Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [67]
The white-haired judge also granted interviews for Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, a book authored by Floyd G. Brown during the election of 1992. This eye-popping tome assembled the most outrageous and salacious tales about Clinton in one volume, openly attempting to derail Clinton’s run for the presidency.
Part of what Justice Jim disliked about Clinton, truth be told, was the younger man’s Hot Springs roots. For Johnson, Hot Springs was “like the manure pile in a barnyard. You just pile it over there, and you know it’s over there and you don’t want it.” With its gambling and drinking and horse racing and mineral baths, Hot Springs represented entertainment with a raunchy twist. “Everybody was in on it in Hot Springs,” he would quip. “The natives, they’d entertain the tourists and if it felt good, do it, and they didn’t have a lot of second thoughts about the morality of the situation they grew up in.” As Johnson saw it, there existed a “Hot Springs state of thought” that thoroughly repulsed him. He recalled that during his state senate days, a legislator from Hot Springs had once found out how he planned to vote on an issue and promptly “sold my vote” to an opponent. When Johnson confronted him, the colleague apologized up and down. “But within an hour, he would have sold my vote again if he could,” Johnson said. “That’s the Hot Springs state of thought.” In Johnson’s eyes, Bill Clinton possessed that attribute in spades.
The judge harbored an even more personal grudge. When Clinton was governor, Johnson had asked for a tiny favor, requesting that the governor appoint one of his protégés to a vacancy on the local chancery court. Despite “a faithful promise” from Clinton that the appointment would be made, the favor was never delivered. Stung by that memory, the judge would reflect, “This gave me a lesson to go ahead and express my convictions against Clinton every opportunity I had.”
One particularly ripe opportunity had presented itself during the presidential election of 1992. Johnson had pounced on a chance to dredge up letters relating to Clinton’s “draft-dodging” Oxford days. Johnson made no bones about calling Clinton a “queer-mongering, whore-happening adulterer; a baby-killing, draft-dodging, dope-tolerating, lying, two-faced, treasonist activist.” Johnson had been appalled by Clinton’s infamous letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes, in which Clinton suggested that he was morally opposed to the Vietnam War and used this excuse to slide out of the draft. So the judge searched out Colonel Holmes, who had retired to the outer reaches of Arkansas, asking the colonel to write a letter indicating his own contempt for what young Bill Clinton had done to avoid serving his country. Johnson passed along that letter to editor Wesley Pruden at the ultraconservative Washington Times, which immediately published the story. That effort briefly blew up in Clinton’s face during the campaign, but fizzled out before it did permanent damage.
Now, two years later, with David Hale at his doorstep, Justice Jim dusted off this maneuver from the Colonel Holmes playbook, again contacting his friend Pruden to ask if any major media would be interested in Hale’s story. As the judge later recounted with pride, “I retraced those footsteps that I had used in trying to stir up some publicity over that damn [ROTC] letter.” Again, it paid dividends; the paper happily published Hale’s startling account.
The judge also urged Hale to contact Cliff Jackson, an attorney in