Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [116]
“In my whole life, I have been threatened a lot,” he said. “And I have normally found it’s a mistake to cave in to them. And I knew that there had been no sexual harassment.”
At the same time, years after he left office, President Bill Clinton would concede that if he had it to do over, he would have settled the Jones case at this moment. “I should have done it for the same reason that I later tried to do it for seven hundred [thousand dollars], because it interferes with your work and it interferes with the headlines. It complicates the deal. But, you know … I wasn’t going to apologize for doing something I didn’t do. I didn’t sexually harass her [Jones], and we were later able to prove that. And Judge Wright later found that her claims were without … merit.”
Although the common wisdom today is that Clinton should have bitten the bullet, swallowed hard, and settled the Jones case immediately, a small group of trusted advisers was providing exactly the opposite advice to the White House. That minority view, in hindsight, may have been the wiser course. It boiled down to a swift and direct plan: Attack the allegations head-on; take depositions of Paula Jones and other key witnesses immediately. Then file a motion for summary judgment and have the case thrown out by Judge Wright before it gained any traction.
In a confidential memo to Clinton’s inner circle during the early stages of the litigation, one unofficial adviser with experience in civil rights lawsuits counseled: “The discovery process should be used to the fullest extent in an offensive attack and with the intent to ‘pin down’ the plaintiff and her witnesses on a number of the facts. By locking them in early, they cannot continue with a lie or with changing facts.” The writer went on: “A critical element of [Paula Jones’s] case is … that she suffered adverse job terms and conditions.” This provided the spot of vulnerability. “By quickly taking the depositions of the governmental officials in her chain of command and examining her work and employment records with a swift use of subpoenas could provide a quick and ‘clean’ basis for a summary judgment motion.”
The basic premise of this minority plan was very simple: Judge Susan Webber Wright was a principled jurist. She would assess the Jones case and toss it out, like any other baseless claim in her courtroom that failed to meet the legal threshold. As a woman, she would look at the evidence with special skepticism and say to herself, “If I were in that position, I would have done things different than Paula Jones. Why go to this man’s room?”
There was another fact, overlooked by the outside world, that supported this theory. Jones was not the first person to seek to turn Clinton’s alleged womanizing into a federal lawsuit that yielded money damages. A number of anti-Bill Clinton suits had been bumping around the federal court house in Little Rock for years; in most cases, they had been swiftly dismissed as meritless. The federal judges were already on red alert for such sham lawsuits. Robert Wright, law professor and husband of Judge Wright (who was rumored to assist her in writing opinions), told reporters over drinks that his wife was not going to permit “just a parade of women coming through her court.” Although he was no fan of Bill Clinton’s, Professor Wright made clear that his wife would not tolerate a circus. He also quipped that, in any event, “from what I’ve heard, a lot of Bill Clinton’s women have been satisfied customers.”
This proposal to tackle Paula Jones head-on—a suggestion that never gained any traction in the White House—may have been right on the money. Yet politicians tend to ascribe political motives to others, believing that the whole world views life through a tinted political lens. In the end, the White House simply couldn’t trust Judge Susan Webber Wright. They feared that given the chance, she would be unable