couldn’t just win the case. He had to win the case the right way. Or, more precisely, he had to be seen as having won the case the right way. Clinton had always enjoyed the support of feminists, and women generally voted for him in greater numbers than men. Clinton had opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and spoken eloquently in support of laws prohibiting sexual harassment. So, not surprisingly, the question arose at Bennett’s first briefing of whether he was going to defend the president in the same way that Thomas’s supporters had defended him—by attacking his accuser.
“Are you going to go into the character of this woman … Bob, the folks at the White House are saying that you are going to go after this woman’s character and reputation.”
“I feel sorry for her at this point, and that’s not really my style,” Bennett said.
On June 8, exactly thirty-three days later, under the golden arches of one of the two McDonald’s restaurants in the sleepy Arkansas town of Cabot, Mitch Ettinger of Skadden Arps shared a meal with a fellow named Dennis Kirkland. Kirkland had a tale to share about Paula Corbin Jones.
Kirkland had graduated from Cabot High School in 1985, and in the summer of 1987 he had attended a graduation party for the school. At the time of the party, he was nineteen and Paula Corbin was twenty. Before that evening, they had never met.
Kirkland recalled that he was drunk at the party, and he guessed Paula was, too. He told Ettinger that he “talked trash” to Paula for about ten minutes, and then she grabbed his crotch. Within ten minutes of their meeting, he took Paula to a van parked nearby, and there she gave him a “blow job.” They returned to the party, where he shared news of his good fortune with several of his friends. Still later at the party, Kirkland told the lawyer for the president, he observed Paula giving blow jobs to three of his friends, whom he named. Paula gave Kirkland her phone number at the party, and they kept in touch for a while. Over the next several weeks, they met several times, usually at Paula’s mother’s apartment. From there they would go to Camp Robinson, a National Guard facility in the area, and have sex. Kirkland stopped calling when he began seeing the woman who would becomehis wife (and whom, he told Ettinger, he was now divorcing and fighting for custody of their kids).
Bob Bennett hoarded the report of Kirkland’s interview like a trophy of war. Of course, he couldn’t make any public reference to what he called, in private, the story of the “blow-job boys.” Bennett’s public silence and private joy about the blow-job boys illustrated how the political imperatives of the case created twisted pretzels of irony. Because of Clinton’s feminist base, Bennett couldn’t even acknowledge that Jones’s background or reputation was relevant to her case, much less that he was studying her life with care. Bennett also had to keep his work secret, because if it was disclosed, conservatives would claim to be outraged. But in ordinary circumstances, conservatives believed that a woman’s background was fair game in a claim of sexual harassment, so their anger would be just as phony as Bennett’s denials of interest in Jones’s sex life. So Bennett dissembled to trump the Republicans’ own duplicity. This graceless standoff served as a metaphor for a larger lesson of the case—that the merger of law and politics degraded both.
The question Bennett so greedily explored had a slight relevance to the case. Paula Jones had filed a defamation suit, claiming that she had been damaged in “her good name, character, and reputation.” So Bennett had the right to examine her standing in the community. Similarly, in her complaint, Jones had asserted that after Clinton had approached her in the room at the Excelsior, she “became horrified, jumped from the couch [and] stated she was ‘not that kind of girl.’ ” In the
“Are you going to go into the character of this woman … Bob, the folks at the White House are saying that you are going to go after this woman’s character and reputation.”
“I feel sorry for her at this point, and that’s not really my style,” Bennett said.
On June 8, exactly thirty-three days later, under the golden arches of one of the two McDonald’s restaurants in the sleepy Arkansas town of Cabot, Mitch Ettinger of Skadden Arps shared a meal with a fellow named Dennis Kirkland. Kirkland had a tale to share about Paula Corbin Jones.
Kirkland had graduated from Cabot High School in 1985, and in the summer of 1987 he had attended a graduation party for the school. At the time of the party, he was nineteen and Paula Corbin was twenty. Before that evening, they had never met.
Kirkland recalled that he was drunk at the party, and he guessed Paula was, too. He told Ettinger that he “talked trash” to Paula for about ten minutes, and then she grabbed his crotch. Within ten minutes of their meeting, he took Paula to a van parked nearby, and there she gave him a “blow job.” They returned to the party, where he shared news of his good fortune with several of his friends. Still later at the party, Kirkland told the lawyer for the president, he observed Paula giving blow jobs to three of his friends, whom he named. Paula gave Kirkland her phone number at the party, and they kept in touch for a while. Over the next several weeks, they met several times, usually at Paula’s mother’s apartment. From there they would go to Camp Robinson, a National Guard facility in the area, and have sex. Kirkland stopped calling when he began seeing the woman who would becomehis wife (and whom, he told Ettinger, he was now divorcing and fighting for custody of their kids).
Bob Bennett hoarded the report of Kirkland’s interview like a trophy of war. Of course, he couldn’t make any public reference to what he called, in private, the story of the “blow-job boys.” Bennett’s public silence and private joy about the blow-job boys illustrated how the political imperatives of the case created twisted pretzels of irony. Because of Clinton’s feminist base, Bennett couldn’t even acknowledge that Jones’s background or reputation was relevant to her case, much less that he was studying her life with care. Bennett also had to keep his work secret, because if it was disclosed, conservatives would claim to be outraged. But in ordinary circumstances, conservatives believed that a woman’s background was fair game in a claim of sexual harassment, so their anger would be just as phony as Bennett’s denials of interest in Jones’s sex life. So Bennett dissembled to trump the Republicans’ own duplicity. This graceless standoff served as a metaphor for a larger lesson of the case—that the merger of law and politics degraded both.
The question Bennett so greedily explored had a slight relevance to the case. Paula Jones had filed a defamation suit, claiming that she had been damaged in “her good name, character, and reputation.” So Bennett had the right to examine her standing in the community. Similarly, in her complaint, Jones had asserted that after Clinton had approached her in the room at the Excelsior, she “became horrified, jumped from the couch [and] stated she was ‘not that kind of girl.’ ” In the
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