If Paula Jones hadn't been
made the victim of a White House campaign to destroy her credibility, she would
have abandoned her lawsuit against President Clinton last summer and "nobody
would ever have heard of Monica Lewinsky," her husband, Steve Jones, told the
Daily Telegraph of
London. In an interview published Thursday in the conservative paper,
Jones said his wife had been under such pressure that she had come "within a
whisker" of abandoning the lawsuit. Pressed to accept a financial settlement
that would have let the president off without so much as an apology, she is now
adamant that Clinton be made to atone for calling her a "pathetic liar."
"The only
settlement we're going to accept from Bill Clinton is: 'I was wrong. I
apologise. I admit that I was in that room with Paula,' " Jones said. "We gave
him wiggle room before. We were willing to let him say 'I may have.' But now
we've collected a lot more evidence and the days of wiggle room are over. The
word 'may' has been stricken. He is going to have to confess to everything on
our terms now, or face Paula in court."
The interview was conducted at the couple's home in Long
Beach, Calif., by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who, as a former Washington
correspondent of the London Sunday
Telegraph , used to work with
right-wing American political campaigners--"conspirators," Hillary Clinton
would call them--to expose financial and sexual sleaze involving the president.
(See
Slate
's review of his The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The
Unreported Stories .) Banned from giving interviews by a judicial gag order,
Paula Jones was doing "her best to prevent their two young children running
amok and raiding the fridge," while her husband spoke on her behalf,
Evans-Pritchard wrote.
"These
people in Washington just don't seem to understand that being called a whore
means something, something we can't live with," Steve Jones told him, singling
out Clinton lawyer Bob Bennett as the person mainly responsible for bringing
disaster on the president. "If it had not been for Bob Bennett coming out on TV
and saying that Paula's story was 'tabloid trash for cash' ... this whole thing
could have been settled a long time ago with a quiet apology," Steve Jones
said. "He chose the wrong girl to pick a fight with, didn't he? And now he's
brought the President to the brink of impeachment. If I could give one piece of
advice to Bill Clinton, it's get rid of Bob Bennett. Fast." (Jones is not alone
in his opinion of Bennett. See this dispatch
by
Slate
's Jake Weisberg.)
Coverage of "Monicagate," "Sexgate,"
"Sexygate," and (increasingly in Britain) "Fornigate" continued to be enormous
in Europe, but much less extensive in the rest of the world. Editorial opinion
almost everywhere continued to be dominated by two hopes: 1) that the American
president, whatever his mistakes, should complete his term of office and 2)
that the crisis should be rapidly resolved. As the headline over an article by
the London Guardian's
chief pundit, Hugo Young, put it Thursday: "Let's hope the lecher
survives."
In
Nigeria, an editorial in the independent Post Express deplored
the way the United States was willing to put its business with Israel and Iraq
on hold in order to "explore such inanities as that of a woman [Paula Jones]
who is claiming $700,000 or $2 million just because, as she claims, she has
intimate knowledge of the president's genitalia." This claim is as "wild as
any," the editorial continued, pointing out that a recent survey in Britain
showed that even long-married wives were unable to properly identify their
husbands' genitalia "under experimental conditions." Incredulous that the
"American system" would make "a monumental event" out of Lewinsky's
contradictory claims, it concludes, "So far, all the ballyhoo over Bill
Clinton's alleged involvement with these women could serve only one purpose.
That of reminding us that after winning the cold war, America has lost control.
Perhaps the cold war was a symbolic reminder to the world that the preservation
of democracy can best come about through the natural conflict of dialectical
forces. In the present circumstances, we may have to start thinking in terms of
reinventing the Soviet Union. If only to help the Americans get their act
together."
Quoted in his own newspaper, Corriere della
Sera of Milan, Gianni Agnelli, the Italian industrialist, lawyer, and
senator, said Clinton's plight reminded him of what Thomas Jefferson had said
when he was criticized for having a mistress: "What do they want? A eunuch in
the White House?" Agnelli spoke warmly, too, of Hillary Clinton, saying: "I
know her well. She is a woman of the first rank. Of great quality. I wouldn't
want her against me as a lawyer." In fact, Hillary seems especially popular in
Italy. Also in Corriere , columnist Ennio Caretto wrote: "The facts have
proved that, among many wrong personal choices made by Clinton, Hillary was the
right one.
"The Lady Macbeth of Little
Rock, as her enemies call her because of her toughness and her imperiousness,
has been and still is his inspiration, his ace in the sleeve." Referring to her
TV appearances this week, Caretto concluded, "It is certain, in any case, that
Hillary, with her dignity and her firmness, under the able management of her
dressers--her make-up, her haircut, her outfit, her imperial eagle pin [?] were
all new--enchanted a good part of America. If Bill isn't among the best
presidents of history, she, on the other hand, is among the best first
ladies."
