At every step, Isikoff grants Jones the presumption of injured innocence. Even when her first set of lawyers, Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata, quit because they believe she is resisting a fair settlement, he glosses over their "irreconcilable differences" with their client, which involved their growing concern that she and her husband were abusing the legal process for unethical political purposes. Amazingly, her new lawyers' decision to raise her settlement demand to $2 million, which ensured their freedom to pursue their own Clinton-bashing agenda, is something he never mentions.

Isikoff's treatment of the "calm" and "convincing" Willey is just as oblivious. He does discuss the variations between Tripp's memory of what Willey said about her controversial November 1993 encounter with Clinton near the Oval Office and Willey's own version. But he gives very short shrift to Tripp's detailed testimony about Willey's romantic fascination with the president, quoting not a single line. That omission is understandable if his aim is to protect Willey's credibility: Tripp told the grand jury that she and her friend often discussed times and places where the president might be seduced, and that Willey dressed to thrill while she shadowed the president in the White House.

Tripp also recalled that Willey seemed strangely unaffected, as if "in shock," after her husband, Ed, killed himself. What she talked about "almost obsessively," according to Tripp, was "the president, that, you know, we discussed the fact that this would be enough to spook him for at least a year, that, you know, she can pretty much understand that he would not have anything to do with her on a personal level after this because of the tragedy."

Isikoff likewise glosses over Willey's deposition in the Jones case, although he boasts about getting an early leak of her testimony. Why? Possibly because her sworn testimony doesn't jibe with either what she had told Isikoff months earlier or what she later said to Ed Bradley during her famous interview on "60 Minutes." At the January 1998 deposition, she couldn't remember whether Clinton had kissed her; two months later, she told Bradley that he'd "kissed me on the mouth." Her memory of the president's touching her breasts also improved markedly over time, and so did her recollection of speaking with Tripp about the incident. And in her deposition she recalled telling her daughter that Isikoff's original Newsweek article about her "was just a lot of garbage."

Asked by one of Jones' lawyers whether she had communicated with Clinton after the incident or sought a job from the White House, she said that to the best of her recollection she had not. That was before the White House released evidence of nine letters and 12 phone calls to the president asking for a job (including a request for an ambassadorship). The problems Willey had keeping her story straight don't prove she was lying about the Oval Office incident, of course. But the way Isikoff evades these nagging questions about her only raises further doubts.

His attitude toward the president's aides is considerably less forgiving and sometimes terribly one-sided. Clinton attorney Robert Bennett in particular comes across as a deceptive and blustering phony who deals in "slime" while pretending to keep his hands clean. Sidney Blumenthal fares even worse in a final lengthy footnote that wrongly accuses the presidential assistant of lying publicly about his appearance before Starr's grand jury last year.

As a coda to "Uncovering Clinton," that footnote reveals more about Isikoff than it does about Blumenthal (with whom, it should be disclosed, I've been friends for many years). Isikoff quotes Blumenthal complaining, "Ken Starr's prosecutors demanded to know what I had told reporters and what reporters had told me about Ken Starr's prosecutors" -- an assertion Isikoff dubs "largely fiction." Yet as he ought to know, the independent counsel's prosecutors not only asked Blumenthal numerous questions about his dealings with the press but also subpoenaed all his documents and computer files in order to trace those communications.

Isikoff didn't call Blumenthal to get his side of the argument. The accusation that Blumenthal somehow misrepresented his own testimony emanated from Starr's office, and apparently that was good enough for Isikoff. The prosecutors were his sources, after all. And in the tradition of investigative journalism, he had shared their mission for a long, long time.
salon.com | April 6, 1999

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