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THE FIRST LESBIAN'S SCORCHED EARTH POLICY
The Other Woman
salon1999.com
Of all the women swirling around President Clinton, perhaps only one was a true victim.
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BY MURRAY WAAS
WASHINGTON -- Late on the
same evening that President
Clinton testified before
Kenneth Starr's grand jury
from the Map Room of the
White House that he had had an "inappropriate"
relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he defiantly
went on national television to ask the American
people "to turn away from the spectacle of the past
seven months."
The entire affair should now become a private
matter between him, his family and God, he argued:
"Even presidents have private lives ... It's time to
stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the
prying into private lives and get on with our national
life."
A longtime Arkansas state employee named
Charlotte Perry might be excused for believing
otherwise. An African-American woman with three
young children at home, Perry is the type of person
who comes to mind when, as he is wont to do, the
president talks about those who work hard and play
by the rules. It was such folks whom Clinton said
he wanted to serve when he asked us to elect him
as president in the first place.
In February 1990, Charlotte Perry hoped that her
hard work, integrity and many years of service to
the state government were finally going to pay off.
She applied for a better paying job as an
administrative assistant at a state agency called the
Arkansas Board of Review. The position paid
slightly more than $17,500 a year.
But Perry didn't receive the promotion she clearly
deserved. Instead, it went to another woman with
less experience and fewer qualifications -- Gennifer
Flowers, whom everyone around Little Rock knew
to be the governor's girlfriend. An investigation of
the matter by a state agency later determined that
the hiring procedure that led to Flowers being hired
over Perry was "improper" and the result of
favoritism.
Flowers, seeking work, had approached Clinton
about finding her a position with the state. There
were, after all, surely perks to be had for being the
governor's mistress, Flowers reasoned. Clinton
turned over the dirty work of finding the
appropriate position for Flowers to an assistant
named Judy Gaddy. Gaddy tried hard to find
something for Flowers, even landing her an
interview with the Arkansas Historical Preservation
Program as a multimedia specialist. But Flowers
was found to be unqualified for that job.
On Feb. 23, 1990, even more desperate for work
than before, Flowers wrote Clinton: "Bill, I've tried
to explain my situation to you and how badly I need
a job ... Unfortunately it looks like I have to pursue
the lawsuit to hopefully get some money to live on,
until I get employment."
The lawsuit Flowers was referring to had been filed
by a former Arkansas state employee named Larry
Nichols. He alleged that Clinton had had sexual
relationships with five women, including Flowers.
Nichols had sued the governor after Clinton had
fired him for stealing state funds. When a local
radio station named Flowers based on papers filed
in the lawsuit, Flowers told Clinton she would have
to sue the radio station for slander so that she
would have some money to live on.
In fact, Flowers was only bringing up Nichols'
charges as a means to try to intimidate Clinton to
find her a job. No one in Little Rock believed much
of anything Nichols had to say, because he was
known as the local loony. The four other women
he named in the lawsuit simply laughed off his
charges. And except for the one radio station, no
reputable news organization in the state of Arkansas
gave credence to Nichols' charges. Nevertheless,
Flowers' ploy to intimidate Clinton had the intended
effect.
In March 1990, the job that Gennifer Flowers and
Charlotte Perry were to compete for became
available. At first glance, things did not look good
for Flowers. She ranked ninth out of 11 applicants.
But then Flowers caught a break. On April 26,
1990, Don K. Barnes, the chairman of the
Arkansas Board, abruptly changed the qualifications
for the job. He did so at the direction of his boss,
William Gaddy, the husband of Judy Gaddy, the
governor's assistant to whom Clinton had earlier
assigned the task of finding a job for Flowers.
The new requirements for the job now included
experience with computers and public relations. As
it happened, Flowers had listed those precise
qualifications on her r‚sum‚ a month earlier when
she applied for the Arkansas Board of Review job.
In two telephone interviews last year, William
Gaddy told me that he could not recall any role in
changing the job requirements to help Flowers: "I
just don't know what to think about that ... I'm not
sure why my name has come up in this." William
Gaddy also denied to me that he had ever spoken
with his own wife, Judy, about the potential job for
Flowers: "She does her thing and I do mine," he
said. "We never talked with each other about
Gennifer."
After failing to get the promotion, Perry filed a
complaint with the state Grievance Review
Committee, the Arkansas equivalent of a merit
protections selection board, saying that she was
unfairly denied the job awarded to Flowers.
Barnes testified to the committee that he changed
the job description at the direction of William
Gaddy. He said that he had supported Flowers
because she had told him about her experience with
computers during a job interview.
In her own sworn testimony, Flowers, however,
could not recall any type of computer that she
knew how to use. And asked how she had learned
of the state job, Flowers swore: "It was advertised
in the newspaper and I had heard about it through
the personnel department."
Barnes, the state official who hired Flowers, told
Newsday in 1992 that he believed Flowers had
committed "perjury" by not disclosing the Gaddys'
assistance in finding her the state job.
Newsday also discovered that Flowers had told a
few lies on her job application. She had stated that
she had been "director of public relations" for the
Dallas-based Club Corporation of America, even
though in an earlier application for a state job, she
had said that she was only the "membership
director" for that group. Flowers further
represented on her r‚sum‚ that she had an associate
degree from the University of Arkansas. But that
college had no record of her ever attending. And
Flowers had also lied about her experience working
on computers.
In early 1992, as disclosures about their affair were
on the verge of going public, Flowers called Clinton
and secretly recorded the conversations. Flowers
told her former boyfriend she was concerned that
someone might find out about his assistance in her
obtaining the state job.
"The only thing that concerns me, where I'm,
where I'm concerned at this point, is the state job,"
Flowers told Clinton.
"Yeah, I never thought about that," Clinton
responded, in that earnest manner we are all so
familiar with. "If they ever ask if you've talked to
me about it, you can say no."
When Flowers told Clinton that she had lied about
how she learned about the job, he responded:
"Good for you!"
Clinton's deceptions did not end there. As Salon
recently disclosed, during that telephone
conversation between Clinton and Flowers, Hillary
Rodham Clinton was standing only a few feet away
from her husband.
According to a version of the story that Hillary
Clinton has told two close friends, the first
lady-to-be was standing right next to her husband as
he talked to Flowers on a phone extension in the
kitchen of the Arkansas governor's mansion. The
first lady had told the friends that her presence was
evidence that her husband could not have possibly
been deceiving her when he claimed that he had no
relationship with Flowers.
It was vintage Clinton: He was simultaneously
encouraging Flowers to conceal the relationship
while saying nothing too incriminating in case she
was taping the conversation, and he was putting on
a show for his own wife as well.
On Jan. 23, 1992, Flowers held a press conference
to publicize a story in the Star tabloid, alleging that
she had had a 12-year relationship with Clinton.
Having been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
for the confession, she no longer had any use for
her state job. She never even bothered to call work
to tell her bosses that she wasn't coming in
anymore. They had to figure that out on their own
when she simply stopped showing up.
Apparently believing her husband's explanations
that Flowers' charges were the result of Republican
dirty tricks, Hillary Clinton personally directed a
campaign to raise similar allegations against then
President Bush. There had been rumors circulating
around Washington for years that Bush had had an
extramarital affair with an aide named Jennifer
Fitzgerald. The only problem was that there was
little evidence to support the charges, which were
most likely false.
According to three sources, the first lady
personally, and through her surrogates, began to
encourage a number of journalists to look into the
allegations. Eventually, New Republic writer Sidney
Blumenthal, now Clinton's aggressive spin doctor,
convinced a Spy magazine writer to include the
Fitzgerald allegations in an article just prior to the
1992 presidential election, even though the piece
contained no compelling evidence to support the
rumors.
Blumenthal then publicly questioned the ethics of
Spy for publishing the story, even though he had
put the magazine up to publishing it in the first
place. Hillary Clinton and Blumenthal then
spearheaded a further effort to have the sex
allegations against Bush circulated in the
mainstream press.
"That was probably the genesis of the so-called
scorched-earth strategy ... You investigate our
sex-lives, we investigate yours," recalls one veteran
of the 1992 Clinton-for-president campaign. (A
spokesperson for the first lady declined to comment
for this story.)
New Yorker columnist Kurt Anderson, who was
then editor of Spy, confirmed Blumenthal's
involvement in the Bush affair story. "Sidney's first
political crush was Gary Hart, whose career was
ruined by a sex scandal ... a tragic and compulsive
motif in Sidney's career," said Anderson.
The Flowers allegations were only a momentary
distraction for Clinton, who would quickly move on
to the presidency and recidivism.
As for Charlotte Perry, the Arkansas state
Grievance Review Committee ruled in her favor. It
concluded that there had been favoritism and
"irregular practices" in the hiring of Flowers and
recommended that Perry be awarded Flowers' job,
and also that she be compensated for back pay.
Still, justice was never done. The review
committee's findings were not binding. They were
overruled by Barnes, the very same official who
was found by the committee to have engaged in
favoritism on Flowers' behalf in the first place.
Unlike Flowers and Lewinsky, Perry is the other
woman we should care about. Flowers and
Lewinsky were never the victims they have
portrayed themselves to be. Flowers received a
state job and a half million dollars for her story,
using Clinton perhaps as much, or more than, he
used her. As for Monica, now that she has confided
to Starr's grand jury her tales of White House trysts
in all their glorious detail, fortune will surely follow
fame.
In contrast to all of them, Charlotte Perry is a true
victim of the president's sexual misconduct. As we
consider her story, it illustrates why, despite the
president's desire to the contrary, his private affairs
are sometimes public matters.
SALON | Sept. 11, 1998
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