On Political Peak, Surrounded

“As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of [President Clinton’s] time.”

--U.S. Supreme Court, May 27, 1997, in the case of William Jefferson Clinton vs. Paula Corbin Jones

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On the chilly but bright Inauguration Day of Jan. 20, 1997, Bill Clinton stood at a pinnacle seen by only two other Democrats in this century. As he stepped forward to take the oath of office for a second time, he matched a feat achieved by Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. For an American politician, there is no higher honor, no further office to attain.

“I, Bill Clinton, do solemnly swear,” he said, repeating the words of the oath to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist as his wife and daughter, his Cabinet and friends looked on with proud satisfaction. “That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”

But when the chief justice shook the president’s hand and said, “Good luck,” Rehnquist’s tone was unusually downbeat, even ominous.

That odd note was easily ignored on the president’s day of triumph. But then, no one else on the platform knew what Rehnquist knew. Just five days before, the Supreme Court justices had met behind closed doors to vote on whether to allow Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment case to proceed against Clinton while he was president. A scorecard would have read: Jones 9, Clinton 0. The decision would not be announced for four months. But Rehnquist knew now that Clinton was going to need all the luck he could muster.

Managed to Keep Jones Case in Check

On Jan. 13, the president’s private attorney, Robert S. Bennett, had appeared before the high court to argue Clinton’s appeal. Combative and gruff in his public posturing, Bennett had gone a long way toward winning the legal war on the president’s behalf, even though he had in fact lost every battle. His first goal had already been achieved: He had kept the Jones case bottled up until after the 1996 election.

From the beginning, the president, his wife and their allies viewed the sexual harassment lawsuit as a political attack, a bid by hard-core conservatives to embarrass him personally and damage him politically. In their view, Jones was just a pawn in the hands of the right-wingers who were driving the litigation. How else to explain a lawsuit seeking $700,000 in damages for an alleged 15-minute encounter in a hotel room? How else to view a lawsuit that was announced not by a court filing but by a press conference at a meeting of conservative activists?

Clinton responded with tactics of distance and delay.

He kept his distance by repeatedly refusing to say anything about the Jones case. “My lawyers are handling that,” Clinton said with a forced smile.

Delay could be accomplished through a series of appeals that claimed the president was immune from being sued. Clinton had a novel claim of immunity, and his lawyers planned to wield it for as long as possible: that, as president, he was too busy to be bothered with responding to a lawsuit.

The notion has a common-sense appeal. The president’s job is “unique” and his duties awesome, as the legal briefs said. But there was no legal precedent for such a claim. Neither the Constitution nor any law put the president outside the reach of the law.

Moreover, the courts frown on officially letting particular individuals be unaccountable for their actions. As a result, judges are immune for their actions in court--otherwise every losing litigant would be tempted to sue--but not for their actions outside. The Supreme Court, in a 1988 ruling that a secretary could sue a judge for sexual harassment, declared that the law of immunity was designed to protect “the nature of the function performed, not the . . . actor who performed it.”

Ruling on Immunity for Official Duties

Only once before, in 1982, had the court squarely confronted the issue of the president’s immunity from lawsuits. Former President Nixon had been sued for damages by Ernest Fitzgerald, whose firing from his Defense Department job had been ordered by Nixon himself. In a 5-4 decision, the court held that presidents should be immune from “civil damage actions arising out of the official duties of office.”

Jones’ complaint against Clinton had nothing to do with an official action, nor did it even involve something he had done while president. Bennett’s novel riposte--that it was not in the national interest to distract a president with such petty matters as lawsuits--sounded as though it had been made up to put off for a while longer the embarrassing spectacle of a president answering questions about his sex life.

However, Bennett’s appeals consumed large chunks of time. And Jones’ lawyers, Gilbert K. Davis and Joseph Cammarata, were spending lots of their own money trying to fight Bennett and the president’s legal team.

When the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the president’s appeal, Lloyd N. Cutler, the White House counsel who had hired Bennett to handle the Jones litigation, told him: “Bob, you’ve accomplished your mission.” The case would be argued before the court on Jan. 13, 1997, two months after Clinton’s reelection.

The arguments were anticlimactic; none of the justices expressed any sympathy for Bennett’s arguments. “We have seen presidents riding on horses, chopping wood, playing golf,” Justice Antonin Scalia commented. “The notion that he doesn’t have a minute to spare is not credible.”

On May 27, the court announced its unanimous opinion upholding Jones’ right to take Clinton to court. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, said: “We have never suggested that the president, or any other official, has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity.”

Clinton, in Paris for a NATO meeting when the ruling was announced, had no comment. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Clinton “continued to conduct the business of the nation.” Bennett issued a short statement saying, “We are confident that the case will ultimately be resolved in the president’s favor.”

Jones said: “I’m quite pleased that I will have my day in court.”

That was the last thing Bennett wanted. He worked privately to settle the matter. Money was no problem. Thanks to an insurance plan for Clinton’s legal liabilities and his private defense fund, the president could muster the money to pay off the suit.

What’s more, Davis and Cammarata, having managed the expensive case for two years without a payday, needed the money. A deal looked to be in the works.

For the president, however, Jones was not the only looming problem. Lewinsky was angry with him, and she was determined that he know why. She had “left the White House like a good girl in April of 1996,” before the election, convinced she could return after November. Now, in a July 3 letter to the president, she threatened to expose their relationship.

Early the next morning she visited the White House, and she and Clinton had a long talk. He was “the most affectionate with me he’d ever been,” she said later. On the way out, she passed along to Clinton “something serious.” A friend had told her that Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff was working on a story that Kathleen Willey, a former White House employee, claimed Clinton had groped her during a private meeting in the Oval Office.

“This was going to be another Paula Jones, and he didn’t need that,” Lewinsky said.

The president was worried. On Monday evening, July 14, she was back at the White House, and she said she found the president “cold and distant.”

Clinton asked her if Linda Tripp was the “friend” she had mentioned earlier. According to her grand jury testimony, Lewinsky assured the president that Tripp could be trusted; besides, she said she had not told Tripp anything of their relationship.

A few weeks later, Newsweek published a brief item about Willey’s fighting off Clinton’s advances and emerging from the Oval Office “disheveled.” The source for this quote was Tripp. Bennett was quoted as saying Tripp was “not to be believed.”

Meanwhile, the settlement deal had hit a snag. The lawyers thought their clients were ready to settle. They hadn’t figured on their clients’ spouses.

Bennett could offer the full $700,000 sought by Jones, but her husband also wanted an apology from Clinton. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton retorted that if Clinton did not do what Jones had alleged, he should not apologize.

Davis and Cammarata urged Jones to take the money and go home happy. “This is a total victory for you,” they said.

In Southern California, Jones had come under the wing of conservative activist Susan Carpenter-McMillan, who urged her to demand a full apology from Clinton.

By Labor Day, the proposed deal was dead, and Davis and Cammarata called it quits. “They have tried to force Paula into a settlement that is all about money, and that’s not what she cares about,” Carpenter-McMillan said.

On Oct. 1, a six-member legal team of Texas conservatives announced they were taking on the case and would “vigorously prepare it for trial.” They pointedly issued a statement saying they were not hired as “settlement counsel.”

Donovan Campbell, the lead lawyer, had made a name for himself fighting gay-rights groups in Texas. When the state Supreme Court considered a challenge to Texas’ sodomy law, Campbell filed a brief urging the justices to ignore the “relentless intimidation and political pressure” from gays and insisting that “homosexuality . . . is an acquired psychiatric, psychopathological condition.”

They had two months to prepare a witness list. Susan Webber Wright, the U.S. District Court judge presiding over the case in Little Rock, Ark., said Jones’ attorneys had a right to interview other women who might have had similar experiences with Clinton.

The Dallas lawyers were supported by the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va., the creation of John Whitehead, an Arkansas native who had made a career of fighting for the rights of schoolchildren to read the Bible. Across the South, Whitehead had taken up the cause of religious liberty.

Bennett was troubled by the turn the case was taking. He saw a political agenda at work. In a news interview, he complained that the litigation had come under “the control of people who are right-wing political Clinton haters.” Whitehead called Bennett’s statement “ridiculous.”

Now events began to develop their own momentum.

Lewinsky, who had no luck getting back on the White House payroll, told Clinton in July that she wanted to move to New York. By October she was still looking for a job there.

She told Clinton of her disappointment, and the president said he would help. She got an offer to work in the office of Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but she turned it down. Instead she met in Washington on Nov. 5 with Clinton confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr. to explore other possibilities.

Jordan helped Lewinsky land a job offer on Jan. 8, 1998, from Revlon cosmetics--part of “the Jordan magic,” as he described his role to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury. She accepted the offer five days later; subsequent events forced her to quit before she could start.

Meanwhile, Tripp’s literary agent in New York, Lucianne Goldberg, had heard enough of Tripp’s taped conversations with Lewinsky to decide that they would be of considerable interest to the Jones legal team.

Through a mutual friend, she contacted Richard W. Porter, a onetime aide to Vice President Dan Quayle. Porter was now a partner in Kirkland & Ellis, the Chicago-based law firm that employed Starr until he took a leave to concentrate on his duties as Whitewater independent counsel.

Porter had connections to the Jones defense. He had turned down a request to represent Jones in the spring of 1994, but he had put Jones on the trail that led to Davis and Cammarata.

Goldberg recalls asking Porter to give Tripp’s unlisted phone number to the Jones lawyers. Sources familiar with the case said Porter did so, but his lawyer, Edward McNally, said he did not.

But by whatever means, the Jones team did learn of Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton. On Dec. 5, 1997, the Dallas lawyers faxed Bennett their final list of witnesses to be deposed in the Jones case, and it included Lewinsky’s name.

Goldberg also asked Porter how to put Tripp in touch with Starr. Goldberg said Porter phoned her back with Jerome M. Marcus, one of his law school friends, also on the line. “I assumed I was being handed off,” she said.

The cascade of events in early January pushed Clinton’s problems into a new realm.

Jan. 7: Lewinsky signs affidavit in the Jones case saying she had had no sexual relations with Clinton.

Jan. 8: Marcus calls another law school classmate, a good friend of his and Porter’s, Paul S. Rosenzweig, who worked in Starr’s office. Sources close to the Jones case say the call was to ask if Starr would be interested in Tripp’s evidence. Rosenzweig says he doesn’t know, but he’ll check.

Jan. 12: Tripp tells Starr’s office about her tapes and summarizes what she knows about Lewinsky’s relationship with the president.

Jan. 13: Tripp, wearing a body wire authorized by Starr’s office, has lunch with Lewinsky, who says she will not sign an affidavit declaring she had no sexual relations with Clinton unless she lands a good job.

Jan. 15: Starr’s staff asks Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric Holder if the Justice Department will extend their jurisdiction to allegations of obstruction of justice in the Jones case.

Jan. 16: Atty. Gen. Janet Reno extends Starr’s jurisdiction. Starr’s staff interviews Lewinsky for nearly 10 hours at a suburban Washington hotel, threatening the possibility of prosecution if she does not disclose her relationship with Clinton. Tripp briefs Jones’ lawyers about her taped conversations with Lewinsky.

Jan. 17: Clinton, at his sworn deposition in the Jones case, is surprised by the amount of detail in the questions about Lewinsky and denies that his relationship with her was sexual.

By the end of the month, Starr had impaneled a grand jury to investigate possible charges of perjury and obstruction of justice by the president of the United States.