To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books April 6, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/04/06/isikoff Spikey's choice "Uncovering Clinton," Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff's long-awaited book on the Clinton scandals, reveals how fine the line is that separates reporters from prosecutors -- and conspirators. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Joe Conason The most telling journalistic postscript to the previous year of scandal came on Feb. 15, the Monday after President Clinton's acquittal. The cover of that morning's Newsweek touted an exclusive excerpt from Michael Isikoff's new book, "Uncovering Clinton," the investigative reporter's first-hand account of his adventures with Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg. With the impeachment trial over, Isikoff was ready to tell America what he knew about the "right-wing web" behind the scandal. Or at least some of what he knew. It seemed curious that Newsweek and Crown Books, Isikoff's publisher, had decided to promote his book almost two months before any copies would be available in bookstores. But the strangest thing about the five-page excerpt was in Isikoff's opening lines: "In Washington, you never know who you'll meet in a TV green room. In August 1997, as I waited to appear on CNBC to offer my analysis of the latest judicial decision in the Paula Jones case, I ran into someone who knew much more about the Jones litigation than I did." That savvy someone was his fellow TV commentator Ann Coulter, the ultraconservative attorney, author and dogged Clinton antagonist, who couldn't resist teasing Isikoff with her inside knowledge of Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton. "There are lots of us busy elves working away in Santa's workshop," she laughed. Which means that Isikoff learned about the "right-wing web" -- a phrase slightly less fraught than "right-wing conspiracy" -- at least five months before he wrote his first account of the Monica Lewinsky story on Newsweek's Web site. Weeks would pass before he or Newsweek noted the existence of any of the "elves," and that happened only after one or more of them had been publicly identified elsewhere. For the duration of the scandal, both Isikoff and his editors downplayed the importance of the "right-wing web." Revelations about the secret activities of Coulter and her legal cronies surely would have influenced the public's opinion of the Lewinsky affair -- which Isikoff describes proudly as "the most stunning political scandal in a quarter century ... and Newsweek owned it." That sense of ownership is no doubt the reason that, a few lines down, he feels obliged to explain his behavior after he learned about the elves: "As the months wore on, I used the lawyers to get more information; sometimes they tried to use me to spread the story. Looking back, some sources misled me; others later told me of their involvement on an off-the-record basis and lifted that restriction only at the conclusion of the Senate trial." In other words, the true outlines of the right-wing plot couldn't be revealed until more than a year after the plotters had, with Isikoff's help, completed their mission, because they were his sources. Readers will have to take Isikoff's word for it that until that encounter in the green room, he had no inkling about the activities of Coulter, tobacco lawyer George Conway III, former Bush White House aide (and Kenneth Starr law partner) Richard Porter and Philadelphia attorney Jerome Marcus. Considering their importance in the Jones case, which he had been covering since its beginnings in the spring of 1994, perhaps he should have spotted them sooner. He was always the preferred reporter of Jones and her attorneys of record; it was one of them who provided the tip that led him to Kathleen Willey. Even when Isikoff gets around to describing the circle of right-wing lawyers behind Jones and Tripp, he neglects the context that points to a much broader effort to get Clinton. To cite just one of many instances, he mentions Theodore Olson, the Washington attorney who coached Jones' lawyers as they were preparing to argue her case before the Supreme Court -- but he says nothing about Olson's close friendship with Starr, about Olson's role in the Richard Mellon Scaife-financed Arkansas Project or about Olson's having represented David Hale, Starr's chief Whitewater witness against Clinton. But then again, Isikoff wasn't looking for right-wing mischief-makers. He was looking for evidence of Clinton's misconduct, and so were they.Writer Janet Malcolm has subjected the conflicts faced by investigative journalists, who must constantly weigh their debt to their sources against their duty to the public, to an unsparing moral examination. No doubt she would also note the uncomfortably close resemblance between the journalistic investigation of a political scandal and a criminal prosecution -- a similarity often expressed in practice by the symbiotic relationship between reporters and prosecutors. Both must develop trusting relationships with sources (or informants), who sometimes end up feeling betrayed. Both operate in an atmosphere of secrecy and privilege. Both tend to regard themselves as the scourges of powerful, malignant figures, the bigger the better. Although Isikoff tries to wrap himself in the robes of objectivity, he has a number of prosecutorial qualities. This observation is no criticism of him or his work, which was largely vindicated (if not in every particular) by subsequent events. But it is something to keep in mind while reading his account -- sometimes cautiously apologetic, sometimes forthrightly aggressive -- of the years he spent investigating his target, Clinton. (Similarly, something to keep in mind while reading this review is that Gene Lyons and I are writing a book about the Clinton scandals from a decidedly different perspective.) Trained by demanding editors during an earlier era at the Washington Post -- after Watergate but before Whitewater -- Isikoff is not altogether comfortable promoting his own harsh assessment of the president. His literary strategy for dealing with that discomfort is to adopt the guise of a yuppie Columbo: outwardly rumpled and awkward, inwardly crafty and indefatigable, a reluctant avenger who merely follows the evidence wherever it takes him. Writing in the first person, he establishes this engaging persona with anecdotes about his misadventures. Perhaps the funniest concerns his encounter with one Christy Zercher, a stewardess on Clinton's '92 campaign plane who was, not so incidentally, an ex-stripper. (If you recognize the name, it's because she later sold her exaggerated account of being groped by Clinton to a supermarket tabloid.) In the midst of an interview, Zercher and her companions drag the hapless Isikoff to a Dallas topless joint, where he finds himself face-to-chest with "an extraordinarily large-busted woman." Trying to fit in, he sticks a $20 bill into her panties. As she happily dances closer, he makes the naive mistake of touching her; she slaps his hand away, and Zercher and her friends roar with humiliating laughter. The Zercher episode is a big bust, alright, but it also adds a touch of drama. The tension grows as Isikoff clashes with timid editors at the Washington Post and is ultimately forced to decamp to Newsweek. By the time the lonely reporter at last finds Willey, a more demure and thus more credible victim of Oval Office groping, his snooping seems almost nobly dogged. And from that point on, the story gathers momentum: as he tracks down Linda Tripp, who guides him to Monica and on to glory. Among the book's surprises is the author's sharpness toward Tripp. The two of them have apparently had more than one nasty dispute during the past year. Others may agree that his unflattering portrait of his key source amounts to "butt-covering," as Lucianne Goldberg contends in her angry review in Slate. To me it seems equally plausible that Isikoff came to dislike the morally indefensible Tripp for all the normal reasons. Occasionally he interrupts his narrative to assure the reader that, unlike Tripp and Goldberg, he didn't really enjoy his tawdry quest. He insists he would far rather have avoided the Clintonian sex swamp and kept digging in the less gamy field of campaign finance corruption. At moments he seems to struggle against his own biases. But finally he is too honest to conceal his scorn for the president or his indulgence toward the president's accusers. As an author released from the mundane constraints of mainstream journalism, he indulges himself a bit, too. The juicy tidbits that most newspaper editors would never allow into print, but that book publishers demand, help to justify his rehashing this familiar story. Isikoff exploits his newfound license to maximum effect, emptying his old notebooks of everything he couldn't use before. About midway through the book, for example, he confides that he became convinced of Clinton's horrific character by an anonymous call from a woman claiming to have suffered at the hands of the president. "Who was this guy Clinton?" Isikoff exclaims. "What demons possessed him?" What Isikoff doesn't dwell on are the motives and credibility of his book's two heroines, Willey and Jones. Early on in his dealings with Jones, he frets about the possibility that she hopes to profit from book and movie deals, but he drops the subject after she denies any such ambitions. And from then on he almost entirely avoids the fascinating questions of who financed Jones' lawsuit, who subsidized her living expenses (including her highly publicized makeover) and how she incorporated her "legal fund" as a profit-making sole proprietorship with her husband. He also omits her initial pledge to turn over all her proceeds from the case to "a Little Rock charity," her questionable deal with a right-wing direct-mail outfit and her adviser Susan Carpenter-McMillan's secret attempt to shop a book deal. 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