Not long after Labor Day, Cliff Jackson, the Little Rock lawyer who later became Clinton’s nemesis, called Bush senior adviser Charlie Black and put several Arkansas state troopers on a speaker-phone. The troopers claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Clinton’s sexual escapades when he was governor. “I believe it,” Black said, “but what I believe doesn’t matter. Nobody in this campaign can pursue this. You have to go to the press.” With Jackson at their side, the troopers finally did so in 1993-long after it mattered to either campaign.
Bush’s refusal to dabble in dirty linen even extended to the Gennifer Flowers story. Toward the end of the campaign, when Flowers’ tale was distinctly old news, aides got a bootleg advance copy of Penthouse magazine, which included a lengthy text-and-pictures interview with Flowers. It disgusted Bush when he read it in the Oval Office. “Can yon imagine other world leaders reading that before he’s even inaugurated?” he said. To some on his staff, his phrasing seemed to concede the upcoming election. Still, Bush refused to approve an idea for using excerpts from Flowers’ tape-recorded phone calls with Clinton for campaign television spots.
The hard-liners kept looking for dirt–and ways to get around the Bush Rules. A woman who called herself “Naomi” rang Bush-Quayle headquarters in early October from a pay phone in a small town near Lafayette, La, with a tantalizing tale. She said she had met Clinton at a July 4th party at her sister’s house in Little Rock in the mid-1980s and had wound up going to bed with him. Naomi said she was a Christian and the daughter of a black Baptist minister, and she seemed to be ashamed about their liaison. Now, she said tearfully, she wanted to atone for her behavior by confessing what she and Clinton had done. And, she said, she had photographic proof.
Using outsiders to ensure deniability, the Bush campaign devised a plan to bring Naomi to Washington to tell her story and show her photos to reporters. It had to look as if coming forward were her own idea. The plan seemed to be ripening nicely when Naomi called to say she’d decided to try to talk to the Clinton camp. She promised to call again the next morning, but didn’t–and despite desperate efforts by her “case officers,” the campaign never found out who she was.
Meanwhile, others in the Bush camp were pursuing a Marine Corps colonel with a story to tell from Clinton’s years as a Rhodes scholar trying to stay out of a war he opposed. As the colonel had told it to several people, he had seen Clinton one night in Oslo, Norway, and had had to talk him out of renouncing his U.S. citizenship and moving to Sweden rather than serve in Vietnam.
The colonel had since softened his story. But the Bush campaign, working through middlemen, kept up the pursuit anyway and enlisted P. X. Kelley, the retired Marine commandant, to meet the colonel at a hotel in Rosslyn, Va. Kelley went and waited for an hour. Nobody showed up; the colonel, Kelley was informed when he called his Bush contact, had chickened out for fear of wrecking his career. Bush’s oppo staff had lost its last chance to destroy Clinton.
