Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [159]
This was not, Davis believed, a man caught by surprise. “Reflection has convinced me that the president knew all along, for two years, that he was going to lie about this eventually in deposition,” said Davis. “Because we had talked about the ‘other women,’ and there had been press reporting about this.”
Jones’s lawyers had waved a red flag at the president. For whatever reason, Clinton had decided to make a running charge at the bullfighters.
As President Clinton ushered Monica Lewinsky out of the pantry outside the Oval Office, in May 1997, giving her a quick hug to express his penitence for allowing this sinful affair to continue so long, he looked at the young former intern with deep remorse in his eyes. Of course, if Bill Clinton had known what was waiting for them around the corner, he would have wanted to end the relationship far more decisively and, undoubtedly, much more quickly.
CHAPTER
19
INSIDE A TEXAS PRISON
In the winter of 1997, just as his criminal investigation was shifting into wrap-up mode, Ken Starr made two decisions that would alter his legacy as Whitewater/Madison independent counsel: He announced that he was leaving for Pepperdine University, and (after that blew up in his face) he authorized his team to interview Arkansas women about past sexual liaisons with Bill Clinton.
Jim McDougal, now a cooperating witness for the Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), helped prime the pump. In an article by James Stewart published in February 1997 by The New Yorker, McDougal said that he believed that his then-wife, Susan, was having an affair with Governor Bill Clinton during the Whitewater/Madison follies, intimating that she was refusing to answer questions of the Starr prosecutors because she was trying to protect her paramour Clinton. The article quoted McDougal as saying that he had innocently picked up his telephone one day in 1982, while working at Madison Guaranty, dialed his home number, and found himself patched into the middle of an “intimate” call between Susan and Governor Bill Clinton.
Jim McDougal told his interviewer, “It was just a country phone line. I don’t know what happened, but I dialed the number and it didn’t ring and I was in the middle of their conversation.” An article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette cast doubt on this latest McDougal tale, reporting that an expert associated with the United States Telephone Association in that region found McDougal’s claim “highly improbable.” Yet now there existed a stronger motive that might explain Susan McDougal’s refusal to testify against President Bill Clinton: a long-hidden extramarital affair. Speculation along these lines only whetted the media’s thirst for details and made Jim McDougal (once again) a sought-after interviewee.
Ken Starr’s prosecutors were paying regular visits to McDougal. They continued to debrief him in a tidy Little Rock apartment paid for by OIC, as he prepared to serve time in federal prison. The prosecutors took McDougal’s stories with a grain of salt, as he rocked back and forth in his favorite new recliner. Yet Hickman Ewing, Ray Jahn, Amy St. Eve, and a young member of the OIC team named Bob Bittman found that much of the information their witness was providing checked out.
A remarkable FBI document summarizing OIC’s meetings with McDougal, later obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed that OIC agents and prosecutors met with McDougal for nearly a hundred hours before he left for prison. These meetings in Arkadelphia and in McDougal’s new Little Rock pad covered wide-ranging topics, including the ill-fated Whitewater deal; Governor Clinton’s jogging by McDougal’s Madison Guaranty office and drumming up legal work for Hillary and the Rose Law Firm; McDougal’s nervous breakdown when his business empire began collapsing; Susan’s frequent calls to Clinton and McDougal