By the time I’d arrived for the annual White House Christmas party for the media, CNN’s Larry King had done an award-winning imitation of a peeved 1st-grader.
King, in tow with Wife No. 6 (or No. 7, one loses track), went ballistic when security guards let Wife No. 6 (or No. 7) in but not him! He apparently wasn’t on the list.
He went into a loud heavy pout. The indignity of it all! Stuck in the cold with the print proletariat!
Warmer heads (inside) prevailed, and a mellower King eventually got in and was thus able to snake his way to the head of the line and cozy up to the president of the United States and the first lady.
I proved gutless when I got there. I mentioned some banality, about mutual friends of ours having just visited me. I might as well have muttered in German.
The president seemed dead on his feet.
After all, it was a few minutes after 10 p.m., and he had been shaking hands for four or five hours during several similar parties, largely marked by hundreds of newsies hobnobbing with people they cover and everybody crashing the buffet table.
(History must record that I was elbowed aside, albeit unintentionally, at the shrimp bowl by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose single-mindedness suggested he might have fasted since the last increase in short-term interest rates).
Ah, if only I had the nerve to ask the president about a very interesting letter just passed on to me!
It came via an Anderson, Ind., couple, and it involves a less-than-merry challenge facing the president, namely the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones.
The solicitation is written on the supposed letterhead of Paula R. Jones:
“Do you think I did the right thing?
When President Clinton’s attorneys offered to pay me a significant amount of money so that I wouldn’t take my case to court, I refused.
Since then, many people have criticized me for not taking the money and walking away.
Even my two prior lawyers resigned from the case!
But my reason for continuing this case is to clear my name of any wrongdoing and receive an apology from Bill Clinton.
And I need to know that the American people support me in my decision to stand on principle. That is why I need you to do two things for me today:
First, The Rutherford Institute is the group that is paying the expenses of my case. And, make no mistake, this case will be expensive to bring to court. So please send in a gift of $50 or $75 to help with the legal expenses and court costs for my case and the Institute’s other important legal cases and educational programs.(emphasis is hers)
The institute is a non-profit legal and educational organization that defends, without charge, people whose constitutional and human rights have been threatened or violated;
Second, please let me know that you support my decision to take this case to court and not be paid off.
I am sure that you have heard the numerous news reports about the events that brought all of this about.
It all started back in 1991 when I was working at the registration desk for the Governor’s quality Management Conference at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock.
After talking with my co-worker and me earlier in the day, Arkansas State Trooper Danny Ferguson came up later that afternoon, handed me a piece of paper with a room number written on it and said that the governor would like to meet with me.
Excited by the prospect of being introduced to the governor thinking that this might lead to a better job with the state, I went with the trooper to Governor Clinton’s suite.
While Ferguson waited out in the hallways, Governor Clinton answered the door, invited me in and made small talk for a few minutes.
But then something happened that both shocked and humiliated me.
Although you shouldn’t have to suffer the lurid details, you should know that governor Clinton made unwanted sexual advances toward me and exposed his genital area.
Horrified, I stated that `I’m not that kind of girl.’ As I retreated from his room, Governor Clinton sternly remarked that we should `keep this between ourselves.’
But I couldn’t. . . . “
The rest, as they say, is history.
My copy is one of 800,000 copies sent by the Virginia-based Rutherford Institute, which, until now, has been a sort of ACLU for the Christian Right. Serious-minded, it is focused on religious freedom issues, such as kids not being allowed to open their Bibles in school.
But even if one concedes that the institute has done capable work, what is a non-profit group whose mission is, first and foremost, to “preserve free speech in the public arena, including public schools,” doing fronting for Paula Jones?
Even die-hard conservatives with whom I spoke scratch their heads.
“This is sexual harassment, not religious liberty,” said Michael Cromartie, a senior fellow and director of the evangelical studies project at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center here.
Hmmm. Here it is, a group that raises about $4.5 million a year soliciting for Jones nationwide and, perhaps, illegally in at least one state. An official in Florida’s Division of Consumer Services told me that the group’s mandated non-profit registration has lapsed, meaning it can’t solicit there.
Jones’ new personal attorney, Donovan Campbell Jr. of Dallas, is Rutherford’s treasurer. Thus, at the same time he and the other lawyers must observe the judge’s so-called gag order on most of the pretrial proceedings, he is soliciting money for Jones with the activist’s letter.
Robert Bennett, Clinton’s lawyer, would say only that he is “concerned about the tainting of the jury pool” in Arkansas in light of such letters, which surely will arrive in the mailboxes of some prospective jurors.
The jockeying in the public arena by both sides is intense. Bennett is very adroit and has sliced up Jones with a surgeon’s skill–and occasionally with the subtlety of Hulk Hogan.
Heading the Rutherford camp is John Whitehead, the $195,000-a-year institute president, who in part cites competitive pressures on the Christian Right as having driven his involvement.
After actively pursuing many religious freedom cases, he realized that other conservative groups were doing the same sort of work. In addition, many of their bigger battles had played out.
The institute started getting requests for help on a range of other issues, “such as search and seizure and genital exams on little girls. Parents called and said, `We need help.’ “
Eight percent of his employees are women. “We had been talking about sexual harassment issues for a bit, and I ran it (the Paula Jones matter) by a lot of the women.”
“They said, `Go for it.’ We saw it as a human rights issue, like things in China and the Soviet Union.”
Human rights issue?
“I have always been concerned with anything touching on the Bill of Rights,” he said. “This is not a leap.”
While the letter purports to be a straight-from-the-heart request from Jones for her case, its last line asks for a donation to help the institute “with my case and its other much-needed legal cases and educational programs.”
Whitehead conceded “not all the money will go to her expenses.”
So Jones herself is being used.
Given the unseemly nature of the underlying dispute, it seems fitting.
