Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 5

  Then, on July 4, 1997, Drudge broke the Kathleen Willey story. “Coming just hours after the President ‘adamantly’ denies harassing Paula Jones,” wrote Drudge, “the DRUDGE REPORT has learned that NEWSWEEK ace investigative reporter Michael Isikoff is hot on the trail of a new development that threatens to ignite premature holiday fireworks at the White House. Reports have surfaced that Isikoff has been in contact with a former White House staffer who may offer ‘pattern’ evidence of improper sexual conduct on the part of the President.”1

  Willey, a Clinton donor’s wife, claimed to have been fondled by the president when she went to visit him—and when she got home, she found that her husband had killed himself. The Willeys were having financial trouble, and so it was natural for the Willeys to approach Clinton. And because Clinton is who Clinton is, it was just as natural for Clinton to allow the meeting, because Kathleen Willey was an attractive woman. While Willey was there and in the process of telling Clinton that she and her husband were in deep financial straits, the classy gentleman that Clinton is allegedly put the moves on her in a special kitchen area off the Oval Office. According to Willey’s later interview on 60 Minutes, Clinton “kissed me on my mouth and pulled me closer to him. And… I remember thinking—… ‘What in the world is he doing?’ He touched my breasts with his hand… and he whispered… ‘I’ve wanted to do this ever since I laid eyes on you.’ And… then he took my hand, and he put it on him.”2

  A story that went all the way to the White House. Broken on Drudge. It was mind-boggling to watch how one outsider was frazzling the whole order.

  A couple months later, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Drudge had the story up with the iconic “Drudge siren” on his site before cable news and the networks, in their frantic Paris-and London-based coverage, reported it.

  The string of successes of man vs. media was starting to add up. Tons of media began profiling Drudge, the Internet started gaining attention as something other than a hobby, and—naturally!—members of respected journalistic institutions began slandering Drudge with charges they couldn’t back up, let alone prove.

  He was not just a threat to the political order—he was also a threat to the business of the mainstream media.

  By the summer of 1997, I had actually struck up something of an acquaintance with Drudge over the Internet, and it was in fact he who hooked me up with Arianna Huffington. Arianna had become interested in creating media-driven websites, and she was looking for help from someone who knew the landscape. So I went to her house, and we sat outside and ate spanakopitas and drank iced tea. I’d read about Arianna in Vanity Fair, and I thought she was one of those people who was larger than life, the type of person nobody like me gets to meet. She was already writing a column for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Before I could even get comfortable being in her picture-perfect estate, accepting her graciousness, eating her hors d’oeuvres, I was abruptly hired.

  I immediately quit a disposable E! Online job, which I had gotten from the classifieds, and where I had spent most of my time teaching myself the technical basics of the Internet (the job also gave me access to their T-1 line, the equivalent of the Autobahn for the Internet in 1997). I guarantee you, E! did not lament losing a key cog in their machine. I had learned all I needed to do basic HTML, and I thought, Okay, I know what I need to know, and now I’m going to create websites for Arianna and see where it takes me. With less than a formidable arsenal, I was about to become a website designer.

  I’d be working out of Arianna’s house in Brentwood, not far from my apartment in Santa Monica. It fit my lifestyle all the way down to the bizarre and cloistered office she provided for me, which was hidden behind a huge painting. It was like a secret panic room situated above her office, accessible only by a spiral staircase, and which itself looked just like an old English study in the board game Clue.

  The first day on the job, I went into her office and she sat me in front of her desk. She handed me a piece of paper that said on the top “Director of Research.” It had a small list of job requirements.

  I asked, “What is this?”

  She countered, “Which of these things can you do?”

  I didn’t get it. “You want me to find somebody to become your researcher?”

  “Just tell me what you can do on this list.”

  The first requirement was the ability to type. “I’m a hunt-and-pecker.”

  She said, “That’s okay.”

  Requirement two: ability to write. “Okay,” I said, “I wrote for my college paper and a couple of local entertainment magazines.”

  “Yes, darling, perfect.”

  Requirement three was the ability to edit. “Uh, I guess,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know those weird book editor symbols, but I know basic grammar.”

  At this point I was getting a little confused. I’d signed up to create websites for a rich, conservative columnist and speaker, an easy job, and now this was feeling like a bait-and-switch.

  But before my confusion could turn into anger, I saw requirement four: “Do you know how to use LexisNexis?”

  And it hit me between the eyes that for all of my stumbling and bumbling, I had tripped over the perfect job for an Internet information junkie. LexisNexis was the key to satiating my cravings, a database aggregating virtually every article in the modern history of media, both mainstream and obscure. For a person organizing bookmarks of every newspaper, who wanted to find every piece of information that was out there, LexisNexis was the Holy Grail. This was before Google, and you can find a lot on Google today—but even now, LexisNexis is the greatest thing in the world, and having access to it was a dream come true.

  I’d never felt so good to be duped in my life. At twenty-seven—gulp!—I felt like I might actually have the first job I wanted to keep.

  Then it got even better. Arianna next informed me that there was a story she was working on, and that the source of the story was staying in her house while she wrote the piece. The source’s name was Norma Nicolls, and she was the personal secretary to a man named M. Larry Lawrence.

  Larry Lawrence was the owner of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and he became the top donor to Bill Clinton; he was therefore rewarded with the ambassadorship to Switzerland. From 1991 to 1996, Lawrence gave $200,000 to Democrats. At the time, the world was just finding out the list of favors the Clinton White House was paying out for high-end donors, including overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. A cursory investigation into Lawrence’s background showed that he had some suspect business relations in Detroit. Already I was getting excited—this was fun, interesting. The layers of intrigue to the story involved sex, politics, and Bill Clinton, one of my personal chosen online investigative obsessions.

  When Larry Lawrence died of cancer in 1996, Bill Clinton provided him a waiver to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was the first Merchant Marine to be given this sacred honor. In the 1990s, Larry and his fourth wife, Shelia, had spent a lot of their time running around to Merchant Marine and Clinton fund-raisers, giving their money and hoping to get goodies back in return. Goodies, apparently, like being buried in Arlington National Cemetery sacred land.

  But that wasn’t the real story. The real story was that Larry Lawrence wasn’t even a Merchant Marine.

  Norma Nicolls told Arianna that back in the early 1990s, Lawrence asked her to research the history of the Merchant Marine at a San Diego library. Then, Nicolls said, Lawrence started writing checks to the Merchant Marine. All of a sudden, the Merchant Marine started giving him awards, because he was giving them money. He started claiming that he had served aboard the USS Horace Bushnell, a Merchant Marine ship torpedoed during World War II, and that he had been thrown into the Arctic Ocean as the ship sank.

  And Arianna was onto both scams: Clinton’s culpability in selling an Arlington burial slot, and Lawrence’s culpability in falsifying a pseu
domilitary record in order to gain entrance.

  On November 24, 1997, Arianna started revealing the story to Americans:

  The more we delve into Larry Lawrence’s last years, the more he looks like the poster child of President Clinton’s Make-A-Wish Foundation for big-time donors….

  Lawrence’s only military link was his service in the Merchant Marine during World War II. “I was surprised and disturbed,” Norma Nicolls, his executive assistant from 1979 to 1993, told me, “to learn that Larry was allowed to be buried at Arlington. I was a Navy officer’s wife for 24 years, who lost many good friends in the Vietnam War. I believe that should be a privilege accorded only to those who have given up something for their country. I worked as his personal assistant for almost 15 years before he was appointed ambassador to Switzerland, and as far as I know, he never expressed a desire to have a military funeral.”

  It appears that the driving force behind the effort to bury Lawrence at Arlington was his fourth wife, whose petit-bourgeois appetite for honors and distinctions seems to have no limit. Whatever the truth about his Merchant Marine service, can anything—other than political services rendered—explain multiple medal winners standing in line awaiting admittance to Arlington while Lawrence is allowed to cut ahead? Way ahead.3

  The response was swift and brutal from the mainstream media. Maureen Dowd, a charter member, ripped Arianna, writing in her syndicated column, “The Clintonites have hidden behind double-talk so often, it was tempting to believe the Republicans’ sinister allegations. But the GOP case began to melt…. What you need to know about the Republicans is that the charge was disgusting.”4 White House special counsel Lanny Davis told the press that Lawrence “was thrown overboard and suffered a serious head injury. Had he been in the Navy and the same incident would have occurred, he would have received a Purple Heart.” The late Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state, said, “I’m dumbfounded that there would be the slightest question about the appropriateness of Larry Lawrence being buried at Arlington.” Army Secretary Togo West said there was no political motivation to Lawrence’s burial. “I am the responsible person…. Just not done. Not possible… He deserves to be there.”5

  But Arianna was just getting started. She was responding to attacks on her credibility with calm and composure, knowing that she had the goods, and reacting with utter serenity as she watched a phalanx of media swarm around her, looking for their pound of flesh. She fed them the story, bit by bit. And I was helping. There was a moment in my research when I personally realized that everything Arianna was saying was true. I was spelunking and spelunking, and finally I came across something big. I ran down to Arianna’s office yelling: “Arianna, Arianna! He didn’t serve in the Merchant Marines. I’m positive.” It was a piece from the San Diego Union-Tribune dated January 19, 1993. The story talked about how Lawrence had been honored by the Merchant Marine at a dinner, where he had recalled “the morning when, as an 18-year-old, he suffered head wounds during a German torpedo attack on his ship in the frigid waters off Murmansk.” There was only one problem: according to the newspaper, the incident was “previously unknown to most of his family and close friends.” To me, that was the whole goods. It was the confirmation in my mind that everything Arianna was laying out for the American public was true.

  Arianna ran with it. Citing that piece and responding to her critics, she wrote, “What about the fact that the Horace Bushnell’s manifest does not include Lawrence’s name? Or the fact that the casualty list for the ship also has no record of the injuries so movingly described by the White House counsel? Indeed, according to the Maritime Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard, there is no record of Lawrence having served in the Merchant Marine at all.”6

  The house of cards that the Complex constructed for Larry Lawrence began to crumble. The same media that had attacked Arianna now began to swing behind her, calling for Lawrence’s disinterment from Arlington: folks like Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, George Stephanopoulos—and yes, Maureen Dowd. All I could say as I watched it was three words: “This. Is. Awesome.”

  The awesomeness culminated on a Thursday morning in December. I was working in my hidden office when I heard Arianna shouting: “Come down, come down, come down!” I came downstairs, and she pointed at the TV and shouted, “Watch!”

  CNN was on. And it was showing aerial helicopter footage of Arlington National Cemetery, where a series of banquet tents formed a labyrinthine path to the exit of Arlington. They were disinterring Larry Lawrence at the behest of Shelia Lawrence, Larry Lawrence’s aforementioned fourth wife, who, along with Clinton’s liberal media allies, had shot at Arianna without aiming first in an attempt to smear her. They had instinctively defended Larry Lawrence. They had put their names and credibility out there, and when caught red-handed, none of them had ever apologized. But it didn’t matter. Arianna was staring at the TV with a look of utter serenity on her face: she’d gotten her scalp.

  I knew right then and there that I needed to find a way to do this for a living.

  One night in late December 1997, I watched an episode of Nightline. The subject: Matt Drudge. The premise: an entire hour about Matt Drudge. They started with this: “Do you know who this man is?” A picture of Drudge at his computer flashed on the screen—type, type, type. “If you don’t, you soon will.” The show actually went on in a semipositive vein—as positive as you can get for a conservative with a few scalps, a conservative who is trailblazing against the Complex. They had the requisite slams, of course, posting a picture of Drudge’s website next to pictures of extreme websites, implying that the Internet was filled with crazies and white supremacists. But for the most part, it was fair.

  Little did I know that ABC News was foreshadowing something much greater than Kathleen Willey or the death of Princess Diana.

  They were foreshadowing the demolition of a presidency.

  In January 1998, I was a happy guy. I was happily married, living in a tiny house with (I swear) a white picket fence. I had my buddies Arianna and Matt, and we were all hanging out together, and we were all doing more from Los Angeles with minimal resources than the mainstream media were doing from Washington, DC, with hundreds of reporters. It was great fun.

  About two weeks after the New Year, on January 16, 1998, I spent the day at home paying attention to the unprecedented deposition Bill Clinton was giving due to his former student, Judge Susan Webber Wright, ruling that he had to testify in Paula Jones’s civil lawsuit. For me, as a Clinton aficionado, this was a huge day—a sitting president testifying about accusations of sexual harassment.

  Now, I was against overly broad sexual harassment law on a philosophical level because of my belief that feminism had defined sexual harassment down to the type of interaction that created so many marriages—a secretary and a boss meeting each other at work, for instance. I didn’t believe in the post-structural PC Marxist/feminist critique that said that sexual relationships were inherently relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed, and that power structures between bosses and employees necessarily rendered such relationships a form of sexual harassment. I thought that was nonsense, which is why Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings had been such an epiphany for me. But at the same time, I knew that if they were going to hold Thomas to that standard, they had to hold Clinton to that standard as well.

  The Clinton hearings became, to me, the living embodiment of the Democrat-Media Complex—and the inherent biases of the media were multiplied when cable news came of age during this era. With an enormous dedication of resources, the Complex went to work spinning Bill Clinton out of peril.

  Watching a purported women’s-rights advocate get away with sexual harassment—shoving cigars in the help, groping job applicants in the hallways—was the emblematic example of the media double standard, where a liberal could get away with anything as long as he toed the politically correct line. Clinton could attack women, use his gun-toting state troopers to recruit hand-picked groupies for
him as if he were a rock star, pull down his pants and say, “Kiss it.” He could get away with it because he was a liberal, and because liberals wanted him to get away with it. I wanted Clinton to pay, and I wanted his enablers to pay—I wanted to see them held to the standard that they had created to destroy their enemies.

  I wanted Clinton to get busted because it was obvious to me that this was the type of person you would not let your daughter date, your sister date, any distant relative date—that this was a guy who was not virtuous, that he was a glutton, that he had a voracious appetite for power and women and food and anything that he could use to fill himself up. As a human being, he was essentially a sociopath, but the mainstream media had built him up because he possessed weapons that suited their purpose: the correct pro-abortion and left-of-center economics policies, the wily charms of a born cad, and a venal commitment to the politics of personal destruction.

  After watching the hearings, at around midnight, I got home and started to climb into bed. Before I did, I logged on to the Internet. In my e-mail box was the Drudge Report.

  NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, the all-caps headline bannered. BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.

  At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president’s sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month. The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor at the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57. The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist….