A Vast Conspiracy Read Online Free Page A

Traylor was a simple one—at first. She said the magazine article did refer to an actual incident. But, she explained, Brock had it all wrong.
    During Clinton’s last term as governor, Jones was twenty-four years old and working as a clerk at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. One day—she later determined it was May 8, 1991—Jones and a colleague named Pamela Blackard were working behind the registration desk at an AIDC conference at a Little Rock hotel called the Excelsior. After the governor and his security detail arrived, a trooper named Danny Ferguson stopped to chat with Blackard and Jones, whose last name was then Corbin. A little while later, Ferguson said that the governor, whom she had never met before, wanted to meet her in a room upstairs at the hotel. She agreed, and the trooper escorted her to the suite. The governor greeted her, made small talk for a few moments, and then began touching her. Jones rebuffed him and moved to sit down on the sofa. Clinton followed her there, then exposed himself and asked her to perform oral sex. She immediately jumped up, told him, “I’m not that kind of girl,” and left the room. In the intervening almost three years, Jones said, she had told only a handful ofpeople about the incident—her two sisters and her husband, as well as Blackard and Ballentine, both close friends.
    Traylor and Jones spoke for only a few minutes in that initial conversation, and then she put her husband, Stephen Jones, on the telephone. For Traylor, the contrast between husband and wife was dramatic. Paula was hesitant, nervous, still embarrassed about the whole situation, and conspicuously uninformed about politics or the law. Steve, on the other hand, was enraged—at Clinton, at the troopers, and, it seemed to Traylor, at life in general.
    Steve was thirty-three at the time, and he had just moved Paula and their son, Madison, to Long Beach, California, so he could pursue a career in show business. He had tried to make it as an actor in Little Rock, but there wasn’t much of a market for his talents. He had basically had only a single small role—as the ghost of Elvis in Jim Jarmusch’s quirky independent film Mystery Train . Like Elvis, Steve hailed from Memphis and had a soft Southern accent and sleepy good looks. For years, he had made a living as a ticket agent for Northwest Airlines, first at the Little Rock airport and now at Los Angeles International. Colleagues remembered him as quiet and a little sullen. When he did talk, it was often about sex. He’d probe coworkers—men and women—about the state of their sex lives, and he’d display photographs of his girlfriend Paula in skimpy costumes—garter belts, stockings, and the like.
    Steve Jones also despised the governor. Even during his governorship, Clinton had an unusual ability to generate passionate hostility, feelings that often transcended mere political differences. Indeed, one cannot understand the long siege of his presidency without weighing the depth and breadth of these emotions. Clinton haters were sometimes so obsessed by their feelings that they acted against their own political or financial self-interest. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Steve had posted Bush/Quayle bumper stickers on his locker at the airport and had even worn a campaign button until his supervisors told him to remove it. But politics only began to explain the depth of Jones’s feelings. There would come to be a personal dimension to Steve’s feelings as well.

    For his part, Traylor did a little legal research and made a revealing discovery. If he were to sue anyone on Jones’s behalf, she would have a betterchance of winning a case against the president of the United States than against a small magazine. The power of the news media had manifested itself in the legal world. Public figures like the president enjoyed no legal protections comparable to those erected, on First Amendment grounds, to benefit the press. For Paula