Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [122]
Bob Bennett was also busy amassing evidence to prove that Paula Jones had actively sought out Governor Clinton in the state capitol on multiple occasions after the alleged incident in the Excelsior Hotel. He had information indicating that she made inquiries about Clinton at the governor’s office after the alleged episode and referred to him as “a nice-looking man” and as “nice” and “sweet.” Carol Phillips, the head switchboard operator at the governor’s office, had already signed an affidavit swearing that—after the AIDC conference—Paula Corbin “asked me for a picture of the Governor” and described having met Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in a “happy and excited manner,” even checking the governor’s parking space, hoping to “see and speak with Mr. Clinton.” Pam Hood, who worked with Paula at AIDC, likewise would testify—if served a subpoena—that Jones displayed “bubbly enthusiasm” after having met Governor Clinton, similar to when she had caught a glimpse of movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger in Little Rock. All of this would certainly cause jurors to take Jones’s story with a shaker’s worth of salt.
Finally, there was the Steve Jones factor. Although this important element had largely been overlooked in the press, Paula had been wearing an engagement ring at the time of the alleged incident with Clinton. To put it more bluntly, when the woman named “Paula” had voluntarily gone to the governor’s room—as reported in the American Spectator piece—she was already engaged to marry Steve Jones. (They married in December 1991, just seven months after the Excelsior Hotel encounter.) Bennett was prepared to argue forcefully that this gave Paula a strong motive to lie.
“The issue of Steve Jones being engaged to Paula was very much on my mind,” Bennett later divulged. If he was forced to go to trial, he would argue vigorously that Paula’s engagement to Steve at the time provided a powerful motive for “making up the whole story,” or at least making up “key facts,” in order to “avoid the damning truth that she had gone up to Clinton’s room and perhaps flirted with him, at the time she was an engaged woman.”
There were big surprises in store for plaintiff and defendant alike, if the case went to trial. No matter how it played out, it was unlikely that either side would escape unscathed.
CHAPTER
15
ARKANSAS FELONS
President Clinton would later say that he was “a hundred percent” sure that the prosecution against the McDougals and Governor Jim Guy Tucker was designed to “ratchet up” the investigation to do anything possible to nail him and the First Lady. He believed the facts spoke for themselves: “You know, Jim had already been prosecuted and acquitted once on all this S&L stuff in the nineties.” Although it was possible McDougal was guilty as charged, said Clinton, Madison Guaranty was one of the smallest S&L failures in America. “McDougal never would have been tried again after having been acquitted once if he hadn’t been seen as key to getting me.”
Bill Clinton had no doubt that McDougal’s business conduct had been unorthodox. But he also knew that McDougal was suffering from a “deteriorating mental condition.” “I was worried about him,” Clinton recalled. “I didn’t know what the facts were in his case, but I had known him when he was younger and when he was well. I thought he was a good man, and I was [hoping] that given his mental condition, he wasn’t going to prison. Because I thought it would probably break him, given the disintegration of his sense of stability.”
President Clinton felt that the reason Ken Starr’s office was pursuing a broken man like McDougal so vigorously was obvious. “When they got