Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [88]
Just to be safe, Traylor faxed his draft complaint to the two Virginia lawyers—Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata—scribbling a note, “FYI, Review, Comment. Please call to discuss.” Just as Traylor was preparing to walk across the street to file his papers in the court house, Cammarata called from along a side road in Virginia. He said, “We’re still headed your way, Traylor.” Cammarata added that they had perused the draft complaint and that, with all due respect, it “would not withstand court scrutiny for fifteen minutes.”
Traylor stared out his seventeenth-floor window in the First Commercial Bank building. A horde of journalists had amassed outside on the street. He explained his predicament to the Virginia lawyer—he had let the cat out of the bag to a few local reporters. So what does he do now? he asked. These newspaper folks wanted a story. Cammarata asked Traylor, “Don’t you feel a little sick? Don’t you feel a little ill?” Gil Davis chimed in, “Cancel the damn press conference.… We’ll be there tomorrow.”
GIL Davis was a big man accustomed to big cases. He had grown up in Waterloo, Iowa, before attending University of Virginia Law School. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia, Davis had prosecuted one of the first aircraft hijacking cases in the country. In private practice, he had racked up a $40 million verdict for a poor Kentucky coal miner against a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. The case had given Davis the financial freedom to take on cases that tickled his fancy.
Davis was an unabashed Republican; he had pictures of his idol Ronald Reagan hanging on his office wall. He did not particularly like Bill Clinton, because of “integrity questions.” Yet Davis was a respectable lawyer who did not allow politics to get in the way of professional duties. Even though the “elves” had secretly enlisted him through a friend, Davis was his own man.
Joe Cammarata, a young, thin, quick-talking Italian American from Brooklyn, shared space in Davis’s office. A lawyer and certified public accountant, he had worked for the Department of Justice’s Tax Division during the Reagan administration. Now he was a Republican, but he had grown up in the Democratic world of Brooklyn and understood how the political game was played. He also enjoyed the thrill of unconventional tactics making this a dream case.
Davis and Cammarata stayed up all night drafting a new complaint to replace Danny Traylor’s shaky effort. Near midnight, they sent their law clerk to the local 7-Eleven to pick up a newspaper and snacks. It was a lucky trip: Michael Isikoff’s first story about Paula Jones and her detailed allegations against the president appeared on the front page of the Washington Post’s early edition. Years later, the Virginia lawyers revealed that they cherry-picked from Isikoff’s article, drawing upon the facts in that story about Paula Jones’s X-rated charges against Bill Clinton to draft a more fulsome four-count complaint.
After catching a few winks and throwing clothes into an overnight bag, they boarded a plane for Arkansas. In Danny Traylor’s office, on Wednesday, May 4, the Virginia lawyers met with Paula Jones for the first time. She appeared to be a simple Southern gal and wore a flower in her hair. She was accompanied by her mother, Delmer Corbin, a plain-dressed, God-fearing woman who reminded Davis of the folks he had represented in Appalachia.
Davis sized up Jones as “sweet, and a bit naive.” After listening to her for an hour, he concluded that “she did have a meritorious claim, her motives were pure, and she was only interested in her own reputation.”
Davis was intrigued that—according to the morning papers—the White House had assigned big-shot criminal defense lawyer Bob Bennett, a recent addition to Clinton’s team, to squash Jones’s lawsuit. Bennett had represented the likes of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in