Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [146]
A forty-nine-year-old California native with platinum blond hair, she was a self-styled PR expert who specialized in “high-profile controversial causes” under the banner of “The Woman’s Coalition.” Carpenter-McMillan had dabbled in conservative issues for years, receiving a nomination for an Emmy Award in 1991 for television news commentaries defending Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. She had launched a campaign to ensure that the California legislature passed a mandatory “chemical castration” bill, the only law in the country that mandated the neutering of adult males who had sexually abused children. In the early 1990s, Carpenter-McMillan had begun writing conservative commentaries for an ABC affiliate in California. One of these championed Paula Jones and her lawsuit against the president. Thus began a beautiful relationship. “Susie” and Paula met for lunch in Long Beach, becoming fast friends. As Carpenter-McMillan would summarize her impressions of the young Arkansas transplant, Jones was “very, very sweet,” and “became like a kid sister. I felt the need to protect her. She was very naive.”
There was plenty from which Jones needed to be protected, she felt, especially when it came to the likes of William Jefferson Clinton. “I truly believed that he [Clinton] was just… a slimeball,” Carpenter-McMillan said later. “I mean, he was a trailer-park boy with a brain, a very brilliant brain, but still a trailer-park boy.”
Carpenter-McMillan signed on to become Jones’s official spokesperson and personal coach, turning the cause into an “eighteen-hour-a-day job.” In previous lawsuits, for which she acted as PR consultant, she would “come in and hire the lawyers, plan the wardrobe, look at the strategy, decide, ‘Is this [case] going to a jury?’” But in the Jones case, Carpenter-McMillan aspired toward a bigger role, and she found an immediate ally in Paula’s husband. Although Steve Jones was a “very controlling figure,” he clearly was itching for a confrontation with Bill Clinton. On that score, he and Carpenter-McMillan were of one mind. “I’m not sure that Paula would have been able to do this on her own,” Carpenter-McMillan said later. “I will give Steve credit. It was really a lot of his strength that propelled this lawsuit, promoted it and kept it [going].”
As Carpenter-McMillan sized up the situation from a PR perspective, this case was eventually heading to a jury. “Did Steve Jones want the money? I’m sure he did,” she explained. “But that is not what drove them in the beginning.” Carpenter-McMillan saw a bigger incentive to go after Clinton: “The way you discipline big corporations is to hit them in the pocketbook. That’s how our system works. I suppose if Clinton would have said, ‘Well, instead of paying you money, I’ll take thirty lashes on the front of the White House lawn,’ maybe [Paula and Steve] would have opted for that.”
For Paula’s Virginia lawyers, the injection of Susan Carpenter-McMillan into the case was a massive headache. Where she came from and how she got hired, said Joe Cammarata, was a “mystery of life.” She was constantly disrupting the lawyers’ work with her PR meddling and other activities behind their backs, which caused them to have “lack of confidence in her.” However it happened, Carpenter-McMillan was soon joined at the hip with Paula. As Cammarata said, exhaling loudly: “They became friends. Susie and Paula.”
BESIDES Susan Carpenter-McMillan, the White House also had to deal with the fact that two leading conservative Republican lawyers had quietly stepped up to assist Gil Davis in the preparations for his Supreme Court argument.
Davis, who had no experience in the rarefied atmosphere of the nation’s highest court, was doing his best to ready himself. In one random note dictated to his file, he recorded: “What Clinton is asking for is a license to be