Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [87]
So Traylor began “putting out the word,” from coast to coast, that he was ready to dump the Jones case and put it up for grabs. “By this time I was, quite frankly, getting tired of the thing,” he recalled. “The phone would ring off the hook. People wanting this, that, and the other.” Traylor ran a one-man law practice; he had to make a living to put bread on his family’s table. The question that began to dominate his thoughts was “Who am I going to pawn this thing off on?”
Two unlikely lawyers whom Traylor contacted as potential pawnees were Gerry Spence, the famous cowboy-booted trial lawyer from Wyoming, and Anita Hill, the African American law professor from Oklahoma who had testified against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. Neither famous lawyer answered Traylor’s letter.
Some lawyers “volunteered to help” on condition that “they could not go public.” Among these were Richard Porter and Jerome Marcus, two former classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, now attorneys in Chicago and Philadelphia, respectively. These men, whom Isikoff would later dub “the elves,” shared common jurisprudential philosophies as members of the conservative Federalist Society. They offered to strategize and draft legal documents for Traylor as long as it was done surreptitiously.
Danny Traylor drank coffee nonstop and went into a self-imposed “news blackout.” Even as he struggled to ditch this clunker, however, other events in Washington began converging to create a ripe environment for Paula Jones’s lawsuit. The American Political Report ran a piece in March 1994, indicating that 49 percent of the public now believed that “Whitewater was a serious matter requiring a full-scale federal investigation.” That publication also reported that the brewing scandals dealing with Whitewater/Madison Guaranty, Vince Foster’s death, and “Troopergate” were “beginning to knit together in voters’ minds.”
For the first time, a segment of the public began to respond positively to Jones’s story. A letter dated April 7 from “A Friend” was sent to Jones: “Dear Ms. Jones, I urge you to file a lawsuit against Bill Clinton before the statute of limitations expires on May 8th. This man is a liar, a cheat, a fraud, and a hypocrite who needs to be exposed for what he is to the American people.… God go with you.”
Several events helped God along, sealing Paula Jones’s date with destiny. First, the White House had recently hired Washington criminal superlawyer Robert Bennett to assist with President Clinton’s damage-control efforts and to deal with the media; now the Jones matter was added to Bennett’s portfolio, giving the case an instant aura of legitimacy. Bennett’s appearance in turn gave Isikoff’s editors the hook they needed to publish his story about the Jones allegations on the front page of the Washington Post. Finally, Traylor received a call from two Virginia lawyers who expressed a willingness to work on the case, with no money up front. “It seemed to me that they were my kind of guys,” Traylor said. Suddenly, a new synergy seemed to be building up.
“Then the whole damn thing busted loose,” Traylor said.
TRAYLOR had copied a few sample complaints from the “Fright, Shock or Mental Disturbance” section of a legal form book. Jerome Marcus, the invisible “elf” in Philadelphia, faxed him a more polished draft complaint from his home, so it could not be traced to his law office. As the clock ticked toward the May 8 statute of limitations deadline, Traylor was still “feeling isolated.” On May 3, he completed the papers necessary to file a complaint in federal court, affixing the cover sheet and typing the amount “$3 million” in the box listing the damages demanded. He also drafted a one-page press release, hoping this might prod the White