Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [86]
With that introduction completed, the crowd was ready to hear from Jones herself. Dressed in a dark outfit trimmed with golden buttons, she took the stage looking like a deer caught in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler. Steve Jones, wearing a double-breasted suit with a white handkerchief wedged in his pocket, stood next to his wife with a tight, angry face. The scene quickly became unwieldy. A tape recorder captured the moment, as Paula Jones told a condensed version of her story, and reporters pumped out questions:
REPORTER: Did he ask you to have sex with him? Yes or no? Did he ask you to have sex with him?
MS. JONES: [After hesitating]. A type of sex, yes.…
TRAYLOR: I am going to talk to Paula right now and ask her to give you kind of a blow-by-blow account [laughter from the audience] of what transpired in the room.…
REPORTER: A question, that uh, I don’t know how quite to say it. Did the governor ask you to perform fellatio?
PAULA JONES: Excuse me??
REPORTER: Fellatio?
After a long pause, Cliff Jackson cut in: “Thank you, I will be available outside the room in just a few minutes if you have any questions.”
Most accounts of the Paula Jones case would later blame President Clinton and the White House for failing to settle the case immediately before it irreparably damaged his presidency. Yet this revisionist viewpoint failed to take into account the context of the Jones case rollout. The unveiling of Paula Jones’s claim at a CPAC convention with Cliff Jackson acting as master of ceremonies certainly did not give it an aura of seriousness and legitimacy.
Years later, Traylor admitted that he had exercised poor judgment in selecting this particular venue to go public with Jones’s charges. “Being seen as allied with Cliff Jackson … that was probably, in light of retrospect, unwise.” If he were to do it over, Traylor said, he would have stayed away from overt political enemies of President Clinton, since this did nothing to “facilitate a settlement.” He further expressed dismay that Cliff Jackson “kind of suckered me in.”
The public and media reaction to Paula Jones’s maiden appearance at the Washington CPAC convention was underwhelming. Most of the national papers, if they covered the story at all, buried it in their inside sections. The New York Times ran a short, 250-word article about the CPAC event, but failed to even mention Jones by name. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran a larger front-page story, but it contained only a sprinkling of details concerning Jones’s allegations. The Washington Post made a brief reference to Jones’s allegations as “yet another ascension of Mount Bimbo.”
“They butchered us pretty quickly,” admitted Traylor. “So we didn’t get much traction, right out of the gate.”
The conservative media watchdog group Accuracy in Media took out a $14,000 ad in the Washington Times, posing the question WHO IS PAULA JONES AND WHY IS THE POST SUPPRESSING HER CHARGE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT? The ad went on to assert that Washington Post reporter Michael Isikoff had been suspended for “insubordination” because he had “protested the editors’ refusal to report the Paula Jones story fully.” R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., editor of the American Spectator and the man who had launched the Troopergate story, commented that he was “amazed that journalists have been so cowardly” in failing to treat Jones’s allegations as serious news.
Michael Isikoff had indeed been tussling with his editors at the Post over publishing the Jones story. A short, wiry journalist known for his boundless nervous energy and his healthy-sized ego, Isikoff wasn’t about to let this story get away. After meeting with Jones in Arkansas, he had the gut feeling that her account was believable. Isikoff groaned that Post editors were being too cautious, holding him back from publishing a blockbuster piece that readers deserved