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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
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Then, Case got what seemed to be a big break in the form of a phone call from a Little Rock lawyer named Cliff Jackson. A Fulbright scholar in England during the 1960s, when Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Jackson developed something of an obsession with what he saw as Clinton's character flaws. During the 1992 campaign, Jackson was often cited in the press as a high-minded opponent who knew Clinton all too well.
Clinton biographer David Maraniss, author of "First in His Class," took Jackson's opinions very seriously, indeed. Jackson provided Maraniss with contemporaneous -- if not terribly accurate and unfailingly nasty -- letters he'd written home from Oxford 25 years earlier detailing Clinton's efforts to avoid the military draft. (Jackson himself had a medical deferment.) Now Jackson wanted to offer Case something else: a racy photograph he thought so damningly explicit it would doom Clinton's presidential candidacy and end his political career.
"Is the photo good?" Case asks on a taped conversation. "I mean, is it better than what we've seen around here? Because I've seen a bunch of photos, but nothing that's really spicy."
"This one is spicy," Jackson assures the detective. "I haven't actually seen it, but I know what's in it ... Again, I told them I didn't want to get in the middle of this type stuff. That I'd pass it on to someone who can say what the market is ... Let me just tell you this. My perception of it? If it's what's been represented to me, it ought to be worth $2 million ... If this woman has what she says she has, it'd be totally incriminating ... I think It'd absolutely do in the campaign."
Jackson's client, whom he described as a friend of a friend, wanted cash -- no checks, no wire transfer. And Jackson wanted his own fingerprints kept off the transaction. Despite his eager assurances, Jackson was never able to produce the $2 million photo.
In other venues, Jackson continued to represent himself as a principled opponent of Clinton's political opportunism. He was used as a source by mainstream reporters, whose taped conversations with Case reveal that they knew of Jackson's attempts at trafficking the elusive photo, but continued to treat him as a credible source.
In a phone interview with my colleague Brantley on Tuesday, Jackson declined to confirm or deny his role in the affair. "I tried to put this stuff behind me in 1994," he said, "and that's where I want it to stay."
But in 1993, Jackson was still very much in the anti-Clinton business. He negotiated "personal service" contracts guaranteeing jobs to Arkansas Trooper Larry Patterson and fellow troopers who told salacious fables about the Clintons' sex lives to the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator.
The December 1993 American Spectator story, by David Brock, was widely credited by the mainstream media, despite the self-evident absurdity of some of the troopers' tales. Believe what you will about the president's libido; but can anybody truly believe that Hillary Clinton allowed the late Vincent Foster to caress her breasts at a Rose Law Firm party in a public restaurant, while she squirmed and purred like a cat in heat? Well, that was what the troopers told Brock she did. And that's what the American Spectator printed.
Within a week of the "Troopergate" bombshell, Jackson released an open letter to President Clinton in which he expressed his hope that the public washing of his allegedly dirty laundry would bring about the "best possible future for you and our country."
"I feel for your pain and that of your family," Jackson wrote. "Forgive my role as an attorney for the troopers (a role which I did not seek and undertook only with great trepidation when the truth of their allegations became apparent) in inflicting such public pain upon you and yours." A couple of months later, Paula Jones made her public debut standing at Jackson's side at a Washington meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee.
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