A Vast Conspiracy Read Online Free

large forces in the sweep of history. But that, of course, is not the case. For while the Jones and Lewinsky stories did reflect their times, they also evolved out of a strange mixture of accident, coincidence, fate, and a bizarre cast of personalities. The peculiar population of this saga spanned a broad range in ideology and temperament, but its members did have some traits in common. Chief among them was the narrow pursuit of self-interest. No other major political controversy in American history produced as few heroes as this one. Instead of nobility, there was selfishness; instead of concern for the long-term good of all, there was the assiduous pursuit of immediate gratification—political, financial, sexual.
    Chief among the antiheroes was the president of the United States. He believed, in an undoubtedly sincere way, that his private life was his own business, and that it had no impact on how he performed his public duties. In this, ironically, he may have been right. For all the piety of the authoritarians of the left and right about the importance of sexual fidelity of public persons, there remains no proof that monogamous presidents do betterjobs than adulterous ones. (The evidence is actually somewhat to the contrary.) But Bill Clinton knew the implicit promises he had made about his own behavior. He thought he could get away with breaking them, and he couldn’t. And when Clinton was caught in that most clichéd of dilemmas—a menopausal man having an affair with a young woman from the office—he reacted not with candor and grace, but rather with the dishonesty and self-pity that are among the touchstones of his character.
    Yet the most astonishing fact in this story may be this one: in spite of his consistently reprehensible behavior, Clinton was, by comparison, the good guy in this struggle. The president’s adversaries appeared literally consumed with hatred for him; the bigger the stakes, the smaller they acted. They were willing to trample all standards of fairness—not to mention the Constitution—in their effort to drive him from office. They ranged from one-case-only zealots in the cause of fighting sexual harassment to one-defendant-only federal prosecutors, and they shared only a willingness to misuse the law and the courts in their effort to destroy Bill Clinton.
    But Clinton’s enemies were not propelled only by political opportunism. There was greed, too. Several of his primary pursuers—each of whom played an essential role in the events leading to his impeachment—were motivated by their desire to write books about the president’s sex life. Such incentives did not even exist a generation ago. But the transformed business of publishing prompted his former bodyguards in Arkansas, the journalist Michael Isikoff, Linda Tripp, and Paula and Stephen Jones to act as they did. Only one of this group actually wound up writing such a book (so far), but their plans to do so altered the course of events at several significant moments in this story. Indeed, at times in the Clinton scandals, commercial considerations even trumped political motives.
    The Clinton scandals—using that term to define the events that led to his impeachment—consisted of three intertwined narratives. One of these stories, the Paula Jones case, occurred mostly in public; the second, Kenneth Starr’s investigation, occurred mostly in private; and the third, the president’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, occurred almost entirely in secret. No single person knew the details of all three narratives as they were happening, and the stories unfolded at the same time as one another. When the president’s relationship with Lewinsky became public in January 1998, the three strands merged into a single cataclysmic drama. But these crashing cymbals of constitutional portent could scarcely be imagined when Danny Traylor answered the telephone on his birthday.

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    What the Bubbas Wrought
    T he story that Paula Jones told Danny