Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [151]
With that, Davis recalled, “we were off to the races.”
Justice Stevens, a liberal Republican appointed by President Ford, was one of the few justices who seemed concerned with how long the trial might take. Davis replied: “Depending on stipulations, Justice Stevens, I would say 4 or 5 days perhaps, but that’s just a guess.” Justice Stevens asked whether Jones’s lawyers planned to go into “collateral matters,” such as the matter of “other women.”
Davis told the Court that if probing into “other women” would “tend to show a fact that we need to prove,” he would have no choice. “I think I would be duty bound as counsel to pursue that,” he said.
At precisely 11:03 A.M., Chief Justice Rehnquist rapped his gavel and declared that the Court would take the case under advisement.
GIL Davis and Joe Cammarata headed for a private room at La Brasserie restaurant on Capitol Hill. Here, hidden from the media, they were joined by Steve Jones’s father, who had traveled to Washington to observe the argument, and George Conway, the elf who had worked hard on preparing for this day. Conway presented the Virginia lawyers with clear plastic paperweights that contained miniature versions of the front cover of their Supreme Court brief—much of which the elf had written—as mementos of this historic day.
As Davis chatted with Steve Jones’s father, sipping wine over an excellent lunch, he recalled feeling as if the planets were finally aligned to produce a settlement. Unlike his son, the father did not appear volatile or hotheaded. He seemed supportive of the Virginia lawyers’ plan to seize this moment, and to sit down with the president’s lawyers—before the Court rendered a decision—to resolve Paula’s claim for the good of all.
Said Davis years later, thinking back on this sparkling moment of opportunity that somehow slipped away, “His efforts were as vain as ours.”
ONE of the first things that Joe Cammarata did after the oral argument was to return to the subject of the mystery woman who had telephoned his office. Cammarata picked up the phone and called Mike Isikoff to determine whether the Newsweek reporter had tracked down the unknown caller. Cammarata reminded Isikoff about the conversation, in which he asked Isikoff, “What have you got?” The lawyer was aghast when the reporter now responded, “I can’t tell you. I got information, but it’s off the record.”
Cammarata exploded, “You son of a bitch! You kidding me? I gave you that information. Now you’re telling me you can’t give it back to me?” Isikoff didn’t flinch. “I can’t,” he replied coolly. Cammarata screamed back into the phone, “Well, if you can find it, I can find it.”
Within twenty minutes, using the same clues that he had provided to the Newsweek reporter, Cammarata figured out the mystery caller’s name. “And then I found out where she lived and I served a subpoena on her,” he said.
But the mystery did not end there. Kathleen Willey later insisted that she was not the person who had called Paula Jones’s lawyer that day. The substance of the facts relayed to Cammarata were true. Yet Willey, assuming an unusually defensive posture, would deny calling the Jones lawyer, stating that it must have been one of her coworkers in the White House with whom she had confided after the incident with Clinton. That caller, she said, obviously posed as her (Willey), in order to lead Jones’s lawyers to this new and explosive evidence.
That person, she said, must have been Linda Tripp.
PART THREE
THE MONICA THREAD
CHAPTER
18
MONICA S. LEWINSKY
One person whose life seemed to grow infinitely more complicated in early 1997, as the Supreme Court mulled over the Clinton v. Jones case, was a young woman who had recently placed an anonymous Valentine’s Day note in the Washington Post addressed to “Handsome,” intending it for President Bill Clinton.
Monica Lewinsky was trying desperately to regain her job in the East Wing of the White House after having been banished to the