T A B L E+T A L K Can't afford to go to Nagano? Come into Salon's Olympic village -- it's free! D A I L Y+Q U O T E A Monica-free zone R E C E N T L Y Men in black (robes) By Bruce Shapiro Looking for an anti-Clinton arch-conspirator? Try the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (02/04/98) Subpoena me? Subpoena you! By Jonathan Broder Trying to turn the tables, the president's attorney gets legal on Kenneth Starr (02/03/98) Tonya's trials By Jane Meredith Adams How Tonya Harding went from skating champion to video poker addict (02/02/98) Application to Have Sex With the President By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau (01/30/98) Defending the right to pry By Richard Rodriguez Why the private life of public people matters (01/29/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		THE ROOTS OF THE CLINTON SMEAR | PAGE 2 OF 7 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Let's start with Gennifer Flowers. She is crucial to a consideration of President Clinton's current imbroglio, because, as we are being reminded ad nauseam, if he lied about not having had an affair with her, then how are we supposed to believe his denials about the Monica Lewinsky affair? On Jan. 26, 1992, Bill and Hillary Clinton appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes" to confront Flowers' lurid account of a 12-year affair with the candidate in the supermarket tabloid the Star, for which she was paid, according to the Wall Street Journal, upwards of $140,000. Flowers earned another untold sum for an even more sexually explicit Penthouse version accompanied by a pictorial layout. ("I dare Hillary to bare her butt in any magazine," Flowers taunted. "They don't have a page that broad.") On "60 Minutes," correspondent Steve Croft asked Bill Clinton about Flowers' allegation of a 12-year affair. "That allegation," he replied firmly, "is false." In response to a follow-up question, Clinton added that both he and Flowers herself had previously denied the affair. He went on famously to acknowledge having "caused pain in my marriage," adding that he trusted voters to understand what he meant by that. In effect, Clinton had admitted adultery, although Croft never asked the conclusive "have you ever" question, and Clinton certainly never answered it. In a contemporaneous ABC News poll, 73 percent of respondents said they agreed with Clinton that whether or not he'd ever had an extramarital affair was between him and his wife. The next day, Flowers held a press conference in a New York hotel ballroom. Dressed in a scarlet dress with matching lipstick, she played excerpts from tape-recordings of several telephone conversations with Clinton, and declaimed, "Yes, I was Bill Clinton's lover for 12 years, and for the past two years I have lied about the relationship. The truth is I loved him. Now he tells me to deny it. Well, I'm sick of all the deceit, and I'm sick of all the lies." Soon after that, Flowers set up a 900 number for callers to listen to the famous tapes. In 1995 she published a book, "Passion and Betrayal." Last year, a sequel, "Sleeping with the President: My Intimate Years with Bill Clinton," was published, appropriately enough, by Anonymous Press. Fast forward to January 1998. As a sidebar to l'affaire Lewinsky, some mischievous sprite leaked to the press a story that President Clinton admitted having an affair with Gennifer Flowers during his deposition in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Immediately taken as gospel truth amid the general media freakout over the Lewinsky tapes, it led to the remarkable spectacle of Flowers lecturing the president on sexual morality on "Geraldo" and "Larry King Live." A few days later came a counterleak. Time magazine reported Clinton had testified to having had sex with Flowers just one time, in 1977. A dalliance, a fling or a roll in the hay, most would agree, but hardly an "affair." Flowers propositioned him on a later occasion, the president allegedly testified, but he turned her down. That Clinton may have caused "pain" -- with more than one woman -- during the early years of his marriage in the late 1970s is widely believed (although not proven), even among his supporters. But Arkansas locals were always skeptical that Clinton had a lengthy "affair" with Flowers. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett, who has covered Clinton for more than 20 years, wrote that according to "my sources ... around 1977-78, and maybe a little later, she mentioned to friends that she was having a fling with Clinton ... They heard nothing from her after 1979 about a relationship with Clinton." In a more graphic version, her ex-roommate Lauren Kirk told Penthouse that she believed Flowers to be lying for revenge and money: "She just can't accept the fact that he came, wiped himself off, zipped up, and left. He was probably using her, and she just doesn't like being used. She likes to use." There are dark explanations as to why Clinton might have chosen to admit a one-night stand with Flowers in a sworn deposition 21 years after the fact. Maybe he feared that Flowers had kept a semen-stained dress, cunningly anticipating the advent of DNA testing. Or maybe he thought that a not-so-damaging confession of a long-ago indiscretion would make subsequent lies regarding, say, Monica Lewinsky, seem more credible. But the simplest explanation that fits the available facts is that Clinton's testimony is far closer to the truth than Gennifer Flowers', and that Flowers was merely the opening act in a long-running "dirty tricks" campaign to destroy him. N E X T+P A G E+| The jingle-maker's five soiled women