My Life

radio station threatening a libel suit because one of its talk-show hosts had repeated some of the allegations in a Larry Nichols press release, saying the station had “wrongfully and untruthfully” accused her of having an affair. We didn’t know what was on whatever tapes Flowers might have, but I remembered the conversations clearly, and I didn’t think there could be anything damaging on them. Flowers, whom I’d known since 1977 and had recently helped get a state job, had called me to complain that the media were harassing her even at the place she was singing at night, and that she felt her job was threatened. I commiserated with her, but I hadn’t thought it was a big deal. After Dee Dee went to work trying to discover more about what the Star was planning to publish, I called Hillary and told her what was going on. Fortunately, she was staying at the Georgia Governor’s Mansion on a campaign trip, and Zell and Shirley Miller were wonderful to her.

The Flowers story hit with explosive force, and it proved irresistible to the media, though some of the stories cast doubt on her accusations. The press reported that Flowers had been paid for the story, and that she had vigorously denied an affair a year earlier. The media, to their credit, exposed Flowers’s false claims about her education and work history. These reports, however, were dwarfed by the allegations. I was dropping in the New Hampshire polls, and Hillary and I decided we should accept an invitation from the CBS program 60 Minutes to answer questions about the charges and the state of our marriage. It was not an easy call. We wanted to defend against the scandal coverage and to get back to the real issues without demeaning ourselves and adding fuel to the fire of personal-destruction politics, which I had deplored even before it burned me. I had already said I hadn’t lived a perfect life. If that was the standard, someone else would have to be elected President.

We taped the program at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston on Sunday morning, January 26, for showing later that night, after the Super Bowl. We talked to the interviewer, Steve Kroft, for over an hour. He began by asking if Flowers’s story was true. When I said it wasn’t, he asked if I had had any affairs. Perhaps I should have used Rosalynn Carter’s brilliant response to a similar question in 1976: “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you.” Since I wasn’t as blameless as Mrs. Carter, I decided not to be cute. Instead, I said that I had already acknowledged causing pain in my marriage, that I had already said more about the subject than any other politician ever had and would say no more, and that the American people understood what I meant.

Kroft, unbelievably, asked me again. His only goal in the interview was to get a specific admission. Finally, after a series of questions about Gennifer Flowers, he got around to Hillary and me, referring to our marriage as an “arrangement.” I wanted to slug him. Instead, I said, “Wait a minute. You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage.”

Hillary then said she was sitting in the interview with me “because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” After the early mud wrestling, Kroft grew more civil, and there were some good exchanges about Hillary’s and my life together. They were all cut out when the long interview was edited, down to about ten minutes, apparently because the Super Bowl shortened the program.

At some point during the session, the very bright, very hot overhead light above the couch Hillary and I were sitting on came loose from its tape on the ceiling and fell. It was directly above Hillary’s head, and if it had hit her, she could have been burned badly. Somehow I saw it out of the corner of my eye and jerked her over onto my lap a split second before it crashed on the spot where she had been sitting. She was scared, and rightly so. I just stroked her hair and told her that it was all right and that I loved her. After the ordeal, we flew home to watch the show with Chelsea. When it was over, I asked Chelsea what she thought. She said, “I think I’m glad you’re my parents.”

The next morning I flew to Jackson, Mississippi, for a breakfast organized by former governor Bill Winter and Mike Espy, both of whom had endorsed me early. I was uncertain whether anyone would come and what the reception would be. To my immense relief, they had to get extra chairs for a largerthan-expected crowd that seemed genuinely glad to see me. So I went back to work. It wasn’t over, however. Gennifer Flowers gave a press conference to a packed house in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. She repeated her story and said she was sick of lying about it. She also acknowledged that she had been approached by a “local Republican candidate” who asked her to go public, but she declined to name him. Some of her tapes were played at the press conference, but except for proving that I had talked to her on the telephone, a fact I hadn’t denied, the content of the tapes was anticlimactic, given all the hoopla about them.

Despite some later coverage, the Flowers media circus was ending. I think the chief reason was that we had managed to put it in the right perspective on 60 Minutes. The public understood that I hadn’t been perfect and wasn’t pretending to be, but people also knew that there were many more important issues confronting the country. And a lot of people were repelled at the “cash for trash” aspects of the coverage. At about this time, Larry Nichols decided to drop his lawsuit, and he issued a public apology for, in his words, trying to “destroy” me: “The media has made a circus out of this thing and now it’s gone way too far. When that Star article first came out, several women called asking if I was willing to pay them to say that they had had an affair with Bill Clinton. This is crazy.” Questions were raised about the tapes that were played at Flowers’s press conference. The Star declined to release the original tapes. A Los Angeles television station retained an expert who stated that while he didn’t know that the tape was, in his words, “doctored,” it definitely had been “selectively edited.” CNN also ran some critical coverage, based on the analysis of its own expert.

As I’ve said, I first met Gennifer Flowers in 1977 when I was attorney general and she was a television reporter for a local station who often interviewed me. Soon afterward, she left Arkansas to pursue an entertainment career, I believe as a backup singer for country music star Roy Clark. At some point, she moved to Dallas. In the late eighties, she moved back to Little Rock to be near her mother and called to ask me to help her find a state job to supplement her income from singing. I referred her to Judy Gaddy on my staff, who was responsible for referring the many job seekers who asked for help with state employment to various agencies. After nine months, Flowers finally got a position paying less than $20,000 a year.

Gennifer Flowers struck me as a tough survivor who’d had a less-than-ideal childhood and disappointments in her career but kept going. She was later quoted in the press as saying that she might vote for me and, on another occasion, that she didn’t believe Paula Jones’s allegations of sexual harassment. Ironically, almost exactly six years after my January 1992 appearance on 60 Minutes, I had to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case, and I was asked questions about Gennifer Flowers. I acknowledged that, back in the 1970s, I had had a relationship with her that I should not have had. Of course, the whole line of questioning had nothing to do with Jones’s spurious sexual-harassment claim; it was just a part of the long, well-financed attempt to damage and embarrass me personally and politically. But I was under oath, and of course, if I hadn’t done anything wrong, I couldn’t have been embarrassed. My critics leapt on it. Ironically, even though they were sure the rest of the deposition was untruthful, this one answer they accepted as fact. The fact is, there was no twelve-year affair. Gennifer Flowers still has a suit against James Carville, Paul Begala, and Hillary for allegedly slandering her. I don’t wish her ill, but now that I’m not President anymore, I do wish she’d let them be. A few days after the firestorm broke, I called Eli Segal and pleaded with him to come down to Little Rock to be a mature, settling presence in the headquarters. When he asked how I could want the help of someone like him, who had worked only in losing presidential campaigns, I cracked, “I’m desperate.”

Eli laughed and came, becoming the campaign’s chief of staff in charge of the central office, finances, and the campaign plane. Early in the month, Ned McWherter, Brereton Jones, and Booth Gardner, respectively the governors of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Washington, endorsed me. Those who had already done so, including Dick Riley of South Carolina, Mike Sullivan of Wyoming, Bruce King of New Mexico, George Sinner of North Dakota, and Zell Miller of Georgia, reaffirmed their support. So did Senator Sam Nunn, with the caveat that he wanted to “wait and see” what further stories came out. A national poll said that 70 percent of the American people thought the press shouldn’t report on the private lives of public figures. In another, 80 percent of the Democrats said their votes wouldn’t be affected even if the Flowers story was true. That sounds good, but 20 percent is a lot to give up right off the bat. Nevertheless, the campaign picked up steam again, and it seemed that at least we could finish a strong second to Tsongas, which I thought would be good enough to get me to the southern primaries. Then, just as the campaign seemed to be recovering, there was another big shock when the draft story broke. On February 6, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on my draft experience and on my relationship with the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas in 1969. When the campaign began, I was unprepared for the draft questions, and I mistakenly said I had never had a draft deferment during my Oxford years; in fact, I did have one