Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [166]
Neither doctor nor patient, of course, could have foreseen the events that would prevent McDougal from leaving those stark buildings inside the Fort Worth prison. Jim McDougal would never be given parole. Nor would he see the outside of the prison walls or realize his dream of retiring to Claudia Riley’s trailer-house in Arkadelphia to teach a final political science course at Ouachita Baptist University.
Instead, James Bert McDougal would die in solitary confinement, in a dark section of the sprawling complex he had not yet laid his eyes on, an unwelcome place that he would soon visit and that was known as “the hole.”
CHAPTER
20
THE SETTLEMENT THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Those seated in the Supreme Court gallery awaiting the day’s regularly scheduled cases on May 27, 1997, were caught off guard when the Court handed down its historic decision in Clinton v. Jones. The white-haired Justice John Paul Stevens, considered a liberal who might have been sympathetic to Bill Clinton’s plight, read the unanimous opinion in a steady voice. Straightening the trademark bow tie beneath his robe, Justice Stevens treated this like any case against any ordinary defendant. In more than two hundred years, he stated, “only three sitting Presidents have been subjected to suits for their private actions. If the past is any indicator, it seems unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the Presidency.” Justice Stevens organized his papers and concluded, “As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner’s time.”
Solicitor General Walter Dellinger happened to be present in the courtroom that day, preparing to argue another case. Although the result did not surprise him, he viewed the majority’s reasoning as overly simplistic. Dellinger worried that whatever the merits of the ruling as a matter of constitutional law, it was bad news for all future presidents at the mercy of a legion of lawyers and litigants with a “partisan incentive to go after a president.”
The New York Post blared, “Grin & Bare It,” declaring in a front-page story that Jones had won an unqualified victory. The tabloid stated that Paula Jones, who was still sitting on an affidavit swearing that she had observed “distinguishing characteristics” on the president’s private parts, could now “go into a deposition and ask the president to drop his pants.”
As President Clinton posed with Russian President Boris Yeltsin at a NATO signing ceremony in Paris, the American press was already predicting that the Court’s decision would constitute a major setback for Clinton, resurrecting “doubts about [Clinton’s] honesty and integrity.”
Joe Cammarata dialed Paula and Steve Jones in California, sharing the happy news with his client, who was just waking up on West Coast time. “She was ecstatic,” Cammarata recalled. “You know, she cried and [Steve] cried.” For the whole plaintiff’s team, it was “a touching moment.” Susan Carpenter-McMillan also called Paula, remembering with a flicker of nostalgia, “The two of us just screamed and yelled and cried. In her cute little way, she [Jones] said, ‘Susie, can you believe it? Can you believe it?’”
President Clinton later admitted that it took him years to get over the Jones decision. For him, the biggest shocker was that it was unanimous. He had braced himself for the likelihood that five justices—the same five who would later put George W. Bush in the White House during the “stolen” election of 2000—would vote along party lines. But he had hoped that at least some of the other justices would have stood up for his presidency under attack, understanding what it meant to have this sort of “a politically motivated lawsuit, the main purpose of which is to drag the president through a series of depositions which could later be used in a criminal case,” while there was “a politically motivated special prosecutor out there.” Clinton stated: “For the [justices] who did it on politics, it