's women...

...Yet once again Isikoff found that his editors were lukewarm when he was hot...

...Clinton had asked her for "a type of sex," though she did not define it...

...Isikoff was intrigued...

...Isikoff was bothered by this shadiness, but not for political reasons...

...As for the Dallas lawyers Jones hired to replace Davis and Cammarata, one of them, Wesley Holmes, told me that bringing a case against TAS was "nothing we were retained to do...

...Isikoff was not interested in this bit of news...

...Isikoff left the Jones press conference with the sense, as he writes here, that "the very essence of the Troopergate charge— that Clinton had used his bodyguards as, well, pimps was true...

...Newsweek did not publish that weekend, but—again — Drudge did: "Newsweek Kills Story on White House Intern...

...And on January 13,1998, when he received an anonymous phone call (from a source Isikoff tried without success to get on the record for this book) advising him that on that very day Linda Tripp was being wired by the independent counsel's office for a lunch with Monica Lewin-sky, Isikoff thought he had a huge story: Kenneth Starr was launching a secret criminal investigation of the president...

...Tripp emerges in Isikoffs account as manipulative and deceitful, determined to "entrap" Lewinsky and the president...

...December 1993 also brought the Troopergate story, broken by this magazine and the Los Angeles Times, in which Arkansas state troopers said they had solicited women for Clinton while he was governor, and that they had helped him conceal his extramarital activities from his wife and the public...

...During the press conference, Jones and her attorney, Danny Traylor, alluded to a passage in the TAS Troopergate story...

...And so she had come forward to clear her "good reputation...

...We considered the libel question even more strongly and we set the bar higher...

...The first is that "Clinton did what he did quite apart from the machinations of Tripp and [Lucianne] Goldberg—or the plotting of any right-wing cabal...

...In Uncovering Clinton, Isikoff relates his pursuit of the intertwined Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewin-sky stories...

...Clinton's interest in women other than his wife was well known inside the Post...

...In the end, it was the story Isikoff wanted to report...

...Davis and Cammarata did pursue Brock's notes, but they didn't try to subpoena them and eventually moved on to other matters in their case...

...Isikoff also brings into focus the behind-the-scenes legal talent that, dedicated to "bringing down the president," as one told him, advised Jones's various lawyers and ultimately were instrumental in bringing the Lewinsky matter to the independent counsel's office...

...he was still working on the Willey story...

...It did so with such urgency that in January 1994 Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special counsel, Robert Fiske, who later that year yielded to the court-appointed independent counsel, Kenneth Stan...

...Jones's subsequent lawyers, Gil Davis and Joseph Cammarata, also decided against bringing suit...

...According to the trooper, who told the story to [two other troopers], Clinton asked him to approach the woman, whom the trooper remembered only as Paula, tell her how attractive the governor thought she was and take her to a room in the hotel where Clinton would be waiting...

...Yet before he could break it, Matt Drudge posted a "WORLD EXCLUSIVE" about Willey's allegation, writing that "Isikoff has held back on the explosive story...

...77 kind of consensual sex with Clinton—as well as the statement attributed to her about her being available to be his girlfriend — were not true...

...Ferguson, said Traylor, had "defamed, libeled and slandered" Jones...

...labor in now familiar high-minded terms: A sleazy tabloid culture could not be allowed to endanger political discourse...

...If they refused to cooperate, he was to gather information calling into question their credibility or mental stability...

...Greed did not strike me as Clinton's weakness...

...The book is briskly written, revealing, and insightful...

...Isikoff phoned Clinton aide Betsey Wright, who confirmed the story...

...How he does think, as this book shows and those who know him attest, is in the perhaps now old-fashioned terms of coming up with scoops and breaking news, especially about politicians who hide something of public import...

...He describes how he found a woman of interest to Jones's lawyers, Kathleen Willey, who claimed that Clinton had made an unwanted sexual advance toward her in 1993...

...It never dawned on me that anyone would recognize her...

...Perhaps because the country has had its fill of Bill and Monica, Uncovering Clinton hasn't received the attention it deserves...

...I don't think ideologically," he writes, noting that targets of his reporting have ranged across the political spectrum...

...You're barking up the wrong tree...

...A month later Tripp told him "an amazing story" about White Houselies and cover-ups, and Clinton's sexual behavior, which included an ongoing "affair with a twenty-three year-old former White House intern" —whom Tripp did not name...

...She did not separately sue TAS, though she evidently thought about it...

...Isikoff recounts his growing frustrations with the Post, and its with him, and the suspension meted out to him after he and an editor generally opposed to the story faced off over a turf question...

...It was published the next week...

...At the end of this meeting, she told Isikoff, "There's something here, but the story is not what you think it is...

...Traylor told me in an interview that he reviewed whether there inight he a libel case and concluded that there wasn't one...

...In my view he did reasonably well in maintaining appropriate journalistic distance in pursuit of a legitimate story requiring negotiation through, as he rightly says, "treacherous and uncharted territory...

...A short time later, he moved to Newsweek...

...Isikoffs story actually starts during the 1992 campaign...

...Isikoff devotes more than half of Uncovering Clinton to his efforts to report the Lewinsky story, which by August 1997 he concluded was worth pursuing...

...had been concealed...

...But he found a close friend of hers who said she was the one who had come across the article and then told Jones about it—whereupon Jones thought that everyone who knew and worked with her might think that she was this "Paula...

...When that was finally done—more than a year after Isikoff wrote his story—he discovered while digging through the records at the Federal Election Commission that the total paid Palladino exceeded $ioo,000, with "a large chunk" of it delayed until after the election—"one final layer of subterfuge...

...Looking into the use of private detectives in political campaigns, Isikoff, then at the Washington Post, heard about a San Francisco investigator who was digging up "dirt" on women who might allege romantic relationships with Bill Clinton...

...The second, related point is that having political enemies did not— contrary to what Clinton apparently still thinks—justify "the culture of concealment" that Isikoff first saw in reporting on private eve Palladino and which permeated the Clinton presidency...

...Not surprisingly, Isikoff was one of the very few Washington journalists unwilling simply to dismiss Paula Jones's story when, on February 11, 1994, she first told it to reporters...

...David knew who they were...

...Uncovering" Bill Clinton is indeed what covering the lying Lothario in the White House has required, and no reporter during the Clinton years has proved more dedicated to this hard labor than Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who in 1998 won national notice for reporting the sex-and-lies story involving Clinton and that woman...

...Still, I don't think it was even close on the merits as to whether it should be pursued...

...A]fter her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the trooper stood by in the hall, the trooper said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton's regular girlfriend if he so desired...

...This book, of course, is ultimately about Clinton, and Isikoff is clear-eyed on two essential points...

...The Post was not prepared to publish a story that day, however, nor later, despite additional reporting by Isikoff that in his view only strengthened the case for publication...

...Wright justified this low TERRY EASTLAND is publisher of The American Spectator...

...It is a mark against Isikoff's colleagues that few of them, as he recalls, "shared my passion" about the "legal fees," and so the story had littlebounce...

...As the troopers explained it, the standard procedure in a case like this was for one of them to inform the hotel that the governor needed a room for a short time because he was expecting an important call from the White House...

...Jack Palladino, she said, was being paid out of campaign funds and reporting directly to her...

...To historians of Clinton, it may seem fairly major, since Jones's eventual lawsuit against Clinton and the remarkable events it set in motion, culminating in the second-ever impeachment of an American president, might not have occurred but for the unconsidered reference to "Paula" in The American Spectator...

...There just wasn't a good claim," Davis told me...

...In writing this review, I asked Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, who edited Brock's piece, about the reference in it to a "Paula," especially since all the other "Clinton women" in the article, with the exception of Gennifer Flowers, who had told her story during the 1992 campaign, were mentioned by description ("the wife of a prominent judge," for example) but not by name...

...Isikoff was among the several reporters covering Whitewater, successfully buried by the Clintons during the campaign, when it returned to the news in the fall of 1993...

...Isikoff was struck less by the novelty of using a private eye to smear women than by the subterfuge it required...

...As he discovered, the Clinton campaign had paid Palladino not directly but through a Denver law firm, a maneuver that allowed it to characterize the expenditures on the federally required financial disclosure forms as "legal fees...

...Isikoff includes here his recollection of calling Brock to ask about Jones's complaint that she had been wrongly portrayed in the TAS article as a compliant sexual partner of Clinton's.' Brock, who last year "apologized" to Clinton for writing his article (though not to Jones or the troopers, who were mortified by the salacious details he had included in the piece), told Isikoff: "That seems a fairly minor point to me...

...The American Spectator June 1999 67 suit against Clinton and Clinton retained Washington superlawyer Robert Bennett, did the newspaper finally decide to publish a story, which included many of the details Isikoff had been trying to get into the paper...

...I sikoff returned to the Jones story in 1997, when the question of presidential immunity in Jones v. Clinton went before the Supreme Court...

...And "Paula...

...But it is essential reading for anyone interested in the press, Clinton, and his presidency...

...For most of the press, Whitewater, not Trooper-gate, was the 66 story worth pursuing, a point confirmed in a subsequent study of scandal coverage by Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia and S. Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs...

...One suspects, though, that Isikoff will be available for duty...

...She wanted the president to apologize...

...Isikoff reports his worry over this and confesses some mistakes...

...David didn't know her last name, and I thought Little Rock was a big enough place for there to be many Paulas...

...Isikoff's reporting on Willey, which includes some textbook examples of proverbial shoeleather journalism, led him to Linda Tripp, whom he first met in March 1996 in the Pentagon, where she worked...

...Not until early May 1994, when Jones decided to file a civil 'Jones's original lawsuit included Ferguson with Clinton as a co-defendant...

...Jones maintained that the suggestion in the story—that she had engaged in some44 He was bothered by this shadiness, but not for political reasons...

...It was obvious from the start that we would never mention any of the women by name, without their approval," said Pleszczynski...

...Presidents," he writes, "ought not he permitted to deceive the public," Whether the next president will engage in such deceptions as to require his (or her) uncovering is, after six and one-half years of Clinton, almost too much to contemplate...

...It did, however, force the Clinton campaign to make public its payments to Palladino...

...Feeling "utterly defeated," Isikoff was reduced to filing a piece on Newsweek's website...

...His job was to extract affidavits from the women (an amazing 19 in all) denying any involvement with Clinton...

...All Brock had done was quote someone else [Ferguson]," he says...

...Writing that Clinton would "use troopers as intermediaries, sending them off with messages and outright propositions to women to retire to back rooms, hotel rooms, or offices with him," David Brock, who wrote the piece, had included this example: "One of the troopers" — later revealed as Danny Ferguson told the story of how Clinton had eyed a woman at a reception at the Excelsior Hotel in downtown Little Rock...

...He had tried to call them for interviews, but they wouldn't give any...

...Isikoff was doubtful that the "Paula" paragraph in the TAS story was what made Jones come forward, since he could not believe she actually read the magazine...

...Though a key part of the White-water team, Isikoff was skeptical where that story would finally lead...

...In Uncovering Clinton, Isikoff offers additional confirmation...

...Increasingly Isikoff saw that he was "in the middle of a plot to get the president" and, indeed, that he had become part of the unfolding story, as sources sought to use him to influence events...

...68 June /999 The American Spectator...

...But was that because they were conservatives, and TAS is a conservative magazine...

...In fact, as Isikoff reveals, Clinton, as a guest of the paper at a Washington press dinner in 1991, had made a pass at one of the paper's young reporters...