Free A Vast Conspiracy by Jeffrey Toobin

the bridge of his nose as he collected himself during long pauses. His performance would have bordered on the comical if not for the rage that poured from him.
    “I’d like to take this a few steps further,” Steve began. “I think Bill Clinton is perverted. I think he needs some deep psychological help, I really do.… It really irritates me that we’ve got this perverted doughboy in the White House. I really honestly feel sorry for his family. Every time I see Clinton, I see him with his pants down in front of my wife, and oh, God, it infuriates me.”
    On this day, however, Steve had another target for his outrage—the paper that was suppressing his wife’s story. “I think the position of the editors of The Washington Post  … is under the left foot of Bill Clinton. That’s where they are, and every once in a while they creep their hand out from under the foot and give him a spit shine. That’s how I feel about it.”
    Paula’s husband didn’t feel that way about everyone at The Washington Post , however. “When we were in Washington, Paula and I and Danny Traylor, Paula’s lawyer, we sat down and we had about a three-hour conversation with Mike Isikoff,” Steve recounted. “Paula gave the exclusive to The Washington Post and Mike Isikoff.… And Mike told Paula as far as he was concerned, he believed Paula and he thought the story should be told.”

    On the morning of April 15, 1994, less than a week after Paula and Steve’s interview with Matrisciana and one month after Isikoff was suspended, a large black bus pulled into a parking lot across the street from the offices of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. Three words were stenciled in red along the side of the customized motor coach: WAKE UP AMERICA! Right below, in bold white lettering, was a provocative question: SHOULD CLINTON BE IMPEACHED?
    The bus had been rented by Randall Terry, the founder of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, who had taken it to Little Rock to kick off what he called his Loyal Opposition Tour to seven cities. “Our motto is ‘Loyal to God, loyal to the scriptures, and loyal to the Constitution,’ in that order,” Terry said at a press conference to kick off the tour. “There are a lot of people who are talking about alleged offenses the president has committed.But at this juncture, there are very few people willing to say what is on a lot of people’s minds, and that is this: Should this man be driven from office?”
    Even at this early stage in Clinton’s presidency, Terry had no compunction about stating his goal—driving Clinton out of office. (Cliff Jackson had used the same kind of language with the troopers a few months earlier.) Of course, at the time, the notion seemed quixotic at best, but it revealed a frame of mind that was central to the story that followed. For the most part, Clinton’s enemies forswore the usual forums of American politics—voting, legislating, and organizing—in favor of calls for his personal destruction. Politics had always been rough, and presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had endured attacks as vicious as those launched against Clinton. But in the past the vituperation had generally been tethered to some matter of government policy, such as, say, the Vietnam War. With Clinton, the assaults were based almost entirely on his personal behavior, his “character.” And few played rougher than Clinton’s enemies. For example, just a few weeks before he arrived in Little Rock, the federal court of appeals in New York had upheld Terry’s conviction on charges in connection with an incident during the 1992 Democratic National Convention, when a man had thrust a fetus at Clinton.
    Terry was joined on his tour by the Reverend Patrick Mahoney, the executive director of a group called the Christian Defense Coalition, who announced at that first press conference, “We are going to be holding demonstrations at the Rose Law Firm and in front of Clinton’s former