Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [74]
Years later, Brock concluded that much information provided to him by the troopers was unreliable: “Their motivation, I mean, up front from the beginning was to sell a book, to sell an article, to get on TV, all of those things. So it was a moneymaking proposition. There was no question in my mind about that. It made me nervous all the way through.” Indeed, Brock later disclosed that he learned two of the troopers were compensated $6,700 each after the piece was published, by a conservative fund-raiser, despite express assurances to Brock that they would not be paid to share their accounts.
The Troopergate story proved to be short-lived. Even the press abandoned it after the troopers admitted they had accepted cash for their interviews. Yet one relatively innocuous passage of Brock’s article, appearing in a tiny paragraph on page 26, would rise up from the ashes to threaten the entire Clinton presidency. This three-inch passage reported that a young woman identified only as “Paula” had caught the eye of Governor Clinton at an event held at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. According to Brock’s passing reference to the incident, Clinton had instructed an unnamed trooper to “tell her how attractive the governor thought she was,” and then to “take her to a room in the hotel” to meet Governor Clinton. The trooper approached the woman, passed along the governor’s invitation, and escorted her to the private suite. The brief paragraph ended succinctly: “After her encounter with Clinton, which lasted no more than an hour as the trooper stood by in the hall, the trooper said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired.”
Brock was no stranger to conservative political mud-slinging. He had authored The Real Anita Hill in the spring of 1993, a book that was aimed at shred ding the reputation of the African American law professor who had testified against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and who had told the Senate that Thomas had sexually harassed her while she was a young lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Anita Hill book project, funded by the Spectator and prominent conservative foundations, had earned the admiration of that magazine’s publisher, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., who hired Brock to embark on this new assignment.
Tyrrell recalled that Brock was enthusiastic about making a name for himself and that the journalist went so far as to leave a message on his own answering machine, stating: “I’m not here; I’m out to get the president.” It was largely happenstance, Tyrrell later said, that Brock made himself world famous with his Troopergate story. The Spectator had never intended to include the name “Paula” in the story; it had a policy against identifying names of alleged victims of sexual misconduct. “It was an accident. An editorial mistake,” said Tyrrell. “There never would have been a lawsuit if we hadn’t erroneously left her name in the piece.”
The Brock article that appeared in the January issue of Spectator could have easily faded into obscurity after selling a few thousand copies. Yet the perfect storm was beginning to gather. It was far beyond any horizon that the Clinton advisers in the White House could have seen, even with their powerful spyglasses. Several fluky facts contributed to this tsunami that was about to hit with violent force. One was that Paula Corbin, the woman identified as “Paula