ISIKOFF'S CLINTON
Tell, David
ISIKOFF'S CLINTON By David Tell On February 11, 1994, during a zoo-like Washington press conference organized by some of the president's least cautious ideological opponents, a woefully...
...What happened after that...
...Her charges were "not true...
...You owe it to yourself, you owe it to all the others...
...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...
...Her husband was a player in the Democratic Party...
...But before that first day was done, reporter Michael Isi-koff, 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...
...Look, I told her, it's really important that we get together and talk about this...
...She too would never say anything...
...Isikoff didn't think so, and we squared off over the validity of various contemporaneous accounts...
...Bennett could prove nothing of the kind...
...She would think about it, she said...
...She mentioned an administration official she knew who had told her about Clinton slipping his hands up her leg...
...But the book's true subject remains, of course, the president—a character from whom any open-minded reader will recoil...
...The few news organizations that bothered to ask for comments from the president's aides were reminded to "consider the source...
...No, she couldn't do that, she said...
...ISIKOFF'S CLINTON By David Tell 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...
...He just wanted to chat, to see how she was doing...
...Clinton started getting physical, trying to kiss her, touching her breasts...
...But she wanted me to know something...
...The woman said she was stunned...
...He's very charming...
...She had met Clinton over the years at political events and would get invited to come see him at the White House when she was in Washington on business...
...I should disclose that I know Mike Isikoff personally...
...And—since it seemed a matter of "he said, she said," and who can ever tell?—there it might have died...
...That woman sounded to me as credible as any of them, more so, really, and her story was in some ways the most horrifying of all...
...Clinton acted as if nothing had happened...
...Everyone involved in the scandal takes his lumps: the conservative lawyer "elves" who secretly assisted the Jones litigation...
...Who was this guy Clinton...
...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...
...I pleaded for her name...
...she worried that her colleagues would start to wonder about them...
...What about it...
...After she hung up, I was shaken...
...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...
...I cannot help that...
...Right-wing praise I do not need," he ruefully warned me several weeks ago...
...But it was a dialogue of the deaf: I believed Clinton...
...I've never had a man take advantage of me like that," she said...
...She shook her head sadly...
...But already, Isikoff writes, he was "incensed...
...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...
...Isikoff's account of this conversation is reprinted in the accompanying sidebar on the previous page...
...I asked...
...Several days later, McDougal refused to testify, for reasons she has never convincingly explained...
...And so he managed to persuade executive editor Len Downie, over the objections of several other senior Post decision-makers, to give the green light to a further investigation...
...the charge was a baseless smear...
...She couldn't, she said...
...She would be in Washington soon to meet with a "client," and maybe she would consider giving me a call...
...A few random and representative highlights: • Following a 1984 Democratic party fundraiser in Mississippi, Clinton boldly propositioned a shocked young woman named Karen Hinton...
...He was with Clinton at the Quality Management Conference that day and would tell me this was all bulls—t...
...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 Lind-sey 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 was just so awful...
...You know that story you had in the magazine this week about the woman Clinton made sexual overtures to in the hideaway office...
...Uncovering Clinton is the most exhaustive, reliable, and clearest general explication of the road to Clinton's impeachment that any writer has yet produced...
...There didn't seem to be any point to Clinton's calls...
...She hesitated, and she said softly and with apparent discomfort, "I think he finished the job himself...
...What demons possessed him...
...I pointed out that the timing was the key...
...To be sure, in Uncovering Clinton Isikoff does not at all restrict his criticism to the White House...
...But even if we couldn't convincingly disprove her claim, it still came down to a "he said, she said...
...Then Clinton started calling her at work...
...I didn't have any doubts," she said...
...Clinton's attention was "pretty flattering...
...Yes," I said...
...The woman left the White House, humiliated and repulsed...
...A woman was on the line...
...The image lingered...
...Ken Starr's prosecutors, for the periodic heedlessness and overkill with which they pursued the president...
...In short, the White House had misled him...
...That's exactly the same thing that happened to me," she said...
...But it would take Isikoff almost no 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...
...he believed Jones...
...Linda Tripp, not least, whose reputation for manipulative nastiness Isikoff implicitly endorses...
...Jones appeared easy to dismiss: Her complaint was vague and confusing, and her own lawyer expressed some reluctance about it...
...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...
...In the Aftermath of the Kathleen Willey Story from Michael Isikoff's Uncovering Clinton, pp...
...Sorry, Mike...
...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...
...The caller was articulate and well-educated, a professional woman probably in her mid- to late-thirties, married and involved in politics...
...Isikoff would discover evidence of compulsive and sometimes abusive sexual behavior by the president...
...And how many more of them were out there—women too terrified and too smart to open their mouths...
...The woman told no one except her sister...
...We spoke for the next half hour...
...I begged her to meet me...
...One of the people who knew about it was the DNC's then-press secretary, Mike McCurry...
...The calls were embarrassing...
...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...
...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...
...If my husband knew I was talking to you, he'd kill me," she said...
...Clinton turned away, she said...
...Der-showitz then called the White House counsel's office to alert them to this development...
...Next, for three hours the following morning, Isikoff quizzed Jones herself...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...A culture of concealment had sprung up around Bill Clinton," Isikoff argues, and "it had infected his entire presidency...
...Dershowitz told her such fears were well founded...
...Clinton "didn't know" this woman...
...But for everyone else, I suspect, the fresh material in Uncovering Clinton—by its sheer volume, detail, and consistency—will tend to corroborate itself...
...Initial West Wing reaction was casually contemptuous...
...he must have been worried about what she might say...
...The story she told was chilling...
...And the president's staffers, lawyers, and other minions would swarm to suppress that evidence with public lies and private threats or inducements...
...She had no idea how to respond...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Later in her career, between 1989 and 1991, Hin-ton worked at the Democratic National Committee in Washington, where her past experience with Clinton became widely known...
...I haven't felt that way since high school...
...She wouldn't give me her name...
...It was pretty awful...
...There are a lot of us out there who are not bimbos," she said...
...At which point George Stephanop-oulos made a large and momentous blunder...
...The Paula Jones controversy was not yet one week old and still quite murky...
...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...
...As Clinton pressed himself on her, she said, she resist-ed—and finally pushed him away...
...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...
...The woman never called back...
...He found her description of the alleged incident surprisingly credible...
...He called many times in January, around the time of his inauguration—just as the Jones case was being argued in the Supreme Court...
...Doesn't the president of the United States deserve the benefit of the doubt...
...They chatted...
...David Tell is opinion editor of The Weekly Standard...
...I asked...
...McDaniel listened...
...There would be a flurry of calls at strategic times— usually when there were developments in the Jones case...
...At every stage, the pattern held...
...In case you had any doubts about the Willey story," I told her, "let me tell you about the phone call I just got...
...she asked...
...One day, about a year and a half before, she had gone by to see him and he had taken her into the hideaway office— the same one described in my article...
...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...
...A few minutes later, I wandered back to [Newsweek Washington bureau chief Ann] McDaniel's office...
...There are so many people who have been attacked by the White House, so many people who are worried about being slimed for daring to tell the truth about this guy...
...She paused...
...161-163 Later that week, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang...
...We didn't have our silver bullet...
Vol. 4 • April 1999 • No. 28
