Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [358]
CHAPTER
42
THE DRUDGE REVOLUTION
On the last day of July, Paula Jones appealed Judge Susan Webber Wright’s summary judgment order, asking a federal appeals court to reverse the Arkansas judge and to permit Jones to get in front of a jury of her peers. To further strengthen Starr’s hand, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington granted OIC a reprieve on the “leaks” issue, adopting OIC’s position that the independent council’s office should be allowed to prove that it had acted “in full compliance with the rule of law,” before David Kendall could take Starr’s deposition or sift through OIC’s documents.
As both sides awaited the grand jury testimony of Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton, the whole world seemed to have its eyes glued to the Clinton-Starr showdown. The story had turned into a form of twenty-four-hour news that had merged with high-tech drama to produce an unprecedented form of titillating entertainment. It was as if American journalism had slipped into a new groove, rivaling even the era of yellow journalism in the late 1800s, when the invention of photography and mass-circulation newspapers had turned the press into an implement of scandalmongering. Throughout the summer of 1998, the advent of Internet news and round-the-clock cable television had caused many time-honored journalistic standards to be tossed out the window in the scramble for viewers and Web site hits. The thirst for coverage kept stories coming. By August, the result was near journalistic hysteria.
Stories concerning the infamous blue dress, which had first appeared in the Drudge Report in late January, had turned into a search for the unholy Grail. Time magazine ran an article headlined “The Press and the Dress: The Anatomy of a Salacious Leak, …” noting that the story about the blue dress “chang[es] slightly each time it is repeated.” By August, even after the FBI had the dress in its custody, television host Geraldo Rivera had declared indignantly to a national audience, “There is, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely no possibility that a so-called semen stained dress exists.”
Stories had also bounced around the media and the Internet concerning the so-called Talking Points that Monica Lewinsky had given to Linda Tripp. Many of these accounts asserted that presidential assistant Bruce Lindsey or President Clinton himself probably had written the Talking Points; some called this document the “smoking gun” for Starr’s prosecutors. Chris Matthews declared on CNBC, “If the President gave her [Lewinsky] the Talking Points, she can’t give him away without bringing down this administration.” Matthews congratulated Starr, noting, “If every prosecutor in this country were as tough as Ken Starr, the streets would be swept of criminals right now.”
New rumors about Secret Service agents witnessing the president and Monica Lewinsky in “compromising positions” proliferated like frisky gerbils, even as agents denied such accounts in sworn testimony before the grand jury. One story that gained traction was that a White House steward, Bayani Nelvis, had told Secret Service Agent Gary Byrne that he “found lipstick-stained towels in the Oval Office study after a Clinton-Lewinsky meeting.” Agent Byrne denied the account; Nelvis himself appeared before the grand jury, calling the story about Monica’s lipstick utter nonsense. When questioned per sis tent ly by OIC prosecutor Sol Wisenberg, who cited a tabloid publication as his source, the steward declared under oath: “There’s nothing true in that magazine.”
There were even stories bouncing around the Internet and cable news shows intimating that “four other interns” besides Monica had been sexually “servicing”