Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [115]
Attorneys on both sides declared victory. Appearing on CNN Daybreak, Davis announced that Jones was “quite pleased” with the ruling. Bob Bennett, speaking for the president, called the judge’s ruling “an important victory for Mr. Clinton.”
Privately, both sides were thrown for a loop. The Jones camp had lost its most valuable leverage for exacting big money from the president—the specter of forcing Clinton to go to trial while he occupied the White House. Bob Bennett was even less thrilled. He now had to prep the president for embarrassing testimony in these god-awful depositions. No matter what steps the judge took to put the deposition “under seal,” the ugly details would be leaked to the press within hours. Washington was a sieve. For both sides, Judge Wright’s decision was a mixed bag of artificial sweeteners and poison pills. Both sides promptly appealed Judge Wright’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Politics is the art of bobbing and weaving, delaying danger in hopes that a truck might hit one’s opponent in the interim. The White House prayed that by postponing the trial long enough, President Clinton could shake free of his ultimate day of reckoning until after he left office. Among other things, this would deflate much of the “collateral value” out of the case. Its high monetary price tag was directly linked to the ability of the plaintiff’s lawyers to put the screws on a sitting president. After Clinton was out of office, the Jones lawyers’ golden ticket would vanish. They would be stuck with exactly what their client had started with: a weak case against a nonpresident.
Yet legal appeals, like high-stakes games of craps, often take unexpected rolls. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals swiftly overturned Judge Wright’s Solomonic ruling, declaring that she had given the president too much slack.
Why Bill Clinton failed to settle the Jones case at this stage, before it moved to the Supreme Court, is one of the great riddles of the Clinton scandal. One source close to the White House later explained that the situation was much more complicated than met the eye. It would have been a simple matter to settle the case, said the source, “if it weren’t for Paula Jones, Stephen Jones, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton.” The clear sense around the West Wing was that “Hillary was adamantly opposed to settling.” President Clinton himself seemed to be gun-shy of cutting a check if it meant incurring the wrath of his wife. One source close to the First Family said, “I can imagine the [following] scenario. Hillary would say, ‘Bill, did you do it?’ referring to the alleged lewd advance on Paula Corbin Jones. The president would answer, ‘No, no, no!’ The First Lady would step closer and glare at him. ‘Then why would you settle the case?’”
Another presidential adviser analyzed the predicament differently: “If you wound up paying Paula Jones money, how many other women would come out of the woodwork? Do you have any doubt that other people wouldn’t come forward for their million? Instead of getting this behind us, [the White House] feared it might start more cases coming.”
Besides, Clinton himself seemed to bristle genuinely at the notion of paying money to Paula Jones for the alleged transgression. Apart from his feeling of having a gun unfairly aimed at his head, Clinton also had a pragmatic problem: how to pay for any whopping settlement. “I had the lowest net worth of any president, in constant