Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [83]
Danny Traylor also took steps to contact the Clinton White House. Traylor had worked as a page for Senator Fulbright. His father, Bob Traylor, had served two terms in the Arkansas state legislature (where he had come to know, of all people, Jim McDougal). The thirty-eight-year-old Traylor knew enough about politics to know that this case could turn into a raging house fire if nobody doused water on it early enough.
So Danny Traylor arranged to meet with George Cook, a prominent Little Rock businessman with close ties to the Clinton White House, at a nearby watering hole. Seated in a dark booth with a beer in front of him, Traylor did not mince words: “So I laid it out to George that ‘here’s the situation: this woman is pissed off, and I believe that she has a lawsuit against Bill Clinton and Trooper Ferguson. And I’ve told her that she’s got a lawsuit and that I can’t do it, but if I can’t, there are lawyers out there that will.’”
“It seems to me,” Traylor continued, “that the woman’s biggest bitch is not so much with Clinton at this time. It’s with [Trooper] Ferguson. Shooting his mouth off.” As Traylor saw it, there existed a nice window of opportunity here. “This would be an opportunity for the White House to come to the rescue of this poor woman’s honor. If Clinton could say, yes, I met with Paula and nothing happened,” and if Paula Jones could say, “No, nothing happened,” then the rest of the details could be “finessed.” Traylor offered his professional opinion that the case could be quickly settled “on a legal and politically ethical-type basis.” He was confident, from speaking with Jones, that his client would embrace such a compromise.
Although later accounts of this barroom meeting would suggest that twenty-five thousand dollars was the magic number Traylor was looking for, Traylor himself would insist that his expectations were much lower. “My recollection is the number was five,” he said, correcting the record. “I had been messing around with this thing for about two weeks or so. I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time on it, but I had spent a little time and the number that came to my mind was five thousand dollars.” He was prepared to pay himself about a thousand dollars for his time and aggravation, then give the rest to Jones and put the case to rest. “I thought that I could get in and out of this thing and make my client happy, accommodate or mediate a claim with the president of the United States for five thousand bucks and get on to something else,” he recalled.
George Cook would later sign an affidavit stating that Traylor had threatened to “embarrass [Clinton] publicly” if he didn’t cough up a hefty settlement. Cook also alleged that Traylor stated that “it would help if President Clinton would get Paula a job out in California,” or perhaps find an acting job for Steve Jones in Holly wood, to which Cook had allegedly replied, “That would be illegal.”
Yet Traylor would dismiss as “bullshit” such stories that he had tried to blackmail the president. Rather, he declared in his own defense, he was simply describing the facts of Jones’s situation: “She’s gone to California; her husband works for the airline; they live in Long Beach; they’ve got one baby; he envisions himself as some type of actor, he’s been in some crummy … movies; Paula is presently a house wife; she has these skills. You take that information, and you run with it.
“I mean, this woman has got a lawsuit, and it might be a nuisance lawsuit, but it’s a lawsuit,” he told George. “It was a sexual discrimination/harassment-type thing. It’s dirty and messy and ain’t my kind of action,” but there would be depositions and public allegations that would not be good for the president. He concluded, “You need to get the message up there to very high circles.”
Two days later, George Cook called Traylor and said there was nothing he could do. He added, according to Traylor’s account, “We’re way up in the polls; this can’t hurt us.” Cook would dispute this version of the story, stating in a sworn affidavit that he told Traylor, “It was a preposterous