HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT

“JUSTICE JIM” RIDES AGAIN

A DECADE AS GOVERNOR had left Bill Clinton with a small but dedicated cadre of enemies who regarded his presidential campaign as a chance for revenge or profit. Larry Nichols, Gennifer Flowers, and Cliff Jackson sought publicity as well as money; Sheffield Nelson, who wanted to ingratiate himself with George Bush and run for governor again someday, preferred to remain in the background. In due course, others with similarly mixed motives would emerge to torment Clinton, including the state troopers who had once guarded him, and his former business partner Jim McDougal. All of them were more or less aiming for Clinton’s demise, though each of them had once claimed to be a friend of Bill’s.

But Clinton had another implacable adversary whose rancor was untainted by greed, a spectral figure who dated back a quarter century to Clinton’s earliest involvement in Arkansas politics. Jim Johnson had never pretended to be his friend. Normally concealed behind a courtly public persona, Johnson’s rage combined the personal frustrations of a lifetime with a profound ideological passion.

In 1992 Johnson was sixty-eight years old, which meant he was old enough to remember a different Arkansas, especially in the cotton-growing, piney-wood flatlands down along the Louisiana border where he was raised, and where the word “nigger” was still a term used in public discourse, and those to whom it applied were often kept forcibly in their place.

For decades, Johnson had struggled to preserve what he revered as the traditional southern way of life. In youth his scowling dark brow and burning glare had given him a threatening appearance; now he looked harmlessly avuncular, his hair snowy white and his narrow eyes squinting behind wire-rims. Denied the power he desired, Johnson had seen the old Arkansas slowly fade away, along with segregated schools, “colored” water fountains, and burning crosses. Bill Clinton was the smooth, smiling face of the New South, where open racism was no longer respectable or even tolerable. Indeed, the governor prided himself on his friendships with blacks and had appointed dozens of black officials. Clinton was the emblem of all that Johnson had lost and of everything that he could not abide.

Their feud carried a sharp personal edge, too, as Johnson would candidly admit. “Clinton boasted that his first political employment was as a campaign worker against me in my campaign for Governor of Arkansas in 1966,” he once told an interviewer.

Retired and living outside Little Rock on a farm he had named “White Haven,” Johnson had plenty of time and energy to pursue his grudge, and a wealth of contacts amassed during forty years in southern politics. Those who shared his obsessive urge to ruin Clinton seemed drawn to him, as if he were the center of a strange negative universe.

Jim Johnson never achieved the national fame of racial demagogues such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Ross Barnett, but there was a moment when he wielded enough oratorical and organizational power to shake the entire country. In his own misguided way, he was a historic personage. Behind the scenes, it was Johnson who precipitated the 1957 constitutional crisis over the admission of nine black students to Little Rock’s Central High School.

Of course, most of the responsibility for the Central High crisis belonged to Orval Faubus, then the governor of Arkansas. After the Little Rock school board voted to integrate Central High, Faubus disregarded a federal court order and called out the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school with guns on September 3, 1957. His defiant action forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to dispatch the 101st Airborne Division three weeks later to escort the nine terrified children past a mob screaming “Get the niggers!” Faubus pandered to that hatred and embarrassed the United States before the eyes of the civilized world. But it was Johnson, the state’s leading professional segregationist, who baited and bullied Faubus into acting while he inflamed the gang of bigots outside the high school.

Without Johnson’s incessant goading, Faubus might have accepted the Little Rock school board’s token integration plan. Raised in the Ozark Mountains along the Missouri border, Faubus bore blacks no personal ill will. Moderation, however, was unacceptable to Johnson, who had run against Faubus the year before in the Democratic primary, assailing him as a “nigger lover” and advocate of “race mixing.”

Johnson’s electoral base was the White Citizens Council, a well-financed, middle-class counterpart to the openly violent Ku Klux Klan. He was its founder, its statewide director, and its most spellbinding speaker. In 1950 he had first run for office in his hometown of Crossett, becoming at twenty-six the youngest man ever to win an election to the Arkansas state senate.

Examples of the Johnson style can be found in yellowing copies of Arkansas Faith, the “official publication of the White Citizens Council of Arkansas,” which he edited and published. Its April 1956 edition, for example, featured a cartoon depicting a tornado labeled “Mongrelization” bearing down on a frightened white mother and her infant child. Another showed Faubus in a butcher’s apron, wielding a cleaver labeled “gradualism.” On the cutting block in front of him sat a dog with three slices chopped from its tail, labeled “Hoxie,” “Fayetteville,” and “Charleston”—three northern Arkansas communities which integrated their schools voluntarily. “This will please the niggers and confuse the white folks,” the Faubus figure says.

As the opening day of school approached in September 1957, Johnson’s group began a deliberate campaign to convince the governor that blood would flow in the streets if a single black enrolled at Central High. Caravans of armed men were rumored to be heading toward Little Rock from all over the state. Decades later, an unrepentant Johnson boasted to Faubus biographer Roy Reed: “There wasn’t any caravan. But we made Orval believe it. We said, ‘They’re lining up. They’re coming in droves.’”

The governor’s confrontation with Eisenhower transformed Faubus into an icon of resistance and Johnson, who had considered opposing him again in 1958, ran for and won a seat on the state supreme court instead. Thereafter he was known to friend and foe as “Justice Jim.” In keeping with his folksy image, Johnson didn’t let his lofty new job preclude socializing with old friends. In 1960, an FBI investigation revealed that the judge had met with two men implicated in a terrorist bombing of Little Rock’s black Philander Smith College, on the day before they brought the dynamite from Memphis. The accused bombers were, Johnson told the Arkansas Gazette a bit defensively, “very fine people.”

During his six terms as governor, Orval Faubus grew steadily more reactionary and closer to his old adversary Johnson. In an effort to cripple the civil rights movement and root out “subversives,” Faubus sponsored the notorious Act 10, a measure requiring all state employees and schoolteachers to list every organization to which they belonged or contributed financially Lest white citizens be “tainted” by nonwhite blood transfusions, another law required the racial labeling of blood supplies. And while the Arkansas State Police ignored wide-open casino gambling in Hot Springs, its Criminal Investigation Division became a veritable redneck intelligence agency, devoting extraordinary resources to spying for Faubus.

“In pursuit of its mission,” Roy Reed recounts, “the CID infiltrated organizations, tapped telephones, secretly tape-recorded meetings … and collected damaging personal information on political opponents and seemingly ordinary citizens. The gumshoes were especially alert for signs of adultery and homosexuality.” Sharing information with similar agencies like the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the Arkansas state police spies functioned, in effect, as an investigative arm of the White Citizens Council. The heirs of this apparatus would one day be employed to probe the private life of Bill Clinton, who was only eleven years old at the time of the Central High incident.

By the time Faubus stepped down in 1966, Clinton was old enough to take an active part in the election of his successor—a watershed event that permanently changed Arkansas politics. Jim Johnson was back, running as a “states’ rights” candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Early in the campaign, he made a point of refusing to shake black voters’ hands. His speeches decried integration as a Communist plot and “a worse crime than rape or murder.”

To a college student inspired by the civil rights movement, the notion of “Justice Jim” as governor was beyond appalling. Clinton rushed home from Georgetown University that summer to work for Frank Holt, Johnson’s leading Democratic opponent and former colleague on the state supreme court. His job was to drive Holt’s wife and college-age daughters to campaign stops. While traveling with the Holt women, Clinton was shocked to discover the continuing shadow of Jim Crow in Johnson’s native region. As he wrote to a girlfriend back at Georgetown, “Now we are campaigning in the heart of cotton country, south and east Arkansas where Negroes are still niggers. And I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw restrooms and waiting rooms still marked in Colored and White. It made me so sick to my stomach.”

More sickening to the young Clinton was Johnson’s upset victory in a Democratic runoff against Holt. The Republicans nominated civic activist Winthrop Paul Rockefeller, a scion of one of America’s wealthiest families, to face Johnson in the general election. For years, Johnson had been attacking Rockefeller in Arkansas Faith for “opening his big fat mouth in public with unwanted advice … on the great race-mixing experiment.” Now he sprayed his rich Yankee opponent with pure poison. In stump speeches Johnson lashed out at Rockefeller as a “prissy sissy” and a “Santa Gertrudis steer.” His campaign distributed pamphlets which depicted Rockefeller as a drunken thief and a pornographer who indulged in sodomy with black men. (That Rockefeller was a heavy drinker was well known; he had also been married three times.)

In the run-up to Election Day, Johnson was endorsed by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan at a public rally in the southeast Arkansas town of Star City. Garbed in white robes and illuminated by a flaming cross, one speaker after another warned against the Jewish–Communist–civil rights conspiracy. “The Klan has come out for Lurleen Wallace [in Alabama], Lester Maddox [in Georgia], and Jim Johnson,” the Klan leader bragged, “and we’re electing them one by one.” Johnson never did repudiate the Klan’s support.

Aroused by the Johnson threat, moderate white Democrats and newly enfranchised blacks almost unanimously supported Rockefeller, making him the state’s first Republican governor since the Civil War. An editorial in the Arkansas Gazette, which had survived a White Citizen’s Council boycott and earned two Pulitzer Prizes for editorials urging obedience to federal law during the Central High crisis, hailed voters for rejecting “the vacuous demagoguery that Mr. Johnson brought in his campaign, with all the name-calling, innuendo, distortions, and appeals to fear. They have spurned the smear literature and character vilification.”

Two years later, Johnson entered the Democratic primary against Senator J. William Fulbright. This time he yoked his candidacy to the populist, white-power crusade of George Wallace, who was running for president on the American Independent Party line. Johnson escorted the Alabama governor on his swings through Arkansas, while attacking Fulbright—“the pinup boy of Hanoi”—for his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

The 1968 campaign afforded Johnson his first glimpse of Bill Clinton, who after graduating from Georgetown came home again, this time to help Fulbright. The talkative young aide chauffeured the senator around Arkansas, much as he had done in the Holt campaign, and meanwhile forged a relationship with James McDougal, the veteran pol and charming raconteur who ran Fulbright’s Little Rock office.

One afternoon, Clinton drove out into the countryside with a college buddy to hear Johnson address a group of farmers. Enraged by Johnson’s racist rant, Clinton stayed to confront the former judge after his speech. When they shook hands Clinton blurted, “You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas.” Many years later, at a conservative meeting in Washington, Johnson would express precisely the same emotion about Clinton in less delicate terms, voicing his regret that his beloved state had produced “a president of the United States who is a queer-mongering, whore-hopping adulterer; a baby-killing, draft-dodging, dope-tolerating, lying, two-faced, treasonist activist.”

The venerable Fulbright defeated Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primary. And although George Wallace took Arkansas’s electoral votes in a three-way contest with Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, the segregationist bloc was isolated permanently below 40 percent. No overtly racist candidate ever won another statewide election in Arkansas, which meant that Johnson’s political career was finished.

After Win Rockefeller lost his bid for a third term in 1970, the new dispensation belonged to moderate Democrats such as Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, and Bill Clinton, their dominance assured by broad support across racial lines. Johnson’s crowd gradually faded from the scene; they toned down their rhetoric, and ultimately abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican religious right. Like any subdued minority, they resented the winners, and because Clinton beat them more often than anybody else, winning six statewide contests between 1978 and 1990, they resented him most.

During Clinton’s final term as governor, he erased Johnson’s legacy forever by successfully campaigning for an amendment that stripped the last vestiges of statutory racism from the Arkansas lawbooks and the state constitution.

Legally sanctioned segregation vanished from the South, but the impulse behind it was slower to disappear. The politics of race baiting in America was a slightly more refined art by the time Jim Johnson encountered its foremost contemporary practitioner. Actually, Johnson had encountered Floyd Brown—auteur of the most inflammatory television spot in recent history—before the “Willie Horton ad” made Brown infamous. They had met several months earlier, during the 1988 presidential primary season, when Brown was organizing five midwestern and southern states for Bob Dole and hired Johnson’s daughter-in-law to work for Dole in Arkansas.

The aging segregationist and the young conservative quickly formed a lasting bond. Even though Brown didn’t endorse all of Johnson’s poisonous racial opinions, he and the judge agreed politically more than they disagreed. Both relished the intrigue of opposition research and the combat of negative campaigning. And the candidacy of Bill Clinton brought them even closer.

Boisterous, barrel-chested, and six feet six inches tall, Brown earned his status as a political pariah during the final weeks of the 1988 presidential campaign, when the Horton ad was unveiled. Its appeal to white fear was so blatant that even Lee Atwater considered it embarrassing.

Produced by an independent political committee called Americans for Bush, which listed Brown as “senior political consultant,” the ad only aired briefly in a few markets, but it became an instant classic of its genre. Just as Brown expected, the ad’s mere existence drew saturation coverage from the mainstream media. The brash Brown loved to boast about this coup, and years later claimed credit for it in his official resume on the Citizens United Web site.

As a video production, the Horton ad was as primitive as its message. It opened with head shots of George Bush and Michael Dukakis as the voiceover recited, “Bush and Dukakis on crime.” Noting that Bush “supports the death penalty for first-degree murderers,” the announcer then remarked, “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.”

Up came the scary mug shot of a stereotypical urban marauder, sullen and scruffy-looking with a bushy, uncombed Afro. “One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received ten weekend passes from prison.” The Dukakis head shot appeared again as the solemn voice concluded: “Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.”

That mug shot was reproduced millions of times before Election Day, in print and on television. Brown’s cheap, blunt thirty-second ad dealt a virtual deathblow to the inept Dukakis. As Brown put it gleefully, the Horton ad was the “silver bullet” that destroyed the Democratic nominee.

The Horton episode proved lucrative as well as lethal. Behind Americans for Bush was the National Security Political Action Committee, an outfit founded by conservative activist Elizabeth Fediay, daughter of a close associate of Senator Jesse Helms. Between 1986 and 1988, the NSPAC raised over $9 million through direct-mail and telemarketing appeals. Twice the Bush campaign complained to the Federal Election Commission that the NSPAC was misusing the Republican nominee’s name to enrich the group.

Brown knew better than to take those complaints seriously. As he pointed out to a New York Times reporter, the Bush campaign officials had waited until the Horton commercial’s run on cable TV was nearly complete before they requested that the NSPAC quit raising money under the name of Americans for Bush. “If they were really interested in stopping this, do you think they would have waited that long to send us a letter?” he asked sardonically.

Two years later, allegations of collusion between Americans for Bush and the official Bush campaign emerged. In February 1990, the New Republic reported that business associates of Bush media consultant Roger Ailes had worked on the Horton ad with Brown. Democratic Party officials quickly filed charges of unlawful cooperation between the NSPAC and Bush-Quayle ’88 with the Federal Election Commission. Although Ailes and his former employees denied any collusion, the FEC opened a formal investigation. But the FEC’s Republican members succeeded in killing the Horton probe two years later, just in time for the ’92 election.

By then Floyd Brown was launching a new operation, called the Presidential Victory Committee—a subsidiary of Citizens United, the political action group he had set up in November 1988. Brown had seen what he could do at the NSPAC, and gone into business for himself.

Anyone examining Floyd Brown’s background would hardly have predicted his career as a professional right-winger. He had grown up in the Pacific Northwest as the son of a Democratic sawmill worker and, more remarkably, the grandson of a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, those freewheeling anarcho-socialists better known as the Wobblies. It was as a student at the University of Washington that Brown veered sharply rightward, becoming an activist in the ultraconservative Young Americans for Freedom. In 1983, he was arrested demonstrating in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. A gifted, tireless organizer with a quick wit, he was elected national vice chairman of the YAF, which funneled bright young activists into the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

The managers of Bob Dole’s 1988 presidential bid hired Brown to oversee their Midwest primary campaign. He produced victories in five states before Dole finally dropped out of the rough race against Bush, but Brown had been shunned by the Bush-Quayle campaign. Then Fediay brought him into the NSPAC.

In 1988 Brown also acquired a stocky, crew-cut young sidekick named David Bossie. Like Brown, Bossie had been a campus conservative, joining the College Republicans at the University of Maryland. As a freshman he had been an enthusiastic volunteer in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, and he eventually dropped out for full-time political work. He never went back to school.

Working nights and weekends as a volunteer fireman in suburban Montgomery County, Bossie slept at the firehouse and knocked around in the low-paid world of Beltway conservatism until 1991, when Brown brought him into Citizens United as “chief investigator.” While both were clever and ideologically driven, the dogged, low-key Bossie complemented his articulate, publicity-loving boss, who sometimes spoke of himself in the third person.

Typically, Brown was full of ambitious ideas for the Presidential Victory Committee. He intended to create a Horton-style ad using the Gennifer Flowers tapes—only this time, the ad itself would generate money with a 900 telephone number. Callers would be charged by the minute to listen to suggestive excerpts of the tapes. Beyond that, Brown planned to write and publish Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, a 150-page paperback book about Clinton’s personal life and his record as governor. When he and Bossie arrived in Arkansas seeking the silver bullet, their first stop was Jim Johnson’s White Haven.

Johnson offered historical guidance while his son Mark, a former congressional aide who hosted a Rush Limbaugh–style local radio program in Little Rock, chauffeured Brown and Bossie around the state, dredging up tales of Clinton’s alleged libertinism, radicalism, and corruption. They spent hours consulting with Sheffield Nelson at his Little Rock law offices, which became their informal headquarters in the city.

In April, just as Clinton secured the Democratic nomination by winning the New York Democratic primary, Floyd Brown received an anonymous letter from Texas about a woman named Susann Coleman. (The same letter was sent to many news organizations around the same time.) Coleman had committed suicide with a shotgun in 1977. At the time of her death she was almost eight months pregnant. According to the letter, the baby was Bill Clinton’s: “She spoke of her husband and how he’d been destroyed by her infidelity … She spoke of her love for Bill Clinton … . She condemned herself for being an obstruction to Clinton’s high ambitions. She died for them.”

Bossie, the twenty-six-year-old amateur sleuth, took over the task of tracking down this tantalizing lead. As the investigation progressed, Bossie often relied on Jim Johnson, who knew one or two ancillary figures in the case. They did establish that Susann Coleman had been a student of Clinton’s when he taught at the University of Arkansas Law School, but could find no evidence of intimacy, let alone an illegitimate pregnancy. Coleman’s widower refused to discuss his wife’s suicide or her suicide note. Members of her family wouldn’t talk much, either. As Bossie suspected, they had been reached first by the Clinton campaign, whose detective Jack Palladino had been monitoring Citizens United.

In May, Bossie found Coleman’s mother in Georgia, where she had gone to visit her second husband in an army hospital while he recovered from a stroke. He tailed her to the hospital, eluded hospital security, and burst into the sickroom firing questions. Susann’s stunned mother said little, except that “Clinton is not the father of Susann’s baby.”

It was Susann’s sister, Lorna Lindsey, who seemed most hostile, demanding proof of Bossie’s identity when Bossie called her at her home in South Carolina. Lindsey informed Bossie that she intended to advise her mother not to speak with him or anyone else from the Presidential Victory Committee.

When he reached Lindsey again, she wasn’t forthcoming. Growing angry, Brown blurted out a wild accusation about why there had been no police investigation of Susann’s death. “Possibly because one of your cousins, who was a police officer at the time, took care of it? … I won’t stop this investigation,” he warned. If his suspicions proved true, Brown added, he would dispatch attorneys to “meet with Clinton and tell him to get out of the race.”

Despite Brown’s blustering, Bossie finally filed a report acknowledging that he could find “no proof to support this letters [sic] allegations … [T]his case is closed.”

But it wasn’t entirely closed. Lindsey had recorded her second conversation with Brown and turned the tape over to the Clinton campaign, which made it available to CBS correspondent Eric Engberg. In mid-July, as Brown began running his Gennifer Flowers infomercial, Engberg aired a blistering report on the CBS Evening News about the Presidential Victory Committee.

Calling the Coleman affair “an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation,” Engberg reminded viewers about Brown’s authorship of the “notorious Willie Horton ad of 1988.” On camera, he interviewed a friend of Susann’s family who said that Bossie had “peered” into the windows of her home when she was out. He described the hospital intrusion and played excerpts from Brown’s sneering phone call to Lindsey.

“The Bush campaign, referring to Brown and his associates as the ‘lowest forms of life,’ today branded their tactics as ‘despicable,’” the correspondent intoned, noting, however, that Bush lawyers had yet to file a complaint against Brown’s committee with the Federal Election Commission.

However repellent Brown’s tactics may have seemed to Bush, the president had more pragmatic reasons for preferring not to dwell on the infidelity issue. When the Democratic convention delegates filed into Madison Square Garden to nominate Clinton in late July, they found on their seats the new issue of the cheeky Spy magazine—whose cover blared “1000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush; No. 1: He Cheats on His Wife.” The article within didn’t justify that sensationally conclusive headline, but examined in some detail the rumors and facts surrounding Bush’s alleged relationships with other women. There were reasons why some might believe Bush had strayed, including his angry reply to a question about adultery during a mock debate in 1988: “None of your damn business!” In an exclusive convention interview with Time, Clinton pointed to the Spy article as an early warning to the Bush camp. In the weeks that followed, the New York Post and Vanity Fair also referred to the president’s alleged extramarital affairs.

Floyd Brown didn’t care what the Bush campaign said about him, his Flowers commercial, or his tasteless exploitation of the adultery issue, any more than he had cared what they said about his Willie Horton blitz. He feigned outrage at the CBS attack, but friends thought he was privately pleased to renew his reputation as a political hit man. By late July he and Bossie were trying to finish Slick Willie, although additions were still possible before publication in mid-September. An unwieldy farrago of fact, exaggeration, and sheer invention, the book charged Clinton with dodging the draft, raising taxes, coddling blacks, chasing women, corrupting state agencies, flip-flopping on abortion, awarding special privileges to gays, promoting secularism (and witchcraft!), wrecking the school system, flirting with socialism, and, in its stirring final chapter, blaspheming the Lord with his campaign slogan of a “New Covenant” between citizens and government. Readers who detected a whiff of earlier anti-Clinton campaigns would not be surprised to see in the acknowledgments a “special thanks” to “Judge Jim Johnson.”

Included in the lengthy appendixes were carefully edited excerpts from the Gennifer Flowers tapes. The chapter on Susann Coleman substituted innuendo for evidence: “As long as her family refuses to enlighten the public … we won’t know why this woman, seven months pregnant, had her head blown off … . Why was there no autopsy? And who was the father of that unborn child? These questions remain unanswered, but Bill Clinton’s hirelings are working day and night to keep them a mystery.”

Brown was too sophisticated to imagine that Slick Willie—a novelty item designed for marketing to far-right mailing lists—would sway more than a handful of voters. At $8.95 a copy, the little paperback might bring in some money, but it was loaded with blanks, not silver bullets. As he prepared the book for publication, he told Jim Johnson that more and better material would be needed to beat Clinton. Johnson suggested a meeting with Larry Nichols, the man who had first exposed the Flowers affair. In fact, Nichols had been pestering Brown for months—but it was only after Johnson vouched for him that Brown agreed to meet with the gravel-voiced huckster.

When Brown invited Nichols to come to Washington for a meeting, Nichols convinced him that Larry Case should come too. Case said he had damning videotapes from Roger Clinton’s cocaine prosecution that the mainstream media wouldn’t touch, an audiotape of a prostitute talking about an affair with Bill Clinton, and much more, all for sale.

On August 7, Case and Nichols flew to Washington first-class at Citizens United’s expense. After spending the evening at a Georgetown “titty bar” that still excited Case months later, the two showed up at Brown’s office in suburban Fairfax, Virginia, lugging bags of documents and tapes. Present at the meeting, along with Brown and Bossie, was Deborah Stone, sole editor and publisher of Annapolis-Washington Book Publishers, which had been set up specifically to bring out Slick Willie.

Stone was a blunt and sometimes abrasive woman in her mid-twenties who had found her way into Beltway conservatism via the Dartmouth Review. She had been the editor of the controversial monthly when its staff made national news in 1986 by taking up axes and sledgehammers to tear down an antiapartheid protest shanty on campus. On another occasion, they had secretly taped meetings of Dartmouth gays and outed several fellow students. This breach of civility, as well as the Review’s racially divisive editorials and cartoons, had drawn a suspension and sharp criticism from university officials—but Debbie Stone had never seen any reason to apologize.

The meeting could not begin until the arrival of a surprise guest: John Fund of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. An intense, mid-thirtyish devotee of Ayn Rand who served as the Journal’s unofficial emissary to the Republican right, Fund was more activist than journalist. He ghosted one of Rush Limbaugh’s books and spoke frequently at conservative events. Fund was a particular favorite of Journal editor Robert Bartley, whose approach to editorial policy could be politely described as dogmatic. Dissatisfied with the Journal’ s straight approach to reporting, Bartley created what his staff called “the reportive editorial,” including long investigative essays free of the constraints that governed the news section.

Earlier that year, Debbie Stone had edited a book by Fund for Regnery Publishing, and he had been advising her on research for Slick Willie. (He came to the meeting solely for journalistic reasons, Fund later recalled, “to find out more about Bill Clinton.”)

When Fund at last did show up, Nichols and Case began to present their wares. If Brown had known Case any better, he would have suspected that Case was secretly taping the meeting.

Possibly hoping to start a bidding war, Nichols suggested that he and Case might take their anti-Clinton material to the Republican National Committee or even directly to the Bush campaign, a notion Stone and Fund both dismissed as silly. “Larry, you’re not going to get anywhere with the RNC or George Bush,” said Stone.

“You can either believe us or not believe us,” Fund chimed in. “They’ll have more to do with Abu Nidal than with you.”

Nichols and Case didn’t seem to get Fund’s joking reference to a notorious Palestinian terrorist. “What?” said Case. Fund repeated himself, provoking nervous laughter. Stone moved briskly on to business, eager to examine the merchandise. “What are the videotapes of?”

“I have one video,” Case said in his Arkansas drawl, “where he’s settin’ up a bribe and a payoff between a contractor in Hot Springs and his bother … .”

“Roger Clinton?” asked Stone. “And his brother … . ?”

“Bill Clinton.”

“Has anybody in the news media seen this?” Fund wanted to know. “Not this one,” Case lied. He had been trying to peddle all his tapes to major media outlets and tabloid TV shows for months.

“And you have a tape,” Stone broke in.

“I have a videotape of it. Now I’ve got the one of him doing the cocaine and all that stuff, but people have seen that … .”

“Is CBS gonna use this?” Stone asked.

“Nobody’s seen this,” Case said. “I’ve been runnin’ it today to get it up, and I haven’t got it yet, but it’s on there.”

“You mean it’s not cued up yet?” Stone asked, a note of petulance creeping into her voice. “Can we cue it up now?”

“Sure.”

But as the television droned on—the tape’s sound and picture quality dismally poor, as is often true of surveillance tapes—the only thing getting clearer was that Case had no idea where to find the vaunted “bribe” segment.

Meanwhile, Stone sounded concerned about Case’s contacts with other media organizations. The private eye said he had told “everything” to a TV reporter, prompting another peevish outburst. “What do you mean, everything?” cried Stone. “Not what you’ve been telling us—Michelle, Louwanda, Denise … ?”

She naturally wanted exclusive rights to “Louwanda and Michelle”—the pair of prostitutes Case had taped talking about Clinton—as well as “Denise,” supposed recipient of the handwritten note bearing Clinton’s signature that sought forgiveness for physically abusing her.

“I used her maiden name,” said Case reassuringly.

Nothing interesting seemed to be happening on the videotape, and Stone grew impatient. “What are we looking for on this tape again? The bribe?” she demanded. “Yeah,” said Case, “the bribe is on one of these tapes.” He paused. “I have the bribe, but I don’t remember which one it’s on … .”

“And why is that significant?” Stone snapped. “What’s the bribe?”

“I think it’s significant because he’s setting up a bribe between a contractor in Hot Springs, to sign a contract on a sewer deal, between him and his brother,” Case answered smoothly.

The discussion turned to Roger Clinton’s jail term, and Nichols’s false allegation that the governor had pardoned Dan Lasater, an investment banker and Clinton contributor who also had been convicted of giving away cocaine at parties. Lasater in fact had been convicted of a federal crime; Clinton had no authority to pardon him. The governor had, however, approved a waiver allowing the state Game and Fish Commission to sell Lasater a deer-hunting license.

“I bet if he wins the election, he’ll pardon his brother,” Fund remarked.

The tape droned on. “Can you fast-forward this?” barked Stone. “I don’t know what to look for,” said someone else. That was when Case admitted, “I don’t even know if [the bribe] is on this one or not.”

For more than an hour, Stone, Bossie, Brown, and Fund listened patiently as Larry Nichols rambled on about his grievances against Clinton, his theories about Gennifer Flowers and other alleged paramours of the Democratic nominee, Clinton’s rumored illegitimate children, Nichols’s aborted lawsuit against Clinton, and his unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a cash “settlement” from the Clinton campaign. Among other absurdities, Nichols accused the Democratic candidate of complicity in the unsolved homicide of a Little Rock swimming pool manufacturer for which the man’s wife was later arrested. His listeners weren’t learning anything they needed to know, but they played captive audience to his passionate soliloquy. If treated with deference, Case and Nichols might produce something. From time to time, however, Stone couldn’t stifle a yawn.

Finally, Nichols got around to mentioning a videotape of Bill Clinton entering Gennifer Flowers’s apartment, made by her neighbor. His bored audience suddenly woke up. “There’s also tapes from cameras at the front door,” said Bossie hopefully. He wondered how the dim apartment hallway had been taped. “Because I was in that hallway where Gennifer Flowers lived …”

“And where’s this tape now?” Stone inquired.

“Guy’s got it and I can’t get hold of it,” admitted Nichols.

“Where is he? Can we talk to anybody?” asked Stone. That tape would never turn up either.

Case and Nichols returned to Arkansas without a firm deal, but Brown said they would be in touch.

The list of participants at the Virginia meeting puzzled Bill Rempel. Trying to check out his potential customers, Case had called his friend at the Los Angeles Times for advice.

“What were they all doing in the same room?” Rempel asked. “You’ve got journalists there, supposedly, you’ve got political operatives … .”

“You’ve got Dave, you’ve got Floyd,” Case recited, “and John Fund, who, he said, works for the Wall Street Journal.”

Rempel offered to perform a Nexis search on the names Case gave him to determine their identities. Later the same afternoon he called back with the results, which perplexed Rempel even more.

“John H. Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal,” he told Case. “That makes it all the more curious why he was there. Deborah Stone is spokeswoman for the Republican National Coalition for Life, which is, I presume, an antiabortion outfit. David Bossie is executive director of the Presidential Victory Committee, which is Floyd Brown’s PAC. Floyd’s the front man on it, that’s for sure … .”

“Is there any truth to this Debbie Stone’s being backed by the Republicans? Does this group of people sound legitimate to you?”

“Who knows? Certainly the Republican National Coalition for Life is a right-wing organization.” (Actually, the Coalition is a pressure group founded by former John Birch Society leader Phyllis Schlafly to ensure party purity on the abortion issue.)

Case was confused. “What would she get involved in something like this for?”

“Well, that’s the mystery. I don’t get that either. What’s the Wall Street Journal guy doing there?” Rempel asked.

“That would be borderline unethical as a journalist, I would think,” Case ventured.

“Borderline ain’t the word. It’s right over the edge. It’s in free fall,” the reporter said.

Case perked up. “So who can I sell that story to?”

Rempel laughed. “I don’t know that it has any monetary value … . Did Fund seem uncomfortable being there?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Now Case was laughing. “If that sumbitch knew me, he should have been.”

Irresistibly tempted by Louwanda, Michelle, and other possible victims of Clinton’s lust, Floyd Brown and his colleagues finally made Case a cash offer. Unaware that the burly detective had already tried and failed to peddle the same tales to the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, and the tabloid TV program A Current Affair, Citizens United agreed to pay him $10,000 for access to the videotapes and the talkative hookers.

In early September, Stone and Bossie agreed to meet Case at the Little Rock airport. Together the trio would fly to Phoenix, Arizona, where, Case said, he had an associate who had the evidence about Michelle and Louwanda. In reality, he had been trying for several weeks to persuade Bill Rempel to give him the name of the Los Angeles Times’s original source on the Oklahoma City hookers. He did know that Rempel’s source had also talked to a Phoenix TV station. Whether Case ever intended to lure the Citizens United crew all the way to Arizona on so thin a pretext isn’t clear.

As they prepared to board the plane in Little Rock, however, a farcical fracas erupted. Case suddenly accused Bossie and Stone of trying to abscond with his bags. Shouting obscenities in the crowded airport, he demanded payment of the $10,000 immediately, rather than the following day as agreed.

“Get on the airplane,” Stone urged, according to Case’s later recollection. “I’ll give you $1,000 if you get on the airplane.” He wasn’t going anywhere for less than $10,000. Case said later that he pushed Bossie aside to get his bags. Bossie claimed that Case punched him in the face, and swore out a police report seeking his arrest. Case told the cops that Stone and Bossie had stolen documents from him valued at $1.5 million and threatened to kill him. He then called various media outlets, Floyd Brown later wrote, “in an attempt to plant a story implicating Miss Stone’s and Mr. Bossie’s research tactics as scandalous.”

When Brown hired a handwriting expert to examine the “Denise” note he learned, like the tabloids before him, that it was a cut-and-pasted fake. In the introduction to Slick Willie he suggested that Case was a double agent working for Clinton. In reality, Case was a double agent working for Case. Within days of the airport altercation, Case was bragging to reporters that he’d “slapped the shit out of Bossie,” and brooding about how to turn a profit by “exposing” Citizens United.

As Floyd Brown fumed over Case’s treachery, the detective and his partner paused to consider their options. By late September, with Clinton’s victory over Bush seemingly assured, Nichols and Case were worried. What if Clinton were to exact vengeance upon his Arkansas enemies? In a phone conversation taped by Case, the pair discussed the grim prospect of President Clinton.

“Bill Clinton’s got the short course to the White House,” Nichols fretted. “Hell, he could stop right now and not do nothin’ else. He ain’t gotta spend another fuckin’ nickel. All he’s gotta do is just say he’s still running, and I believe he’s in.”

“Yeah, and you know where we’re at. We’re behind the eight ball,” said Case glumly.

“We’re the people that when he gets in, he’s gonna be pissed at us,” Nichols agreed. “And we’re the people that if he don’t get in by some quirk of fate, we’re gonna get blamed for it. Now if I’m gonna get blamed for something, I’d damn sure like to do it, is my problem. And it wouldn’t hurt to be set up financially to where whatever they did couldn’t affect me. Now that’s just me talking, because it damn sure ain’t gonna happen.”

Case, however, was mulling a contingency plan. “What the hell would they do,” he asked Nichols, “if you brought the Republicans in now? What would the Republicans do to you?’

“What the hell can they do? They ain’t gonna be in power.”

“You think you could roll Bob Leslie?” Leslie was then chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party.

“I know I could,” said Nichols.

“You got a paper trail on everybody?”

“Sure do.” Nichols proceeded to name as his collaborators in smearing Clinton virtually every important Republican in Arkansas, and claimed to have documentation to prove it. While reluctant to make new enemies, he’d consider turning for the right price.

“You’d be amazed at who I’ve got on that phone,” he chortled. “You’d be amazed at the phone numbers on there.”

“You got [Sheffield] Nelson on there?”

“You bet. Home and office.”

“Well, we could sure tie them into it, from here on up to Washington, if we really wanted to,” said Case. “The way I look at it, Larry, if you’re gonna be blamed for it, get paid for it. Shit, it’s to the point now where, you know, I’m open. I’m open for business. You and me both.”