THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL, SEOUL MAN
AS HARD AS HE AND HIS SPONSORS in the Arkansas Republican Party had worked to prevent it, the election of President William Jefferson Clinton turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Larry Nichols. By then, his lawsuits against Clinton had been dismissed with prejudice by both state and federal courts. Peddling his tales of Clinton’s lechery to the Star tabloid during the presidential primaries had netted Nichols a mere $30,000. He and his fellow scandalmonger, private eye Larry Case, had not only failed to realize their dreams during the 1992 general election campaign, but had ended up talking about changing sides and ratting out their Republican sponsors.
The Clinton presidency and its myriad controversies, however, provided Nichols with an opportunity far beyond any he had hitherto imagined. In early 1994, the former high school football star, rock musician, state bureaucrat, jingle writer, and small-time operator was poised to turn himself into a nationally known celebrity on the Clinton-hating talk radio circuit.
The immediate agencies of Nichols’s good fortune were a California-based outfit called Citizens for Honest Government and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the famous Baptist preacher and right-wing politico from Lynchburg, Virginia. Like many another organ of the political right—the American Spectator Educational Foundation, for example—the innocuous-sounding Citizens for Honest Government was registered with the IRS under Section 501 (c) (3) of the tax code as a nonprofit educational organization, theoretically nonpartisan, tax-exempt and free to solicit tax-deductible charitable contributions. (Actually, Citizens was set up under the aegis of another nonprofit
organization that Matrisciana already had qualified with the IRS under the name Creative Ministries.)
In practice, the new organization had two main purposes: to propagate the political and religious nostrums of the extreme religious right, with which its founder and sole proprietor, Pat Matrisciana, was closely allied; and to promote and distribute videotapes produced by Jeremiah Films and Integrity Films, two for-profit corporate entities he owned.
Until 1993, Jeremiah Films produced slick, melodramatic videos on themes mainly of interest to Christian fundamentalists. In 1988, for example, Matrisciana unveiled The Evolution Conspiracy, a documentary exposing the organizing principle of modern biology as a scientific hoax and religious heresy used by “atheists, hindu mystics and The New Age” to subvert Christianity. Halloween, Trick or Treat? warned American parents that lurking behind such “seemingly innocent symbolism” as black cats and jack-o’-lanterns lay a satanic plot to seduce their children into “Pagan Occultism.” The spread of AIDS, according to a 1989 production, had resulted from “a homosexual cover-up” of the disease’s actual causes. And a sequel titled Gay Rights, Special Rights revealed the hidden purpose of civil rights laws forbidding discrimination by sexual preference: to enable homosexuals to “procreate” in “public classrooms where they recruit and propagandize the innocent.”
The advent of Clinton offered theological entrepreneurs like Matrisciana an eschatological thrill. With the millennium almost nigh, it seemed possible that Americans were living in the End Times and had fallen under the sway of the Antichrist, as predicted in the Book of Revelation. It also seemed possible to make money and advance right-wing Republicanism by stirring up millennial anxieties.
Jeremiah Films’ initial response to the Clinton presidency was a 1993 production titled The Crash: The Coming Financial Collapse of America. By 2000, this video predicted, the U.S. Treasury would default on the national debt. Hyperinflation would render the dollar worthless, placing the nation at the mercy of Japanese bankers. Inner-city riots, breadlines, and fear of chaos would lead Americans to abandon democracy in favor of a Hitlerian strongman. Narrated in part by such GOP stalwarts as former attorney general Edwin Meese III, former California representative William Dannemeyer, and Mississippi senator Trent Lott, it urged a “spiritual revolution” and recommended stockpiling food. (Somewhat paradoxically, Citizens for Honest Government simultaneously offered a course in “Christian Investment Counseling” for a mere $19.95, Visa and MasterCard accepted.)
What Jeremiah’s doomsday video neglected to note was that almost everyone involved in making it, including Matrisciana himself, belonged to a tightly
guarded political organization known as the Council for National Policy. Founded in 1981 by the Reverend Tim LaHaye, the CNP’s roughly five hundred members include virtually everybody who is anybody on the evangelical far right. Its thrice-yearly meetings are members-only events, strictly closed to press and public. Even the organization’s membership list is supposed to be confidential, although the Institute for First Amendment Studies and other liberal critics have obtained the roster and even posted it on the Internet.
Along with Meese, Dannemeyer, and Lott, other Republican politicians then affiliated with the CNP included North Carolina senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, and John Kyl of Arizona. Former Southern California representative Bob Dornan is a longtime CNP stalwart, as are House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Dick Armey of Texas, and Dan Burton of Indiana. No Democratic senator or representative is a member.
On the pastoral side, televangelists Pat Robertson and James Dobson belong to the CNP, as do Falwell and many others. So do the leaders of virtually every far-right foundation and think tank in the country, including Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, Floyd Brown of Citizens United, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, and political consultant Ralph Reed. Television commentator Oliver North has been a member for many years. But what really enhances the organization’s political significance are its connections with major sources of wealth, such as the Coors and DeVos families and rich individuals such as Colorado investor Foster Friess.
In essence, the CNP functions as the central committee of a theocratic “popular front”—an alliance of individuals and groups who set aside their differences for the sake of fighting a common enemy. Abstractly stated, that enemy appears to be America’s constitutional separation of church and state; more concretely, the CNP’s targets are liberals, most Democrats, and “secular humanists” of all sorts, including moderate Republicans. Many influential CNP members adhere to a doctrine known as “Christian Reconstructionism,” which essentially argues that the U.S. Constitution derives its earthly legitimacy from the Bible as interpreted by Protestant fundamentalists.
The intellectual underpinnings of Christian Reconstructionism derive largely from the writings of a California theologian (and CNP member) named R. J. Rushdoony. In an eight-hundred-page tract published in 1973 entitled Institutes of Biblical Law, he wrote, “The only true order is founded on Biblical law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.” Accordingly, he prescribes the death penalty for a wide variety of sins, including adultery, homosexuality, abortion, atheism, heresy, and blasphemy. Among those most heavily influenced by Rushdoony is his fellow CNP member John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute (and, by late 1997, one of the lead attorneys for Paula Jones).
The more pragmatic evangelicals disdain Rushdoony’s extremism. CNP member Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, has criticized Christian Reconstructionism as “an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free and democratic society.” Still, there is one Reconstructionist idea that unites the American religious right. “Most Reconstructionists,” writes scholar Frederick Clarkson, believe that the United States should be a “Christian Nation” and that they are the champions and heirs of the “original intentions of the Founding Fathers.”
If that vision of a Christian America stirs powerful emotions among conservative evangelicals, their fundamentalist theology can also predispose them to a conspiratorial mind-set. “The view of history as conspiracy,” Rushdoony has written, “is a basic aspect of the perspective of orthodox Christianity.” Those who view history as an all-encompassing struggle between God and the Devil may find it natural to regard political opponents as agents of Lucifer.
Reed’s former boss, the televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, plainly shares that perspective. “There will never be peace,” Robertson wrote in 1992, “until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshippers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, revolutionary assassins, adulterers and homosexuals are on top?”
In other words, the “culture war” declared by Robertson, Falwell, Pat Buchanan, and Representative Henry Hyde was doctrinally unavoidable. And Clinton’s election galvanized the culture warriors of the Council for National Policy. Even the relatively cautious Christian Coalition called Clinton’s inauguration “a repudiation of our forefathers’ covenant with God.” Such rhetoric implied a divine mandate to bring down an unfit president.
As soldiers of fortune in that crusade, Pat Matrisciana and Larry Nichols were destined to do business. If Citizens for Honest Government was in the market for conspiracies involving Bill Clinton, Nichols had plenty to sell. They were introduced in late 1993 by a former NBC News cameraman named John Hillyer, who had been hired by Matrisciana to scout Arkansas for anti-Clinton material. Nichols’s antics during the 1990 and 1992 campaigns had made him a well-known figure in Little Rock newsrooms (where reporters knew better than to use him as a source for anything that couldn’t be independently confirmed).
“More than anything else, Larry just loves to talk,” said one Little Rock journalist who understood his raffish appeal. “He’s literally a bullshit artist … . If Bill Clinton has this amazing charm, Larry has a similar ability to sit down with somebody—maybe not a smart, skeptical person—but, say, a small-town
banker or a right-wing radio talk show host, and persuade them to believe almost any damn thing he comes up with. He’s witty. He can make you laugh.”
Nichols and Matrisciana’s first joint venture was a thirty-minute video called Circle of Power. Distributed nationwide by Falwell’s Liberty Alliance early in 1994, the video opens with Nichols sitting in a cozy parlor, wearing a red cardigan like Mister Rogers and earnestly telling of “countless people who mysteriously died” after running afoul of Clinton’s political ambition.
Few on the right had accepted independent counsel Robert Fiske’s verdict that Vincent Foster had committed suicide for reasons that had nothing to do with his job at the White House. “Fiske was appointed by Janet Reno at the suggestion of Bernard Nussbaum,” Falwell told reporters. “It’s like putting Hillary Clinton in there.” Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal had expressed similar doubts.
Taking Foster’s death as a starting point, Circle of Power tied the president to a series of suicides, accidental deaths, and unsolved homicides. Few of these smears were original; most of the video’s content was identical to a list appearing on an Internet Web site—“The Clinton Body Count: Coincidence or the Kiss of Death?”—run by an Indianapolis lawyer named Linda Thompson. Thompson had quit her one-year-old law practice in 1993 to run the American Justice Federation, a for-profit group that indulges in conspiracy theories and progun agitprop through a shortwave radio program, a computer bulletin board, and sales of newsletters and videos. Updated biweekly, by mid-1994 the list included thirty-four names of Clinton-linked people the Web site said had died under suspicious circumstances, including four federal agents killed in the Branch Davidian shoot-out in Waco, Texas; four army crewmen who died in a helicopter crash in Germany; a Democratic campaign strategist who died of a heart attack; a friend of White House adviser Mack McLarty who perished in a ski accident; a seventy-two-year-old Little Rock lawyer who crashed a single-engine airplane on a foggy airstrip; and so forth.
Almost simultaneously with the release of the video—promoted on national TV as “Jerry Falwell Presents Bill Clinton’s Circle of Power”—former representative William Dannemeyer, a founding member of the Council for National Policy, sent an open letter to his former colleagues in the House of Representatives citing the list of mysterious deaths and demanding a congressional investigation.
But it was The Clinton Chronicles, Falwell and Matrisciana’s second, more ambitious production, that reached the widest audience after it was released that spring. Although Falwell has since denied subsidizing the scurrilous video, the financial records of Citizens for Honest Government prove that its production costs were underwritten by Falwell’s Liberty Alliance. Those same documents
also show that nearly every individual interviewed in what was ostensibly a work of documentary journalism was paid a substantial fee or royalty.
Even more disturbing were the allegations, in court records obtained by former Newsweek, reporter Robert Parry for his on-line publication I.F. Magazine, that suggest that Falwell may have been subsidized by the Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon.
Those court papers, filed in a lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Bedford County, Virginia, claim that Falwell and two associates made a seven-day “secret trip” to South Korea on January 9, 1994, to meet with representatives of the Unification Church, accompanied by Washington Times executive Ronald N. Godwin, formerly the director of the defunct Moral Majority, Inc., and a conservative direct-mail entrepreneur named Daniel Reber. According to the same documents, two former business associates of Reber’s claim that the trio had met a few months earlier at Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg with Dong Moon Joo, the president of the Washington Times and the Korean preacher’s chief American representative.
Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah whose theology is rejected by evangelical Christians, has lavished millions on right-wing political causes in the United States for well over two decades. His church’s ownership of the Washington Times, as well as affiliated publications like Insight magazine, whose combined losses are subsidized at an estimated rate of $100 million per year, have lent Moon legitimacy in conservative circles. Indeed, former presidents Reagan and Bush both have accepted enormous honoraria for their speeches at Unification Church events despite the fact that Moon has repeatedly denounced America as the “Kingdom of Satan.”
On July 26, 1994—in the midst of his promotion of The Clinton Chronicles —Falwell showed up at Moon’s side for a dinner honoring a new allied group called Youth Federation for World Peace. His willingness to publicly associate with Moon, whom Southern Baptists consider heretical, appeared to have at least one clear motive: money.
Falwell’s own right-wing sympathies dated from the early sixties, when he had defended segregation from the pulpit and denounced the civil rights movement as an instrument of Communism. As a mainstay of evangelical Republicanism, he had been particularly close to both Ronald Reagan and George Bush. But like other TV evangelists, Falwell had seen contributions drop in the wake of the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals; public opinion of Falwell himself was negative as well. After being forced to abandon the Moral Majority, Inc., for financial reasons in 1986, he was virtually buried beneath a mountain of institutional debt. By 1993, his Liberty University owed $73 million to the bondholders who had financed its construction, and was badly in danger of a default.
The Clinton Chronicles made Larry Nichols a star. Cinematically, the video resembled the anti-Communist films churned out at Arkansas’s Harding College during the fifties and early sixties, when the young Kenneth Starr matriculated there, with a pseudodocumentary format, a deep-voiced narrator warning of impending doom, and a musical score evocative of Bride of Frankenstein. As in those old movies about the totalitarian Communist conspiracy, the new video depicted the “Clinton machine” as achieving “absolute control” over the state of Arkansas and misusing that power for sinister purposes.
The video’s intellectual style would be familiar to any student of historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. “The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with … a careful accumulation of facts or at least of what appear to be facts and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming ‘proof’ of the particular conspiracy that is to be established.”
Preceded by a notice that “all information in this video is documented and true,” the tape was narrated principally by Nichols and the ubiquitous Justice Jim Johnson. According to Johnson, a white-haired eminence identified only as a retired state supreme court judge, the evidence of Clinton’s crimes was “more credible than the evidence of 90 percent of the people who are confined on death row across America.”
The challenge facing Arkansas journalists was to find a single “true” or “documented” statement in The Clinton Chronicles. Veteran reporter Carrie Rengers drew the assignment of reviewing the Citizens for Honest Government opus for the resolutely Republican Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. (“Apparently,” she commented tartly, “honesty isn’t necessary in videos.”) She painstakingly debunked its most absurd assertions. Had Governor Clinton really failed to balance Arkansas’s state budget even once? In fact he had done so every year because state law forbids deficit spending. Had he, as the video alleged, issued a full pardon to a political supporter named Dan Lasater who was convicted of giving cocaine to his acquaintances? Impossible, because Lasater had pleaded guilty to a federal crime.
Had all the financial records of Clinton’s political campaigns mysteriously vanished? No, they were duly on file with the Pulaski County clerk and the Arkansas secretary of state. Had poultry mogul Don Tyson, of Tyson Foods, donated some $700,000 to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign? Neither he nor his firm had donated a penny to the Democrat or his party in 1992. Had Tyson Foods received a low-interest $10 million state loan which it failed to repay? Although a version of this fable also had appeared under Jeff Gerth’s byline on the front page of the New York Times (which ran a correction), the poultry giant had never borrowed a dime from the state of Arkansas. As far as Rengers could determine, the whole story was invented.
Unsurprisingly, the largest volume of fabrications in The Clinton Chronicles concerned the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), the state agency from which Nichols had been fired in 1988. As presented by him, the ADFA’s purpose wasn’t to help Arkansas cities and businesses finance sewage projects, schools, and industrial parks. Rather, it was designed to help Clinton’s cronies loot the public treasury and launder billions in drug-smuggling profits—and to finance Clinton’s out-of-state partying with loose women.
Again, every allegation that could be checked was phony. Contrary to Nichols, Webb Hubbell had played no role in writing the ADFA’s enabling legislation. His father-in-law’s company P.O.M. (which manufactured parking meters, not hollow airplane nose cones for stashing cocaine) had once qualified for a $2.8 million loan, but far from making no repayment, the firm had retired the debt on time.
The Clinton Chronicles asserted that the Rose Law Firm had a monopoly on ADFA businesses, and that the governor personally signed off on all ADFA loans. In reality, the Democrat-Gazette found, a half dozen Little Rock law firms competed vigorously for ADFA work; the governor’s office played no active role in the agency’s lending process. One of the video’s silliest charges was that the ADFA had laundered $100 million per month (or $1.2 billion per year) in illicit cash. In the agency’s nine-year existence, it had made loans totaling only $1.7 billion.
These errors and falsehoods didn’t discourage Falwell from promoting The Clinton Chronicles as if it were The Ten Commandments. For four successive weeks in May 1994, viewers of the Virginia evangelist’s syndicated TV program, The Old-Time Gospel Hour, saw not sermons and spirituals but excerpts from Circle of Power and The Clinton Chronicles, along with a half-hour infomercial touting the videos for a donation of $40 plus $3 for shipping and handling. A few of the more than two hundred TV stations that carried Falwell’s program deemed the episodes political rather than religious, and refused to broadcast them without payment, but most showed them on schedule.
Toward the end of the thirty-minute infomercial, Falwell interviewed a figure in silhouette, identified only as an “investigative reporter.”
“Can you please tell me and the American people why you think that your life and the lives of the others on this video are in danger?” the reverend asks.
“Jerry, two weeks ago we had an interview with a man who was an insider,” the dark figure replies. “His plane crashed and he was killed an hour before the interview. You may say this is just a coincidence, but there was another fellow that we were also going to interview, and he was killed in a plane crash. Jerry, are these coincidences? I don’t think so.”
The silhouette’s voice was recognized by investigative reporter Murray Waas, who finally got Pat Matrisciana to admit he was the mystery man. “Obviously,
I’m not an investigative reporter,” Matrisciana confessed, “and I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry’s idea to do that … . He thought that would be dramatic.”
A few months later, Falwell’s Liberty Alliance sent out a direct-mail solicitation to thousands of supporters, asking for contributions to help him “produce a national television documentary which will expose shocking new facts about Bill Clinton.” But the letter didn’t reveal why Falwell needed to finance yet another edition of the anti-Clinton expose. In keeping with Larry Nichols’s allegiance to Sheffield Nelson, The Clinton Chronicles had made several dubious allegations against Nelson’s lifelong enemies at Stephens, Inc., the Arkansas investment house.
It charged that a Little Rock commercial bank owned by the Stephens family had reaped illicit profits from its dealings with the ADFA and other state accounts, and had in return made an illegal $3.5 million loan to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign that was never repaid. But the Stephens family no longer owned a controlling share in Worthen Bank; it had lost, rather than gained, state business as a result of the ADFA’s creation; and it had played no part in the perfectly legal Worthen loan to the Clinton campaign, which had been repaid in full. Although Stephens, Inc., would be forced to defend itself in print against hurtful inaccuracies in both the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic on several occasions during Bill Clinton’s first term, it had more direct means to deal with Jerry Falwell.
The investment firm had long underwritten bond issues for religious colleges across the South—one of which happened to be Falwell’s own insolvent Liberty University. “We had first claim on Liberty University to pay the bonds we owned,” explained chief executive Warren Stephens. “After they went into default, we could have taken the first dollar of tuition payments to satisfy the debt. We could have shut the place down, but we didn’t. Then lo and behold, here came The Clinton Chronicles-all lies.”
Rather than foreclose, Stephens took a gentler approach. He flew to Lynchburg in a corporate jet and explained the facts of life to the portly Virginia evangelist. “There was no pressure, no threat,” Stephens recalled. “It was more like, ‘Hey, you know us. You absolutely know from a character standpoint that these things aren’t true.’ Falwell acted like he was shocked. They took it out of The New Clinton Chronicles and sent out a letter to the people who’d ordered the video explaining that there had been a mistake. But I don’t mind telling you, he’s a bizarre guy. Flat spooky.”
With President Clinton’s popularity edging toward record lows during the spring and summer of 1994, The Clinton Chronicles became an underground
sensation. Citizens for Honest Government would later claim sales of more than 150,000, with perhaps double that number of bootleg copies in circulation. The Council for National Policy bulk-ordered copies for all its members, and Matrisciana sent tapes to all 435 members of Congress and to influential Washington journalists. Indiana congressman Dan Burton—a Foster conspiracy buff who achieved a degree of notoriety by conducting an amateur ballistics test in his backyard involving a .38 revolver and a watermelon—invited Larry Nichols to Washington and introduced him to like-minded House members. Evangelical churches, particularly across the South, showed the video during services. Conservative talk radio amplified its ominous message to an audience of millions. Nichols’s gravelly baritone soon became a familiar feature of the nationally syndicated Michael Reagan radio talk show, where he took to claiming that his life was in danger and that he was being forced into hiding. He solicited donations to finance his life as a political fugitive.
In real life, Nichols cruised around his hometown of Conway, Arkansas, in a brand-new white Lincoln Continental. He and his wife, whose state job as secretary to the president of the University of Central Arkansas remained unaffected by her husband’s activities, moved into a large new home with a swimming pool on a winding street.
He set up his own Internet Web site, began a shortwave radio program, and became a favorite speaker among “patriot” and militia groups nationwide. On May 11, 1994, he spoke at a Colorado rally sponsored by a group called the “Boulder Patriots.” A videotape of the proceedings was later turned over to the Secret Service, probably because at one point during his manic monologue, Nichols pulled a nickel-plated semiautomatic handgun from his pants and provoked cheers by waving it in the air. “I made a deal with Bill Clinton,” he shouted. “In 1994, we’re gonna meet at high noon, and one of us is gonna get out of town!” Voices in the crowd could be heard yelling, “Shoot the bastard!”
Although Nichols’s actual military experience consisted of four months duty as an electrician in the Arkansas National Guard, he boasted of his extensive record as a Special Forces combat infantryman. “Everything I did,” he roared, “I did for God and country. And when you’re playing with commies, it ain’t easy. In the old days before Clinton took over, communists were bad guys and I was trained—I was taught—to get in the other man’s world and beat him at his game. I’m in Bill Clinton’s world now, and there’s not ever gonna be the day when the draft-dodging, lying, woman-chasing, dope-smoking, cocaine-using womanizer that exposes himself will be the president of this country!”
Eventually, the president was forced to defend himself. He gave an interview to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on April 8, 1994, complaining about the right-wing media. “There’s something that those of us who are Democrats have to contend with. The radical right have their own set of press organs.
They make their own news and then try to force it into the mainstream media. We don’t have anything like that. We don’t have a Washington Times, or a Christian Broadcasting Network, or a Rush Limbaugh, any of that stuff.”
Interviewed in June on KMOX, a St. Louis radio station, Clinton complained again about the “constant, unremitting drumbeat of negativism.” A KMOX reporter asked Clinton if he was referring to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and The Clinton Chronicles. “Absolutely,” he said. “Look at who he’s talking to. I mean, does he make full disclosure to the American people of the backgrounds of the people that he has interviewed that have made these scurrilous and false charges against me? Of course not.”
Falwell responded by inviting the president to prove his innocence. He told the New York Times that Clinton should be angry not at him but at those who made the accusations. If Clinton were to “tape a personal and direct rebuttal” to the video indictment, the reverend promised to broadcast it unedited on The Old-Time Gospel Hour. Floyd Brown, author of Slick Willie, publisher of the Clintonwatch newsletter, and previous employer of the talents of Larry Nichols and Justice Jim Johnson, commented that the Clintons were very “thin-skinned.”
The president’s complaints caused a flurry of front-page stories in newspapers like the Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that inevitably focused on the more sensational accusations and observed that the videos offered no proof that Clinton was a drug-smuggling murderer. These articles provoked an oddly defensive editorial in the Wall Street Journal on July 20, 1994. While conceding that many of The Clinton Chronicles accusations made no sense, the Journal editors still insisted that “the Falwell tape and the controversy around it get at something important about the swirl of Arkansas rumors and the dilemma it presents a press that tries to be responsible. The ‘murder’ accusation, for example, is not made by Mr. Falwell or Mr. Nichols, but by Gary Parks, whose father was gunned down gangland style on a parkway near Little Rock last September.”
The elder Parks had run a private security firm that supplied guards outside Clinton’s Little Rock headquarters during the 1992 campaign. The anti-Clinton clique, including the London Sunday Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, deduced that he had been killed because he knew too much about Clinton’s sex life. The Journal acknowledged that there was no evidence, and speculated that “Jerry Parks had plenty of reason to have enemies, and his family may be overwrought.” That was how Little Rock police viewed the still-unsolved crime. (Gary Parks eventually apologized for accusing Clinton and expressed regret about his involvement with the video.)
The Journal editors stipulated that they could not “for a minute imagine Bill Clinton knowingly involved, even tangentially, in plots of violence.” Yet even in criticizing Falwell, they published the names of several more putative
Clinton “victims” previously listed in the British press. Then, chafing against the niggling constraints of responsible journalism, they went further.
Rumors about Clinton were “old news to any of the journalists covering Arkansas scandals, but few of us have shared any of this knowledge with readers … . Finding no real evidence of a Clinton connection, and feeling that the President of the United States is entitled to a presumption of innocence, we decline, in the name of responsibility, to print what we’ve heard. And then it is left to less responsible sources to publish the first reports, and the disclosure of basic facts adds credibility to their sensational interpretation, especially among those losing trust in the mainstream press.”
The performance of the mainstream press did leave much to be desired as far as knowledgeable Arkansans were concerned. Highly influential articles about the president and his home state continued to appear in prominent publications with information that was scarcely more accurate, if less luridly presented, than the Clinton Chronicles. Taken together, they strengthened the Washington-press elite’s impressions of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s scandal-ridden past.
The Journal first betrayed its own impatience with journalistic restraint during a farcical episode that had occurred earlier in 1994. That incident, too, involved Larry Nichols, along with a writer named L. J. Davis. At issue was a cover story that ran in the April 4, 1994, issue of the New Republic. Headlined “The Name of Rose,” it purported to be an expose of Arkansas’s “colorful folkways” and corrupt political culture. With the venerable Washington magazine’s imprimatur, Davis introduced the worldview of The Clinton Chronicles to an influential, sophisticated elite that would scoff at the Falwell videos.
His article, which had been rejected by Harper’s magazine, sketched Arkansas state government as a “Third World” criminal conspiracy among Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Rose Law Firm, and Stephens, Inc. Assisted by “sinister Pakistanis” and “shadowy Indonesians,” this cabal had looted the president’s home state and now menaced the nation.
Considering that Larry Nichols and a Republican political consultant named Darrell Glascock were the writer’s two primary sources, it was unsurprising that he erred so badly. (Some months after the Davis article appeared, Glascock copped a plea in a scam involving a fraudulent state purchase of fifty thousand nonexistent U.S. flags, and gave testimony that sent his co-conspirator to jail for seventeen years.)
Employing no fact checkers at the time, the New Republic was helpless against Nichols and Glascock’s inventions. Two examples should suffice: “With the stroke of a pen and without visible second thought,” Davis wrote, “then-Governor Clinton … gave life to two pieces of legislation inspired by his wife’s boss [i.e., the Rose Law Firm]—revising the usury laws and permitting the formation
of new bank holding companies.” Supposedly by abolishing the constitutional 10 percent limit on interest rates, Clinton had enriched Stephens, Inc., which owned Worthen Bank, then the state’s largest. In return, Worthen had hired Hillary’s law firm as its outside counsel, in exchange for which Clinton had made it “a major depository of the state’s tax receipts.” Next, Worthen had given the Clinton presidential campaign a $3.5 million line of credit, and so on—much the same tale told in The Clinton Chronicles.
In reality, the usury law was changed not by Bill Clinton, but by a constitutional amendment enacted in the 1982 general election. It was placed on the ballot by the legislature, at the urging of Republican governor Frank White, a banker, and became law before Clinton became governor. Furthermore, Stephens, Inc., didn’t own Worthen Bank either when the amendment was enacted or when Davis’s article was written twelve years later. The Rose Law Firm had been Worthen’s outside counsel for fifty years. And as Arkansas’s largest bank, Worthen had been the major depository of state money since Bill Clinton was a little boy.
Davis’s central premise was that Stephens, Inc., and the Stephens family had pocketed vast ill-gotten wealth through shady bond deals with the Clinton administration. As he put it, “The intimate connection between Rose, Stephens, Inc. and the Governor’s office may help explain how the Stephens family made a huge amount of money when its most visible enterprises were doing no such thing.” Passing over the fact that the Stephens interests had bankrolled every GOP gubernatorial nominee (except the hated Sheffield Nelson) in recent Arkansas history, the notion that Clinton had made the family rich provoked helpless laughter in Little Rock. The value of Stephens, Inc., comprised just under 7 percent of the Stephens family’s $1.7 billion net worth. Besides vast natural gas reserves in Arkansas and four western states, they owned huge soft coal reserves, banks, gas and electric utilities, newspapers, and scores of other concerns. During Clinton’s tenure, Stephens, Inc.’s underwriting fees on Arkansas bonds came to less than 1 percent of the firm’s total revenues.
But what really made L. J. Davis temporarily famous wasn’t the Wall Street Journal’s endorsement of his sinister view of Arkansas politics, but its account of an alleged act of violence against him. In covering Clinton, lamented Journal editors the week Davis’s article appeared, the “respectable press … has shown little or no appetite for publishing anything about sex or violence,” a taboo they would no longer observe.
On the evening of February 13, the same editorial recounted, Davis “was returning to his room in Little Rock’s Legacy Motel about 6:30 after an interview … . The last thing he remembers is putting his key in the door, and the next thing he remembers is waking up face down on the floor, with his arm
twisted under his body and a big lump on his head above his left ear. The room door was shut and locked. Nothing was missing except four ‘significant’ pages of his notebook that included a list of his sources in Little Rock … . Mr. Davis says his doctor found his injury inconsistent with a fall, and that he’d been ‘struck a massive blow above the left ear with a blunt object.’”
The Journal concluded that Arkansas was “a congenitally violent place, full of colorful characters with stories to tell, axes to grind, and secrets of their own to protect.” In this climate, the editors concluded, “the respectable press is spending too much time adjudicating what the reader has a right to know, and too little time with the old spirit of ‘stop the pressed.’”
The near-martyrdom of Davis fit perfectly with the Foster “murder” and the Clinton Chronicles death list. Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on right-wing talk radio professed shock and horror. Rumors spread among the Washington press corps that the phones in Little Rock’s Capital Hotel, owned by the Stephens interests, were bugged, and that Bill Clinton employed thugs and gumshoes to shadow reporters in Arkansas.
Oddly, L. J. Davis himself soon discovered that the crucial four pages weren’t missing from his notebook after all, merely torn and wrinkled. Still, the Democrat-Gazette, alarmed that a colleague had been assaulted in downtown Little Rock, sent reporters out looking for the perpetrator. They didn’t take long to find a suspect.
According to Legacy Hotel records, the assailant appeared to be a half dozen straight gin martinis. During the same four hours that Davis reported having spent facedown on his hotel-room floor, he’d actually been seated upright on a barstool. Hotel officials showed a copy of his bar tab to Little Rock police, and the bartender distinctly remembered refusing Davis a seventh drink. The writer denied drinking more than his usual ration of martinis, although he didn’t specify how many that was. “I might have been a little happy, but so what?” he told reporters. “I have never made any charge about that, and why am I going to call the cops if I don’t know what happened?”
Inside the downtown Little Rock headquarters of Stephens, Inc., the New Republic article caused severe annoyance, but what generated fury was the Wall Street Journal’s embrace of it. Warren Stephens’s semiretired father, Jackson T. Stephens, wasn’t merely a Republican, after all. Having donated more than $100,000 each to the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, he was a card-carrying member of the GOP’s Team 100.
The younger Stephens had been raised on the Journal’s conservative verities. Now he found his firm and family accused of imaginary improprieties and crimes by Journal editors who appeared contemptuous of facts. Following an earlier disagreement, Jack Stephens had paid editor Robert Bartley a visit at the
newspaper’s New York headquarters to protest the newspaper’s coverage, but that cordial meeting had gotten him nowhere. Nor did a series of increasingly exasperated letters Warren Stephens wrote to Bartley regarding the Davis piece.
“In your rush to tar and feather Mr. Clinton,” he urged, “don’t damage the authority of the Wall Street Journal to be a conservative voice. Your praise of such a disjointed, incorrect piece will not serve you well in the long run.” By return mail came a curt note essentially accusing Stephens, Inc., of complicity with the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International, echoing another New Republic charge.
The Stephens interests were not the only important economic power in Arkansas to draw attention from the scandal-seeking national press. Among the state’s largest and most controversial enterprises was the poultry industry, dominated by Tyson Foods.
It was perhaps inevitable that Tyson became a hot topic when, in January 1994, editors of the New York Times convened an unusual meeting of the paper’s entire investigative staff to advance the Whitewater story. Like their counterparts at the Washington Post—indeed, like many national journalists—the Times editors thought they might be on to another Watergate, and they didn’t want to be beaten this time.
Among Jeff Gerth’s previously unexplored leads was an offhand remark by Jim McDougal about profitable commodity futures trading by Hillary Clinton. Returning to Arkansas, he and his colleagues soon found Robert “Red” Bone, the trader who had handled Hillary’s account at the behest of a corporate attorney named James Blair. And Blair, whose wife, Diane, happened to be one of Hillary’s oldest personal friends, had later gone to work for Tyson. The Times reporters uncovered considerable detail about Hillary’s trading, which had over time netted a profit of about $100,000 on a marginal investment of $1,000. But the initial article about her trading was played on the New York Times front page on March 18, 1994, partly due to an erroneous suspicion about Blair’s motives for helping Hillary. His client Tyson Foods, Gerth wrote, had benefited “from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans.”
In fact, those alleged loans were imaginary. Arkansas had no state loan program for Fortune 500 companies, and more than a month later the Times conceded in a published correction that there were no such loans to Tyson. Rather, it said, Tyson had enjoyed $7 million in state income tax credits—investment incentives available to every corporation, as the correction failed to mention. By then the fictive $9-million loan had been featured in scores of accusatory editorials and columns.
Handled judiciously, the cattle futures story need not have done the Clintons much harm. In essence, they had been done a favor by a shrewd friend
who had little to gain apart from something he already had: the new governor’s ear. Stung and defensive, however, Hillary Clinton instructed her White House spokesperson to claim that while Jim Blair had indeed given her tips, she had done most of the trading herself, based upon her study of the Wall Street Journal.
That claim, as reporters quickly determined, was not supported by the evidence. Blair had done most of the successful trading. Mrs. Clinton had briefly managed a second commodities account on her own, but without much success. Had she not gotten uneasy and quit trading before the cattle futures market plummeted, she might have ended up along with Blair and several others in federal court, suing the broker who had failed to make timely margin calls until their losses had become ruinous. Still, her explanation, which she withdrew weeks later, was at best a half-truth and at worst a falsehood. There was less to the commodities story than the sensational coverage implied, but the first lady’s foolish attempt to mislead permanently injured her credibility.
As governor, her husband’s relationship with Tyson Foods had been more troubled than chummy. In 1980 and 1982, the firm’s CEO, Don Tyson, had supported Republican Frank White. The Clinton administration’s ongoing conflict with the potent poultry lobby had been one of the two or three most persistent stories in Arkansas politics during his tenure. Few governors set out to alienate themselves permanently from their state’s largest private employer and fastest-growing industry, but Clinton and the chicken growers had repeatedly found themselves at odds over such mundane but critical issues as highway truck weight limits, waste disposal, water quality standards, sales taxes on animal feed, and corporate income taxes to support community colleges.
Some battles Clinton won, and sometimes the poultry lobby defeated him; most often they cobbled together legislative compromises. But when Michael Kelly came to Arkansas in 1994 to write a Clinton profile for the New York Times Magazine, all that complicated history yielded to the need for melodrama. Populist voters who thought they were choosing reform, he wrote, invariably ended up being defrauded by politicians who were wholly owned by a handful of cynical corporate tycoons. Clinton emerged in this account as the quintessential product of a corrupt system.
According to Kelly, Clinton’s first major gift to the poultry giant was supposed to have been the increase in highway truck weight limits to eighty thousand pounds in 1983 (a full five years after Hillary Clinton’s commodities trades). He mentioned that Clinton had linked the weight increase to a “ton-mile” tax hike on eighteen-wheel truck trailers. But he didn’t note that Arkansas was the last of the fifty states to accede to the eighty-thousand-pound standard, leaving its shippers at a disadvantage.
Pursuing the Tyson connection, Kelly also recounted a dispute over tainted groundwater in an Ozarks community. The state had reacted passively,
he wrote, after “the sewage system in the town of Green Forest, which had been for years overloaded by Tyson-produced animal waste, dumped so much sewage into Dry Creek that a giant sinkhole formed,” polluting local wells. (Kelly did not mention that the acccident had taken place during Governor Frank White’s tenure.) Although Clinton declared a “disaster emergency” within months of assuming the governor’s office again in 1983, Kelly noted, “the state failed to levy any fines against the company or to sue it for damages.”
True, but woefully incomplete. Until Clinton pushed environmental legislation through a recalcitrant legislature in 1985, the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology had no power to levy fines or file lawsuits. Passed in reaction to the Green Forest incident, the new law could not be made retroactive to 1983. Town officials also bore considerable blame for failing to upgrade the town’s sewage treatment facilities, as they had promised to do when Tyson Foods proposed to build a processing plant there. Any fair account of the subsequent lawsuit against Tyson Foods and the city of Green Forest, filed in federal court by a citizens group, also would have noted that Arkansas state officials testified on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Kelly’s skewed account of the relationship between Clinton and Tyson was a perfect example of “naive cynicism,” in which a reporter remains naively ignorant of basic information while cynically assuming the prevalence of corruption. In a joint letter to the New York Times Magazine, both of Arkansas’s senators made a similar point. Democrats Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, both former governors, explained that in a one-party state, the chief executive “must form a new coalition on each issue. The resulting bartering and negotiations may look slick to the unpracticed eye, but the novice should try it before judging … . In his twelve years as Governor, the President alienated every large interest group in the state at one time or another: utilities, timber, building contractors, the Chamber of Commerce, the Arkansas Medical Society, the Education Association, the poultry industry, the Farm Bureau, the National Rifle Association,” and so on.
But this complex reality wouldn’t have supported Kelly’s own darkly simplistic conclusions about Clinton’s character, shared by many of his Washington colleagues, which in turn justified the gathering momentum of scandal coverage during that spring and summer. Tyson Foods and Stephens, Inc., were merely outsized props in a political morality play that was to have a long and profitable run in the national media.
Ironically, Jerry Falwell’s urgent need to revise The Clinton Chronicles to edit out accusations against Stephens, Inc., afforded Larry Nichols another opportunity. Although the video came advertised as a documentary, many who appeared in it got paid. Citizens for Honest Government ledgers show that the organization paid out more than $200,000 to individuals featured in the Clinton
videos between 1994 and 1996. Nichols repeatedly claimed to have received no money but was in fact paid over $89,000 according to the ledgers, and probably made far more selling the tapes. Justice Jim Johnson was given a new pickup truck, while Paula Jones and her husband received a paltry $1,000 for their appearance in The Clinton Chronicles (although Falwell paid Matrisciana $5,000 for the privilege of broadcasting the Jones segment on his Old-Time Gospel Hour).
Also appearing on Matrisciana’s pay sheet was Jane Parks, widow of the slain security-firm owner whose son blamed his death on Bill Clinton. Over a two-year period, Mrs. Parks received a bit more than $22,000 from Citizens for Honest Government. “We did not pay people to tell lies,” Matrisciana told Salon magazine reporter Murray Waas. “We paid people so that they would no longer have to be afraid to tell the truth.”
Over the next few years Jane Parks did quite a bit of talking. Shortly before the 1996 presidential election, she was quoted by American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., to the effect that she had personally overheard Bill Clinton snorting cocaine with his brother Roger through a flimsy wall at an apartment complex she managed. She later told Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that her husband had been murdered because he was involved with Vince Foster in a massive drug-smuggling ring at the rural airport in Mena, Arkansas—the locus of numerous Clinton conspiracy tales. She also claimed she had once found hundreds of thousands in cash hidden in the trunk of her late husband’s car. She didn’t say what happened to it.
Another Arkansan who joined up with Citizens for Honest Government was a former Saline County deputy sheriff named John Brown. Over a two-year period, between 1994 and 1995, Pat Matrisciana paid the ex–homicide detective $28,000 for “investigative work” on the anti-Clinton videos, and Brown himself appeared in two of them. He took the money but soon came to take a jaundiced view of Matrisciana’s operation. During his tenure in Saline County, a rural and suburban area roughly thirty miles southwest of the state capital, Brown had been the lead investigator in one of Arkansas’s most disturbing unsolved crimes. Dubbed “the boys on the tracks” case, it involved the 1987 murders of two teenage boys whose dismembered bodies were found on the Union Pacific railroad tracks.
The case first drew notice due to a foolish error by the state medical examiner. Dr. Fahmy Malak, a British-trained Egyptian seemingly unfamiliar with the intoxicating properties of marijuana, had initially ruled the deaths accidental. Young Kevin Ives and Don Henry, the doctor hypothesized, had smoked twenty-five joints, fallen asleep on the tracks, and been run over by a freight train. Greeted by widespread derision, Malak’s verdict was eventually proved false by an outside pathologist, who showed that the victims had been
beaten to death before being placed on the railroad tracks. Whether the overworked medical examiner—deemed overly solicitous of law enforcement by some observers, incapable of admitting error by almost everybody—had simply misplaced a decimal point was hard to say. But because Malak served at the governor’s pleasure, the first edition of The Clinton Chronicles had little difficulty linking Bill Clinton to the “cover-up.”
John Brown’s suspects in the slayings were all Saline County residents involved in drug dealing. Meanwhile, Brown was also engaged with the FBI in an undercover investigation, probing corruption in the local district attorney’s office. Despite the Chronicles’ ludicrous suggestion that the Ives-Henry murders somehow involved Clinton, its citations of evidence did suggest a familiarity with sensitive investigative materials. Brown’s superiors urged him to find out how that information had leaked by meeting with representatives of Citizens for Honest Government. He did so, then briefed two FBI agents about what he discovered. Thus began his two-year sojourn in the hermetic world of Larry Nichols and the professional Clinton-haters.
At the outset, the young, idealistic cop found himself in sympathy with the organization’s stated goals. As an investigator in one of Arkansas’s most corrupt judicial districts—where ex-prosecutor Dan Harmon has since been convicted by U.S. Attorney Paula Casey on federal narcotics charges—the notion of fighting for “honest government” appealed to him. He thought Bill Clinton had done a poor job of dealing with local corruption during his twelve years as governor, although under the archaic 1837 state constitution, there was little Clinton could have done to curb locally elected district attorneys. No statewide prosecutorial authority exists.
Eventually Brown regretted his involvement with Matrisciana. Although he appeared on The New Clinton Chronicles and a second video titled Obstruction of Justice, he contends that his remarks were scripted, electronically altered, and placed in a context that entirely changed their meaning. Moreover, he says the same is true of virtually all the law enforcement officers who appear on Matrisciana’s videos.
In August 1999 Brown testified as a witness in a federal court case on behalf of two Pulaski County detectives, Lieutenants Jay Campbell and Kirk Lane, who brought a libel and defamation suit against Matrisciana, Citizens for Honest Government, and Jeremiah Films. At the trial, FBI agent Michael Smith confirmed Brown’s account of how he came to be involved with Citizens for Honest Government.
The Obstruction of Justice video had claimed that “eyewitnesses have implicated several people in the [Ives-Henry] murders and subsequent coverup.” It then proceeded to list Prosecutor Dan Harmon and the two police officers as the killers. During his own testimony, Brown said that he had repeatedly and pointedly warned Matrisciana not to name Campbell and Lane
and that no credible evidence existed against them. Far from being Dan Harmon’s associates, they too had been engaged in the effort to bring the corrupt prosecutor to justice. The jury found unanimously for the two officers, awarding them a $598,750 judgment.
Afterward, Matrisciana told reporters that “in Arkansas, I believe it’s almost impossible for me to have a fair trial.” Explaining that Citizens for Honest Government is “a little mom-and-pop operation,” he claimed that it would be impossible for him to pay the verdict.
“If they’d been halfway honest,” Brown explained to a Little Rock reporter, “they’d have called themselves Citizens Against Democrats. Basically, they just wanted to play a game of connect the dots. Except that every picture had to show Bill Clinton’s face. They’d take somebody like Dan Harmon or Dan Lasater, or even Roger Clinton, and find a way to tie everything they’d done wrong to Bill Clinton.”
On August 5, 1994, the same day that the Special Division announced the removal of Robert Fiske and the appointment of Kenneth Starr as Whitewater independent counsel, Brown traveled to Washington, D.C., at Matrisciana’s expense. Also along on the trip were Matrisciana, Larry Nichols, and an Arkansas lawyer named Jean Duffey who promoted a conspiratorial view of the Henry-Ives case. In the Capitol Hill offices of Representative Bob Livingston of Louisiana they met with prominent Republicans such as Representative Bill McCollum of Florida, and staffers of several others, including Jim Leach of Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, and Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina. The lean, white-maned Matrisciana videotaped the proceedings as Nichols regaled the politicians with tales of Clintonian skullduggery. Though unnoticed by the press, Livingston’s cameo role in The New Clinton Chronicles gave an air of authority to the production.
Soon after Kenneth Starr arrived in Little Rock that fall, the FBI agent who had asked Brown to look into Citizens for Honest Government moved on and the agency appeared to have lost interest in local corruption. Frustrated at being told to put the Henry-Ives case aside after seven years, Brown resigned to run as the Republican nominee for county sheriff. After a narrow defeat, he served as police chief in the town of Alexander and opened his own security and investigative firm. Against his better judgment, Citizens for Honest Government became one of his clients.
Brown says he remained curious about the organization’s tactics and motives. What intrigued him was the presence of former military intelligence figures with extreme right-wing views, such as Lieutenant Colonel Tom McKenney, a retired marine who appeared in several of Matrisciana’s videos and contributed a column to the group’s bimonthly newsletter. Brown also needed the business.
The more Brown saw of Nichols, the more it amazed him that Matrisciana
kept Nichols around. According to Brown, Nichols came up with the notion to dispatch Brown to Chicago to investigate Hillary Clinton’s supposed membership in an underground clique of lesbian dominatrices. On another occasion, Brown took Nichols and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Christopher Ruddy to the Sherwood, Arkansas, police department to look into what the pair deemed a suspicious death.
Ruddy had become nationally famous for a series in the Scaife-owned newspaper that questioned the suicide verdict in Foster’s death. It would later appear that among his many anti-Clinton projects, the reclusive Pittsburgh billionaire may have been subsidizing Matrisciana’s Citizens for Honest Government as well. By 1997, internal documents indicate, Citizens for Honest Government maintained a bank account in the name of Jeremiah Films that had an average balance of over $3 million.
The death that brought Nichols and Ruddy to Sherwood was that of Kathy Ferguson, ex-wife of Danny Ferguson, the Arkansas state trooper who was Clinton’s codefendant in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Despondent over a failed love affair, she had called 911, then turned a gun on herself. The funeral was hardly over before Ferguson’s name was added to the growing list of Clinton-connected deaths. John Brown’s connections in Arkansas law enforcement persuaded Sherwood detectives to open their files to him and the Citizens for Honest Government sleuths. After hearing the 911 tape and examining the crime scene photos and forensic evidence, Brown had no doubt that the official verdict was correct: Kathy Ferguson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His companions, however, could not be persuaded.
“Aw hell,” Nichols argued, “they just doctored them pictures.”
“No they didn’t,” replied Brown, noting how unlikely it was that Clinton’s tentacles extended into the Sherwood, Arkansas, police department, and also that many of the photos were Polaroids, virtually impossible to fake.
“Let them prove they didn’t,” Nichols said.
Although Christopher Ruddy had been unable to examine the graphic photos without getting sick, he nevertheless wrote a story for the TribuneReview indicating that in his professional opinion, the Ferguson suicide, too, looked fishy.
One possible explanation for Nichols’s erratic behavior, and ironic in view of his oft-repeated accusations about Bill Clinton’s drug use, was his own addiction to the painkiller Dilaudid. A derivative of the opium family, Dilaudid is similar in its physiological and psychological effects to heroin. It is a Schedule II narcotic with potentially fatal side effects, including suppressed respiration, mood disturbances, and impaired judgment. Nichols may have first been given the drug after suffering a hang-gliding accident, although his doctor later testified to a state medical board hearing that he had prescribed the pills
to ease Nichols’s pain from a rare viral affliction. In any event, by the time John Brown got to know him, the Clinton Chronicles star was gobbling pills by the handful and staggering around in a daze much of the time.
In a strange incident, Brown insisted he saw Nichols demonstrate his toughness by emerging from the bathroom having run an electric guitar string through his scrotum. “That was it for me,” Brown exclaimed. “I got up in his face and told him if he ever came around me pilled-up like that again, I would kick his ass and turn him in.” From that point forward, the former detective’s relationship with Citizens for Honest Government deteriorated rapidly.
Nichols already had found other friends in Arkansas law enforcement. For agreeing to appear in The New Clinton Chronicles, he signed a contract to pay state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry a $1-per-video royalty for yet another project, tentatively titled Nichols vs. Clinton. According to an interview Trooper Perry gave to Murray Waas, Nichols bragged that he had earned more than $150,000 in royalties by selling The Clinton Chronicles, and persuaded the troopers that they could share the wealth. These protagonists of David Brock’s original Troopergate story also agreed to appear in a Matrisciana-Ruddy production about the death of Vince Foster. But Perry claimed the only check Nichols ever wrote him bounced.
Nichols and Patterson, however, appeared to get along well. According to Waas, records he obtained showed that the pair opened a joint checking account in a Conway bank from which cash payments were made to several individuals who appeared in anti-Clinton videos. Living rent-free in a west Little Rock house owned by Republican lawyer and professional Clinton-basher Cliff Jackson, Patterson also joined Nichols on the far-right lecture circuit, earning up to $1,000 per appearance.
By September, two months before the 1994 midterm congressional elections, The New Clinton Chronicles was ready for distribution. All references to Falwell’s creditors at Stephens, Inc., were deleted and replaced by spooky intimations about narcotics trafficking at the Mena, Arkansas, airport. Again, Pat Matrisciana turned to his comrades at the Council for National Policy to promote his new product.
Free copies were shipped to all CNP members from the organization’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, along with a cover letter urging them to circulate the tapes as widely as possible among public officials and members of the media: “As many Americans as possible should become informed about the evil which infests the Clinton administration. Contact Senators and Congressmen with whom you have influence. Insist that when the Whitewater hearings resume … they look into the operations of the Arkansas Development Finance Administration (ADFA) and the other matters mentioned on the tape. Larry Nichols, who was Director of Marketing for ADFA, should be called to testify. Bill Clinton must be held accountable for his actions.”
On Monday, October 31, Jerry Falwell spoke before a Baptist preachers’ gathering in Little Rock. Originally scheduled to be held at Immanuel Baptist Church, where the president had worshiped during his years as governor, Falwell’s appearance had to be moved after pastor Rex Horne refused to allow his church to be used for the event. Having watched The Old-Time Gospel Hour on cable TV, Horne felt that Falwell had blatantly violated the Ninth Commandment’s prohibition against bearing false witness. “I happened to tune in on a Sunday morning,” he explained. “I saw Falwell promoting the tapes that have proven to be scurrilous and full of innuendo and falsehoods directed against not just Clinton but other Arkansans. I could not, with good conscience, go along with it any longer.”
Falwell’s speech excoriated Madonna and Michael Jackson along with Clinton, but he didn’t mention the videos until afterward. Questioned by a reporter about his relationship with Citizens for Honest Government, the reverend claimed, “I have not associated with or [had] any relationships with [those] people.”
One week later, Democrats suffered stunning defeats in the midterm elections, losing control of both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years. Universally regarded as a repudiation of the Clinton presidency, this seismic turnover was attributed to three factors: Newt Gingrich’s catchy “Contract with America,” the failure of the administration’s national health insurance proposal, and the cumulative weight of the “Clinton scandals,” including Whitewater, Troopergate, the Paula Jones lawsuit, Foster’s suicide, and The Clinton Chronicles. Like his fellow southerner, the hapless Jimmy Carter, President Clinton appeared all but certain to be a one-term wonder. As 1995 began with the elevation of Gingrich to Speaker of the House, many pundits were advising the Democrats to dump Clinton in 1996.
On January 28, 1995, about a year after his alleged trip to South Korea for an audience with Sun Myung Moon, Jerry Falwell informed his television flock on The Old-Time Gospel Hour of heaven-sent good news. Two Virginia businessmen named Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas had come to his rescue. Their nonprofit Christian Heritage Foundation had bought up almost half of Liberty University’s $73 million in bonded debt at a bankruptcy sale for the bargain price of $2.5 million. Then they had agreed to forgive the debt. After years of financial crisis, Falwell’s domain was saved.
“They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything,” the ebullient preacher told his audience. “Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas.” He told reporters that the bailout was “the greatest day of financial advantage” in the fundamentalist school’s history. Left unmentioned in the celebration was the identity of Falwell’s benefactor.
Clues to this mystery were unearthed later quite by accident. While researching an article on how much a Unification Church group called Women’s Federation for World Peace had paid former president Bush for a series of 1995 speeches in Asia, journalist Robert Parry noticed a $3.5 million “educational” grant to the Christian Heritage Foundation. Women’s Federation vice president Susan Fefferman told Parry that the grant’s proceeds had gone to “Mr. Falwell’s people” for the benefit of Liberty University. Although the $3.5 million stipend was by far the largest issued by the organization that year, Fefferman could tell the reporter nothing about its purpose. Another Unification Church official to whom she directed Parry failed to return his calls, as did Falwell himself.
Dan Reber, who had joined Falwell on his January 1994 pilgrimage to Korea, ran a Virginia company called Direct Mail Communications. According to court records, more than a third of its income came from a direct-mail subscription drive for Moon-sponsored organizations (and the rest mostly from Texas governor George W. Bush, Oliver North, the National Rifle Association, and the Republican National Committee). It seemed that Reber’s only sacrifice in acting as Falwell’s financial savior had been to give the evangelist’s various enterprises large discounts on direct-mail solicitations.
The real losers in the bailout were 2,500 small bondholders who had invested with the Texas-based Church & Institutional Facilities Development Corporation and who owned millions of the school bonds, which were sold to Reber and Thomas for 20 percent of value. Doug Hudman, a lawyer for the bondholders, told Parry that his clients mostly were “Moms and Pops cashing in their IRA money because their local minister and Falwell’s letters said they’d be doing God’s work … . All it was doing was going to fund Mr. Falwell’s continued indebtedness. It’s kind of sickening.”